The kids had the day off Tuesday, as the middle school The Pip attends is a polling place for our district, and they started making election day a day off a fw years back so they don’t have a horde of random adults trooping through the building on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. I got take-out lunch for me and the kids, then sat through a Zoom meeting, then walked down to the school to cast my vote.
At dinnertime, I closed the social media apps on my phone, and fired up the new Maradaine book from Ryan Marshall Maresca on my e-reader that doesn’t have a browser in it. I managed to stay off my phone while watching The Pip at his new instructional basketball league (he’s got half an inch and 10-15 pounds on any other kid there…), and when I came home plugged it into the charger across the room from my bedside, so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek at the election freakout that I expected to take over Twitter.
So I was well-rested Wednesday morning when I woke up to unexpectedly good news. I was fully expecting the Democrats to get absolutely smoked and lose all the close races, but they didn’t. They’re probably still going to lose control of the House, but only by a tiny margin, and they might yet keep the Senate (depending on yet another runoff election in Georgia, sigh…). That’s within the fat part of the probability distribution predicted by the smart folks at FiveThirty Eight, and astonishingly better than what I expected based on the general pundit vibes heading into election day. It’s one of the best showings in history for the President’s party in a mid-term election.
In a lot of respects, though, you could drop the -term and just call it a mid election, in the faintly pejorative sense that my kids mean that term (and cringe when I adopt it). It’s not terrible— which, again, is astonishingly better than I was expecting— but it’s not utterly brilliant, either. A lot of close races tipped toward the Democrats, but since the base expectation was for a huge Republican win, we’re probably still going to end up with divided (and thus paralyzed) government. It’s a win for Democrats, but I’m skeptical that this will be the straw that breaks the back of Trumpism, because the margin just wasn’t big enough (at least as it looks right now) to constitute the stinging repudiation of that brand of Republican politics. Especially with Ron DeSantis cruising easily in Florida— he’s a bit less charismatic than Trump, but a bit more competent, and that’s a little scary.
And while I generally find the “cringe won” hypothesis fairly convincing, as expressed at the link and screencapped but not linked in this Benji Sarlin tweet:
I don’t think the scale of the win was big enough to cause any significant adjustment on the left end of the political spectrum, either. After all, they won. Well, won-ish. So why change?
I think that’s a problem in that the scale of the win probably could’ve been bigger had the Democrats run better. It’s very, very early, but a lot of what I see suggests that this was won not by mobilization, but (anti-)persuasion— it’s not that Democrats turned out in huge numbers, but that the indpendent voters who are usually inclined to back the out party in midterm elections recoiled from the grifters and lunatics put up by the Republicans. They even got some of the more normie Republicans to split their tickets pull the lever for Democrats, as you can see pretty clearly in both Pennsylvania (where the Senate race was a lot closer than the Governor race involving the loathsome Doug Mastriano) and Georgia (where a good number of people seem to have voted Kemp for Governor and Warnock for Senate).
On the one hand, that’s a very good sign, but I think it happened to some degree in spite of some absolutely terrible campaigning by the Democrats, and particularly the more progressive faction that dominates a lot of the discussion among political obsessives. Their first responses to voter concerns about crime and inflation were basically to declare that those voters were either dupes or awful racists, neither of which is a particularly good start for a campaign to change minds. They won because the alternative was even worse, but easily could’ve lost badly. As they did in Florida, and the Georgia governor’s race, and it looks like a bunch of House seats in downstate New York.
Losing badly in this way would, of course, require the Republicans to stop nominating toxic lunatics, which I don’t really expect to happen, but given the outcome of this election, I don’t expect the Democrats to stop insulting people whose votes they need, either. Instead, they’re likely to bet on holding their modest gains among normie voters and plan to sweep to victory on the grand surge of energized young voters that has been just around the corner about as long as the great wave of academic retirements that will open tenure lines for everyone any year now. Which means a bunch more 51-49 results in state- and nation-wide elections, and continued 30-point losses in the rural districts needed for legislative control.
So, as I said, a pretty mid election.
But, as I said, I went to bed Tuesday night expecting this to be a truly awful election, so I’ll absolutely take it. I’m actually a lot happier about this outcome than I probably sound—and positively gleeful about the defeat of Lauren Boebert, in particular. But, man, looking at the bigger picture doesn’t leave me with a lot of enthusiasm for the next several years of American politics.
This is the last week of our term, so I expect to have more writing time starting next week, which will give me room to expand beyond these once-a-week bummer political posts. If you want to be there for that, here’s a button:
If you want to disagree with my downer takes, the comments will be open:
I'd agree that Democrats and the left more generally could do better outreach in the ways you're describing, but I also suspect that in some places, like Florida, the gerrymandering is so severe that no matter how good the outreach is, it won't have a huge impact on election results.
What makes you think that the voter who is primarily motivated by concerns over crime in a state like Pennsylvania is prepared to respond positively to anything that the Democratic Party offers as a solution to those concerns? Or substantively, what do you think those offers could look like while continuing to satisfy the desire of committed Democratic voters for reform in criminal justice institutions (police, courts and prisons)?
There are plenty of Democratic politicians who orient towards the center in various respects--and make centrist policy proposals. I don't think the centrists in the voting base (if they exist any more) strongly reward those politicians, perhaps because centrism per se is not a coherent political ideology driven by underlying values, it's a preference to identify oneself as a sensible person with no strong foundational commitments.
I think folks who aren't happy with what they see as right or left have unfinished work to do, which is to set out their own foundational principles and then work up to derive an end-state politics from that foundation rather than look at the buffet offered by other peoples' foundational commitments and their end-state preferences and express frustration with the choices available.
I understand when people say they're afraid of crime or feel like crime is rising. I need people who feel that way to tell me more about what they're seeing in their community, in their world--to show me that they aren't just reacting to Fox News or to gross political ads being pushed out by a PAC headed by Stephen Miller. I need people who feel that way to tell me what they think should be done about it that is not being done by Democrats and yet is not what Republicans advocate--harsher policing? Incarcerating even more people in the most-per-capita-incarcerated country on the planet, more than China? I need to hear how that's related to some underlying foundational views about what crime is, what ameliorates crime, about how policing works (or doesn't work), about why they think the US has so many people behind bars. Etc.
Otherwise I think saying "you're not speaking to the reasonable middle!" is just kind of knee-jerk--it's not clear what the reasonable middle is or wants, it's not even clear that it actually exists any more in most states. The reasonable middle can't just be a kind of fondue that melts a bit of right-wing cheese and a bit of left-wing cheese and somehow comes up as especially delicious.