The 1994 Gingrich Revolution election left Democrats here in shock. The New York Times reported, “In the North Carolina House of Representatives, a 78-to-42 Democratic edge was transformed into a 67-to-53 majority for the Republicans.” Similar flips occured across the country. A decade later, Democrats of that era were still flinching. After redistricting post-2010, they are still flinching today. For some, the glory days of Jim Hunt never ended. They look backwards and not forwards.
One might call it a rut. Someone less generous might think it the learned helplessness of an abused spouse. Reflexive caution will not serve Democrats well in 2022, wrote Evan Scrimshaw at Substack as he lamented Manchester United’s lose last night on penalty kicks. Scrimshaw ascribes Man U. ‘s loss in the Europa League Final to the team’s “quixotic loyalty” to a keeper past his prime. Stuck-in-the-past politics could blow a winnable midterm for Democrats as well:
The Chicago Tribune tracked Presidential and Vice Presidential campaign stops in 2020, and Biden/Harris made 5 stops in Ohio and 13 in Florida – states with no Senate race or winnable down ballot priorities, and in the case of Ohio, no case for being the tipping point – while only going to North Carolina 7 times, Georgia 4 times, Iowa only once, and Maine a grand total of *checks notes* 0 times. (The Ohio count does not include the Presidential debate held there.) If you broaden it out to include former President Obama, who camped out the final weekend in Miami, you see a pattern – of a party not knowing where the battleground was, and of making strategically extremely suboptimal decisions.
The focus on Ohio and Florida were examples of the party not knowing what they were doing, but the focus on Ohio – remember, a final Monday visit was extended there – is the real kicker. Why did they go to Ohio? Because that’s where you go in a Presidential election, because it’s a state that matters. The fact that Ohio was solely a vanity project didn’t matter to the Biden camp, because there were no particularly good House targets there, no Senate seat, no chance to flip a State House or State Senate, no chance of it being a tipping point state. They went there out of instinct, out of reflex, out of comfort. They prioritized Ohio and Florida, both states which, even as Florida had a plausible-based-on-2016 case to being a path to 270, were trending right and being less essential for the Electoral College, and ignored Georgia and Arizona, where the ticket went 4 times each. Maine and Iowa, key Senate targets, were ignored, and even North Carolina, which had the right combination of Senate seat and tipping point potential, was visited about half as frequently as Florida.
You can see the same instincts now, as people talk about how Democrats need to make sure they are bipartisan and decent, while the GOP keep a member with an addiction to bad Holocaust comparisons in their caucus. The instincts to Clinton or Obama era moderation are being suppressed so far, but the instincts are still there, and you see it across politics. Would Val Demings make a good Senator? I mean, she’d be a damn sight better than Marco, which isn’t saying much, but she also isn’t going to be a Senator, I’m sorry to say. And yet, there are many in Democratic politics rushing to promote her campaign and donate to her cause. The rush to make Tim Ryan a national star after his House speech on the need for a Commission into January 6th feels like the same performative bullshit that so many of us did for Jaime Harrison in South Carolina last year, and the cynic – and the metric ton of whiskey – in me says it probably ends the same. The questions about Iowa or Missouri could decide the majority (they won’t), the freakouts about whether Biden either giving up too much in an infrastructure deal with the GOP or not getting a deal at all with the GOP might hurt him in 2022 (it won’t), they all feel very old and stuck in the past. They feel of a different age, and they are. The problem is, nobody seems to get it.
What party regulars think is a winning formula based on the past and what average voters do in the present are two different things. If Democrats “listen to the old hands, if they play the game the old way, if they fight the last war – then they will leave their voters feeling the way Manchester United left me, and millions of others, feeling tonight – with the sinking feeling that the only reason we lost was cowardice and devotion to the past,” Scrimshaw wrote.
One sees it everywhere: a reluctance to embrace the unfamiliar new because it is new and unfamiliar. Cautious decisions to forgo canvassing even at a COVID-appropriate distance last year cost Democrats races they might have squeaked out. I can’t help but worry that the need to play it safe could torpedo what one friend believes could be a 2022 blowout election in Democrats’ favor. Conventional wisdom may no longer apply. If it ever did.