President Biden won New Mexico’s First District by 23 percentage points last November. Former congresswoman Deb Haaland, now Biden’s interior secretary, won reelection there by 16 points. NBC’s Steve Kornacki explained why the GOP’s loss in the New Mexico special election to fill Haaland’s seat on Tuesday was disappointing for Republicans if not unexpected:
“What Republicans were hoping for was not necessarily to win this — obviously they would have been thrilled to win this seat,” Kornacki said. “What Republicans were really hoping for more realistically was for a race that was closer than these two numbers,” 23 points and 16 points, and preferably “a single-digit race.” Beating expectations, as the Democrats did in special elections running up to their 2018 blue wave, would be seen as a harbinger of a GOP House takeover in 2022.
With all of the expected vote counted, Stansbury beat the Republican candidate by 24.6 points. “Take these special elections with a grain of salt — there always sort of varying circumstances involved — but Republicans came into tonight hoping they could get a big talking point, hoping they could get some momentum that would point to a big midterm year for them,” Kornacki said, “and it’s Democrats who are going to be coming out of New Mexico 1 bragging.”
About 2022. Guy Saperstein is not a household name. Now retired, the storied civil rights attorney and major Democratic donor from Oakland predicted last Friday on the Nicole Sandler Show that such results are harbingers of things to come in 2022 and 2024. Saperstein predicted in 2014 that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Saperstein predicts Republicans are headed for “the biggest destruction of a political party in American history”(segment begins at timestamp 14:10):
“They’re completely devoid of any agenda. They have nothing to offer the American people. They’re offering chaos and insurrection. They are led by lunatics like Marjorie Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Kevin McCarthy. They’re experiencing the biggest loss of party registration in party history. They are now running nine points behind Democrats, 49 to 40, and it’s going to get worse. They are divided by the biggest divisions I’ve ever seen in a political party. They’re just a total mess!”
Republicans have even lost corporate support, Saperstein adds.
And Democrats? Despite their propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, “They’re doing a fucking good job” of promoting wildly popular policies, says Saperstein. Democrats will have the wind at their backs by 2022 with a booming economy. He expects Democrats to win 300 House seats.
He’s serious. “You can take it to the bank.”
I’ll take more convincing. But it’s refreshing to see someone on the progressive side not in panic mode over where the country is heading. Unsettlingly so.
Nonetheless, Saperstein is moving soon to France where violence, he says, is nineteen times less than in the U.S. “It’s safe to walk the streets at night in Paris.”