Everyone but Trump cultists seems to feel it: exhaustion and ennui stemming from years of political trench warfare. The right keeps its foot soldiers juiced on heapin’ helpings of red meat the way the Sacklers kept doses of OxyContin flowing to rural America no matter the harm inflicted. The rest of us are worn out.
Outrage at the election of misogynist-in-chief Donald Trump drove millions of women into the streets in January 2017. Their turnout at the polls in November 2018 handed the House majority to Democrats and the Speaker’s gavel to Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California for a historic second time.
There are signs, however, that with Trump out of public disservice and with Joe from Scranton in the Oval Office, that enthusiasm for fighting may have waned, writes Karen Tumulty for the Washington Post:
A raft of evidence suggests that female voters, whose engagement and activism fueled the gains that Democrats made during Donald Trump’s presidency, are increasingly tuning out politics. In one survey conducted in May by the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, nearly half of women in key swing states said they were “paying less attention to what happens in Washington” than they were when Trump was in the White House. This was particularly true among female Biden voters who are independents, under the age of 35, college graduates and city dwellers. Focus groups that American Bridge 21st Century conducted in August with women in Pennsylvania and Arizona found much the same thing.
This sense of growing political ennui among women comes through in focus groups, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “People are exhausted,” she explains. “We have people deliberately saying, ‘I am just taking a break — enough.’ ” While enactment of a draconian Texas law that all but outlaws abortion in the state stirred women briefly, that frisson of anger has dissipated among many, Lake says. “Voters nationwide decided Texas isn’t going to happen in you-name-the-state.”
That assumption could be a historic mistake.
Black women, key Democratic voters, are also cynical. “Our base voters are looking for a little more work to be done in Washington,” finds Lake Research partner Joshua Estevan Ulibarri finds in Virginia polling. He believes Democrats inside the Beltway should feel that much more urgency to deliver on their promises of better child care, paid time off, education, etc. in Biden’s Build Back Better plan.
Polling from CBS indicates most of the public doesn’t even know what’s in it. Only about a third believe the plan would help them directly, including only 61% of Democrats, although the elements of the plan are popular in principle.
But they know what it is supposed to cost. Eric Boehlert complains that knowledge gap is “because news outlets like CBS have done such a poor job explaining it.” Additionally, Democrats have, as usual, failed to sell the brownie.
But even passing the Biden plan might not be enough. Democrats chronically expect their results to speak for themselves and don’t take the victory laps needed to set in the public mind whose efforts brough them good things. Fail to define yourself first and your opponent will define you. You’d think professional politicians would have internalized that principle.
Tumulty cautions:
Off-year elections bring fewer voters to the polls than contests where the White House is at stake, and are generally won by the side that does a better job of turning out its base. Virginia “will be a really important indicator of where relative enthusiasm is going into 2022,” says Michael Podhorzer, top political strategist for the AFL-CIO. “That’s the whole ballgame.”
Keep an eye in particular on whether female voters turn up for Democrats as they have in the past few election cycles. Right now, it appears the party has plenty of reason to worry.
It is one reason I’m keeping a close eye on the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. Two Black women are in the hunt for the Democratic nomination: former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Cheri Beasley, and former state senator, Erica Smith. The Senate race will top the state’s ticket in 2022. Democrats’ best bet for turnout in an otherwise low-turnout, midterm election may be for Black women across the state to insist everyone they know get out to vote.