Whoda thunkit?
Brian Beutler wrote another great article this week in his Big Tent newsletter about the Democratic strategy for winning in November. (You should subscribe, if you haven’t.) He discusses all the bellwether races that are showing Democrats are over-performing:
But of all these bellwethers, the Democratic victory in the NY-19 special offers the most prescriptive power. It’s a bellwether not so much in the numerical shift from R to D, as in the character of its losing candidate, Marc Molinaro, and the conduct of its winning candidate, Pat Ryan. (Side note: too many politicians with the last name Ryan).
On the spectrum of candidates in off-cycle elections, Molinaro’s much more Glenn Youngkin than Larry Elder. He was as good a candidate as Republicans could have drawn, running a textbook GOP campaign in a favorable climate for Republicans (at least, until Dobbs). And he lost.
The guy who beat him superficially resembles the kind of candidates Democrats like to run in competitive districts. A veteran who emphasizes service, duty, honor—admirable traits selected to set swing voters at ease; code for: He’s not like those other WACKY libs. Unlike a lot of Democratic nominees in competitive districts, though, he has not tried to hide from fights that force voters to choose sides. He leaned heavily into his pro-choice bona fides, tied them directly to his larger political persona, and then draped it all around his opponent’s neck.
“Freedom includes a woman’s right to choose,” he asserted in his first ad. “How can we be a free country if the government tries to control women’s bodies? That’s not the country I fought to defend.”
In a post-election interview with Greg Sargent, Ryan seized the high grounds of freedom and patriotism generally, and wielded it against Republican politicians whose vision for America would leave citizens at the mercy of armed extremists and religious zealots, without fair recourse to the ballot box. He told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, “We are not afraid to call out Donald Trump as someone who, I believe, is essentially traitorous,” reminding viewers, “I had a top-secret clearance. I was an Army officer. If I had done what he did, I would’ve been in jail, 100 percent. No questions asked.”
Contrast to DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney who would much rather see candidates and members like Ryan ignore Trump and talk about drug prices. Contrast to Conor Lamb, the last great hope of the House Democratic caucus, who won a special election in a Trumpy Pennsylvania district in 2018 and proceeded to attribute it to his special formula of ignoring the menace of the far right and talking about health care instead. There was a candidate who got washed ashore by a tidal wave of anti-Trump backlash and told the whole world he’d gone surfing. Much better to have candidates who recognize the larger forces carrying them along, and swim with the tide.
He’s right about this. Ryan deftly wove his bio as a veteran and a “fighter” into a message about fighting for freedom at home and I think it has more resonance in the face of the right wing led by Trump and DeSantis which is reaching into people’s private intimate lives in ways that just feels un American. (It actually is American — there have been factions doing this from the beginning — but when government bodies start literally reversing rights and censoring free speech it gets serious.)
I think Ryan was on to something. This is a race the GOP should have won in a red wave midterm year.