Takeaways from a Democratic upset
I lost track of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s Washington State congressional race in all the election hubbub. Michelle Goldberg revisits WA-03 (R+5) in light of Gluesenkamp Perez’s upset win over Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed election denier. “FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning,” Goldberg writes. She offers four takeaways:
1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.
Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.
“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”
I’d noticed Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign because another young woman who owns an auto repair shop with her husband ran in the NC-11 (R+8) Democratic primary this year. Katie Dean lost the primary to Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a Harvard-educated county commissioner and LGBTQ rights advocate from Asheville. Beach-Ferrara performed in the red district far better than any Democratic candidate since Heath Shuler retired. She still failed to win the seat vacated by Rep. Madison Cawthorn (and by Rep. Mark Meadows before him).
“2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism,” Goldberg observes next. Gluesenkamp Perez linked her experience with a miscarriage with her district’s libertarian lean on reproductive and gun rights. She made “protect our freedoms” a campaign promise.
Perhaps voters prefer candidates who live outside ideological bubbles. But this election that knock against liberals cut against conservatives. “3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber,” Goldberg writes. Kent seemed to live in his own. He appeared to “normies” as if he was into “weird ideological shit” alien to middle America. Gluesenkamp Perez felt Kent “spent too much time ‘operating in the chat rooms’” and not enough time around the Biden-voting majority.
Finally:
4. Data isn’t everything.
As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.
[…]
“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.
That’s what anyone exposed to young, presidential-campaign staffers can tell you. Fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads, they are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers were measuring supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton was overconfidently measuring measuring. It was a disaster.
Data is no substitute for reading the room. Too often, the DCCC can’t read.