I don’t really think this fits the definition
Our presidential elections are going to be decided by a few thousands votes in a handful of swing states. Again. Ron Brownstein’s analysis here is invaluable if you want to understand why Democrats should not rest on their laurals or assume “the fever has broken.” It hasn’t, but more importantly it probably wouldn’t be decisive even if it did:
The results of this month’s election point toward a 2024 presidential contest that will likely be decided by a tiny sliver of voters in a rapidly shrinking list of swing states realistically within reach for either party.
With only a few exceptions, this year’s results showed each side further consolidating its hold over the states that already lean in its direction. And in 2024 that will likely leave control of the White House in the hands of a very small number of states that are themselves divided almost exactly in half between the parties – a list that looks even smaller after this month’s outcomes.
Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, speaks for many strategists in both parties when he points to the enormous “continuity among the elections” since Donald Trump emerged as a national figure. “We’ve now gone through 2016, ’18, ‘20 and ‘22 – and all looked pretty much alike,” he says. “And it has locked in the coalitions.”
Looking at the Electoral College, this year’s results offered more reason for optimism to Democrats than Republicans. Five states decided the last presidential race by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020 – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats have already won six of the eight Senate and governor races decided across them this month and could notch a seventh victory if Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in a Georgia run-off in December.
“Republicans can’t be happy that in the states they have to win, we won – and by not just a little bit,” says Simon Rosenberg, founder and president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, who was the most visible skeptic in either party of the “red wave” theory this year. “It’s very encouraging as we go into 2024 because we were able to stare them down and beat them … [even] with inflation being so high. And it wasn’t just their bad candidates – its far more than that.”
Still, the results also showed Republicans tightening their grip on Ohio, Iowa and Florida: though Democrats won all three in both of Barack Obama’s presidential victories, each now appears securely in the GOP’s column for 2024 (and likely beyond). And the perennial liberal hope of putting a “blue Texas” in play clearly looks like it will be deferred again after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s double-digit victory against an energetic and well-funded opponent (former Rep. Beto O’Rourke) squashed the limited momentum Democrats had built there in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Republicans once again beat Democrats for all of Texas’ statewide offices, continuing a shutout that stretches back to the 1990s.
These offsetting and hardening partisan strengths could, once again, provide the power to decide the White House winner to a few hundred thousand voters in a very few closely balanced states. That’s a windfall for the owners of television stations who will be deluged with television advertising in states such as Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. But it’s also another reason for the prodigious stress in our fraught modern politics. Each side in an intensely polarized nation of 330 million recognizes that the overall direction of national policy now pivots on the choices of a miniscule number of people living in the tiny patches of contested political ground – white-collar suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix, working-class Latino neighborhoods in and around Las Vegas and the mid-sized communities of the so-called BOW counties in Wisconsin.
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How big a map does this leave the two sides contesting in the 2024 presidential race? No GOP presidential candidate would entirely concede Michigan or Pennsylvania, but the magnitude of the 2022 Democratic wins there – extending the party’s recovery in 2018 and 2020 – show how difficult it will be for any Republican nominee to take them in 2024, especially if he or she supports further restrictions on legal abortion. (Under Trump, says Roe, Michigan has become “a wasteland” for Republicans.) The results even more emphatically extinguished the prospect of Democrats in two years seriously bidding for Ohio, Florida or Iowa.
That could leave as few as four genuine toss-ups in 2024: Wisconsin in the industrial Midwest, and Nevada, Georgia and Arizona across the Sunbelt. That list could shift slightly depending on circumstances and the candidates. Rosenberg, for instance, believes Democrats should now target North Carolina with the same intensive organizing efforts they mounted in the key battlegrounds this year. And Republicans may continue to push for Minnesota and New Hampshire. But all will be difficult to dislodge from their current allegiance.
A race with just Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona as true battlegrounds would begin with Democrats favored in states holding 260 Electoral College votes (including Washington, DC) and Republicans in states with 235. Democrats would need to win just one of Wisconsin, Arizona or Georgia to reach an Electoral College majority – yet that last piece could prove very challenging for them to secure. After 2022, the list of genuinely competitive presidential states may be shrinking, but, if anything, that could increase the tension as the nation remains poised on the knife’s edge between two deeply entrenched, but increasingly antithetical, political coalitions.
The threat that these MAGA extremists could seize power under these conditions is acute and that’s not even taking their election shenanigans into consideration. It’s going to take tremendous effort, every single election until this dynamic shifts. And that could take a ful generation.
Take a vacation. Enjoy your hobbies, your family and your other interests. But don’t withdraw from politics out of sheer exhaustion, as tempting as that might be. Every single vote counts and we all have to stay engaged and on top of it.
There is a lot more analysis at the like which I urge you to read if you want more details about this phenomenon.