This piece by Brian Beutler is the best thing I’ve read about the lessons of Tuesday’s election:
① Because Democrats lost the Virginia election so narrowly, it’s natural that the recriminations will center around small-bore tactical decisions that might’ve made the difference
② That’s all fair game, but it’s much more important for Dems to reflect on how the national mood dimmed so rapidly under their leadership, and fix those mistakes—quickly—before the midterms
③ And if anything it’s even more important for Dems to ask themselves how it came to be that Republican voters are more concerned about fake threats to democracy than their voters are to real ones
WAITING IN THE SWINGS
What follows is the best after-action analysis of the elections in Virginia and New Jersey you will read, because unlike other take-slingers, I’ve had days to reflect upon why the returns confirm all of my priors. [Lol — d}
Most of the gut-check punditry Tuesday night and Wednesday centered on proximate causes: Why did Dems lose in Virginia? Why did both states swing so dramatically toward the GOP? To be clear, these are good questions, and I’ll try my best to answer them below; the races were both very close, which means (as anyone who’s heard of James Comey understands) they could have come out differently under slightly different conditions. Virginia was winnable, in other words, and given the stakes, it’s fair and worthwhile to second guess campaign tactics and any other factors Democrats had the power to influence. What if Terry McAuliffe had grown a mustache? We can only wonder.
But relative to 2017, the rightward swing in New Jersey was about 15 points; in Virginia it was about 12. Had Democrats, through better electioneering, held it to (say) 13 and 10—juuust enough to eke out victories in both elections—it would still be terribly ominous, because nationwide swings anywhere close to that large, if sustained, would annihilate Democratic majorities and governorships next year, and very plausibly doom the republic.
That’s why I ultimately want to home in on what makes the returns more disturbing than a normal pendulum-swing of the kind we saw Tuesday usually is. They imply (and polling bears this out) a horrifying mismatch between real, looming threats to democracy and public perception thereof; that Republican voters are more worked up about lies (2020 election-fraud lies, Great Replacement lies, QAnon lies) than Democrats are about real, ongoing schemes to steal popular sovereignty. And that suggests the failures were baked in long ago.
① THE ‘WHAT ‘IFFE’ GAME
So let’s start small and work our way up to the big-picture stuff. Recriminations began flowing as soon as the writing in Virginia was on the wall. Among the most popular: With Trump no longer menacing front pages, or social-media feeds, it was a mistake for Terry McAuliffe to expend so much energy tying Glenn Youngkin to a figure from the past; he should’ve focused on kitchen-table issues; Democrats should’ve nominated someone newer/better/younger/etc, the education issue in Virginia was really about last year’s school closures.
These kinds of explanations are by definition untestable, but as applied here, they strike me as underbaked, or clearly wrong.
For instance: It’s not crazy to me to imagine that another candidate might have won, but there has to be a real theory to the case. For all his flaws, McAuliffe was a popular governor in his first (and—too soon!—only) term, and has universal name recognition in the state. But, for instance, he was also unusually poorly positioned to capitalize on Youngkin’s career as a soulless private-equity rich guy, or to grow his appeal in rural Virginia. Maybe one of the other Dems in the primary would’ve done a better job at that, but the Democratic track record on this score is honestly small and pretty spotty. Here’s a sobering reminder: When Democrats lost Florida in 2018, crusty old Bill Nelson actually got more votes for Senate than either Andrew Gillum OR Ron DeSantis did for governor.
For another, instance, it was a mistake for McAuliffe to ignore schools and the GOP’s critical race theory propaganda blitz, particularly after Republicans were able to consolidate opposition to Biden in the early months of his presidency with culture-war claptrap alone. McAuliffe tried to jiujitsu the issue at the end of the campaign, but out of complacency, fear of culture war, or arrogance about their invulnerability on the issue, Dems ceded the entire terrain to the GOP through most of October, and by the time they reversed course, it was too late.
For another ‘nother instance: It’s true that McAuliffe tried to use Trump’s unpopularity (and Youngkin’s subservience to Trump) as a motivator, and then lost anyhow. Must mean it backfired! This would be fallacious propter hoc logic under most circumstances, but it may actually be worse than that in this case, because the race in New Jersey was much more issue focused, and Dems there did slightly worse. It just happened to be a bluer state. There will be many, many GOP candidates next year who are far Trumpier than Youngkin (remember Larry Elder?) and it’d be a real fiasco if Dems said nothing about it based on incorrect snap reactions they had on November 2. Youngkin ran scared from Trump for a reason.
Still, at best all we can say is the Trumping of the Virginia race was better than the alternative of ignoring Trump altogether. But it also clearly wasn’t enough on its own. What seems to have been missing from both races was anything that might’ve stemmed or offset the red tide just a bit more than Dems were able to.
② BAD MOOD RISING
These are all small bore criticisms. They may explain the margin of victory but not the overall swing, which should serve as a reminder that heavier currents will swamp tactical choices, and governing parties should thus do whatever they can to shape those currents before sweating the small stuff. In some ways they make me think Democrats would’ve been better off losing by a wider margin, so they’d focus on how and why those currents turned against them.
Part of the explanation surely lies beyond their control. If you’re a political junky, you’ve probably heard the term “thermostatic public opinion,” to describe the well-documented phenomenon of the public quickly turning against incumbent presidents and parties. It swung against Democrats in Virginia the way it normally does. And as unsatisfying as it is to attribute so much consequence to the poorly understood animal spirits of the American electorate, it did so by a pretty normal amount.
But that’s not to say Democrats were helpless. The national mood has dimmed considerably since Biden’s first 100 days. Biden almost-but-didn’t-quite tame the pandemic. The persistence of the pandemic has harmed the economic recovery on a couple of fronts. Then on top of it all, Biden’s economic agenda stalled out in Congress.
Here I think there’s much more blame to go around. The atmosphere in American life today didn’t just rise from the earth or fall from the skies like a fog. Democrats can’t control everything, but it is completely reasonable to expect our leaders to be savvy enough to anticipate predictable risks and insure against them.
They should have known that Republicans would try to harm both the economy and the pandemic recovery, and used their power to create buffers against it. The American Rescue Plan (if not the CARES Act before it) should have tied pandemic relief to objective economic and public-health conditions. Democrats should have permanently neutralized the debt limit, either on their own or as a concession for their CARES Act votes when Trump was president. They should’ve known (because I knew) that Republicans would try to sabotage herd immunity after Biden won by fanning vaccine rejection, and embraced vaccination requirements much earlier than they did. Joe Biden should not have wasted several weeks under the illusion that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) would negotiate an infrastructure deal with him in good faith; Senate Democrats in the Gang of Whatever shouldn’t have then taken the baton and wasted months more to agree on policy that they could just as easily have devised themselves and passed through the budget-reconciliation process along with the rest of Biden’s agenda. They were supposed to prove democracy works, but instead they spent months trying to prove bipartisanship works, even though those are very different concepts—and by the time they corrected course, Biden’s popularity was already sinking.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats are pointing fingers inward, mostly on the assumption that McAuliffe might’ve won if he’d had some or all of Biden’s economic agenda to run on. I actually think there’s something to that. The gridlock left a big blank in what might have been a simple “we’re awesome because of ______; they suck because of Trump” message. But that’s another small-bore issue; the bigger one, coming on top of the Delta variant surge, is the demoralizing specter of a weak-seeming president. It has hurt Biden everywhere, and as goes Biden so goes the party. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin deserve a lot of the blame for that, but the bipartisanship bug didn’t bite them alone, and without that, Dems could’ve passed the whole agenda by September or earlier.
③ THE COWERING INFERNO
Fix any or all of those blunders and I think McAuliffe would’ve won; maybe not by a lot, but by enough. And by the same token, if Democrats fix them going forward, the midterms won’t look so bleak.
What troubles me even more than the governing errors, though, is the fact that Republicans were able to become competitive anywhere in any blue territory in the country so soon after Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with incompetence and lies, then tried to steal the election leaving dead bodies in the halls of Congress. We can’t expect memories to last forever, but we can expect them to last longer than a year. There is plenty of precedent for the kind of reckoning Republicans deserve, and the fact that the entire GOP isn’t toxic in much more of the country after what we just lived through is prima facie evidence of a political failure.
In Brazil, the Senate equated Jair Bolsonaro’s COVID-19 policies with mass murder and recommended he be tried for crimes against humanity. In America, a federal judge had to scold the Justice Department for taking such a blasé approach to accountability for a violent insurrection. “No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms.”
But it’s not just the Justice Department processing hundreds of rioters with petty crimes charges; it’s a party-wide inclination to cower in the face of a vast, acute threat to free society.
Again, there is plenty of blame to go around; The congressional leaders who ducked oversight obligations and accountability measures wherever they could while Trump was still president; the ambivalence they showed about impeaching him in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection; the pockets of resistance to abolishing the filibuster, which are large enough to keep Joe Biden on the sidelines; the unwillingness to extend the full rights of citizenship to the people of Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other territories; or remediate the Republican theft of the courts. It’s Chris Coons convincing Democrats to end Trump’s second impeachment trial without seeking any evidence, because he and his colleagues were so excited about Valentine’s Day; it’s Biden and the leadership prioritizing infrastructure policy—including normalizing relations with Republicans—over an emergency effort to safeguard democracy; it’s congressional Democrats wasting weeks and weeks pleading with Republicans to participate in an investigation of the insurrection, even offering them the power to neuter the inquiry; it’s liberal legal elites, up to and including Merrick Garland, so inclined to leave Trump above the law that after two weeks, they have still yet to render judgment on whether Steve Bannon defied a valid subpoena from the January 6 committee. (He did.)
I don’t think most Americans like lying, cheating, and stealing, let alone the idea that any one party would try to seize dictatorial power for itself. And while I accept that Democrats lack the kind of big propaganda apparatus that would allow them to easily warn the country about what’s coming, they are by no means mute. They have tremendous agenda-setting power right now, but what they’ve said and done has been in no way commensurate with the threat. And while I can’t cite any fancy polls, I’m confident that if Democrats had ever tried in a sustained way to brand Republicans for what they are, the way Republicans have branded Dems for what they’re not, Republicans would be in big trouble.
That’s why they engaged throughout the Trump era in a series of coverups, and why the coverups continue today. They know the truth is radioactive and they’re desperate to hide it. Up until now, they couldn’t have asked for a more accommodating opposition: a party that has let scandal after scandal drift by, that latched on to none of them with anything like the ferocity Republicans showed through years of Benghazi agit-prop, that has since responded less vigorously to an attempted coup than Republicans have to the totalitarian myth that Trump actually won the election.
Add it all up and Tuesday starts to make an eerie kind of sense: A Republican base behaving, based on lies, the way you’d want people to act if they thought their way of life and tools for self-governance were being plundered. Meanwhile there’s a live torpedo aimed right at the hull of America’s popular majority, and our representatives refuse to act like it, plausibly costing Democrats a big swing vote.
It may be that if Democrats had done everything you might expect from a party facing such a menace, it wouldn’t have mattered; maybe creeping fascism matters less to the center-left public than the passing currents that have carried us into a moment of national malaise. If that were true, it would be fair to chalk the end of democracy up to a failure of the people. But Democrats haven’t done anything close to that; and until they do—assuming it’s not already too late—it’s a failure of the leaders.
‘Nuff said.