From Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles (to which you should subscribe for a little bit of political positivity.)
As we often discuss here the central dynamic in American politics since Dobbs in the spring of 2022 has been Dem overperformance, Republican struggle in race after race, all across the country. We saw it in the battlegrounds in 2022, as we improved our standing over 2020 in AZ, CO, GA, MI, MN, NH, PA; and got all the way up to 59% in CO, 57& in PA, 55% in MI, 54% in NH. We saw it all throughout 2023 as we took away Colorado Springs and Jacksonville, two of the largest GOP held cities; the Supreme Court seat and rancid gerrymandering in WI; the six week abortion ban in OH; the Virginia Assembly and the fantasy that the 15 week abortion ban would be a safe haven for Republicans; and so much more, all across the country.
When I started Hopium in early 2023 I wondered whether this dynamic that we saw in 2022 would continue in 2023, and it did. 2023 was really a blue wave year across the US. And here in early 2024 we’ve been wondering would this same dynamic carry over to this year? And look what we’ve seen this week:
Iowa – huge sums spent, competitive race, unprecedented investment in ground operations, lots of candidate time, and overall GOP turnout was abysmal, coming in at 110,000, down from 186,000 in 2016, and the lowest 24 years. If Rs were fired up, ready to take on Biden they would have shown up and voted. They didn’t. It’s another sign of this ongoing GOP struggle we discuss aboe.
Don’t let weather be an excuse here – the drop was much too big to be explained by weather; the test of the strength of a campaign or party is whether they can get their voters to show up – and here they didn’t; this GOP enthusiasm problem is something that just keeps repeating all across the country in election after election.
Florida – Dems flip this GOP held seat, despite all the advantages Republicans currently have in Florida. Another sign of Dem heightened performance, GOP struggle, another Dem takeaway of something Republicans hold.
In his piece yesterday, he gave some reasons why this is happening. I think this is Particularly compelling:
I think the GOP has been struggling since Dobbs because this MAGA, Trumpy party is deeply unattractive even to many Republican voters. Trumpy candidates in the 2022 battlegrounds saw their party splinter, Republicans vote for Democrats and they lost, some times by enormous margins. Democrats then took away important things from Republicans in 2023 due to this ongoing GOP electoral struggle – a SCOTUS seat and outrageous gerrymandering in WI; Colorado Springs and Jacksonville – two of the largest GOP held cities in the country; the six-week abortion ban in Ohio; the state House and the hope of the 15 week abortion ban as a safe heaven in VA; and cities, city councils, state legislative seats and school board races across the US.
The fundamental problem Republicans face in 2024 is that their Presidential candidate and party are more unattractive than they’ve ever been. They’ve brought unprecedented chaos and extremism to Congress, and a historic appeasement of genocidal Putin; dozens of their leaders across the US have been indicted for supporting a party wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy; they are content to leave pregnant women to die on a hospital table, denying them the life saving care they need; they are refusing to pass common sense reforms to make it easier for the US government to manage our border and rising immigrant flows. They want more dead kids in schools, the planet to warm faster, to strip health insurance from tens of millions, establish mass deportation camps, and to keep taking away freedoms and rights common throughout the modern world……
And then there’s Trump. More degraded, extreme, dangerous than 2016 and 2020. His performance on the stump is far more erratic and wild. He keeps making big, consequential unforced errors due to his mental decline and mania. And there are the things he’s done that voters did not know about last time – his rape of a woman in a department store dressing room; his decades-long financial fraud; his leading of a party-wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy for all time; his being more responsible for ending Roe and stripping American women of rights and freedoms than any other single person; his rancid stealing of America’s secrets and sharing them with others; his taking of more money from foreign governments than any politician and political family in history. None of these things were known in 2020. Any one of them could disqualify him with voters. Taken together it’s an unprecedented basket of awfulness, and it’s just hard to imagine how he survives it all.
I can easily imagine how he survives it all. However, people do get burned out on endless chaos and his problems are numerous so it may be taking a toll.
There is no denying that Democrats have been on a roll in 2022 and 2023. And this first race of 2024 down in Florida, which Tom posted, is yet another surprise. Will it hold up? Who knows? But this recent history is promising. As much as the media loves to laud the alleged enthusiasm of Trump’s cult, results indicate that there has been a quiet, determined resistance to MAGA at work since 2018.