Final midterm thoughts

The midterms are finally over. On Tuesday, Raphael Warnock won his Senate runoff race against Herschel Walker. He will now serve a full 6-year term. His win means Democrats will now have 51* Senate seats, up from the 50 they have now. Every single Democratic incumbent in the Senate who ran for reelection won. When was the last time the party in the White House did not see any of its Senators lose reelection in a midterm? 1934. That is another one for the record books for this election.

Republicans will have 222 House seats next year. That is the same number of seats Democrats have now. While Republicans were expected to win 20-30 seats, they wound up winning only 9. Kevin McCarthy will almost certainly be Speaker next year although he may have to endure some humiliation to get there. The one thing he has going for him is that no alternative exists (yet).

The new House majority will be focusing on important issues that people care about like inflation, jobs, healthcare and energy. Just kidding, they will be focusing on investigating Hunter Biden. The number of actual voters who have any familiarity with or care about that story can probably be counted on no hands. I could not care any less about the Hunter Biden saga. Barring some crazy revelation, this is all I will ever write about it.

House and Senate Republicans both seem intent on trying to use the debt ceiling as a weapon to get cuts to entitlement programs. When it needs to be raised some time next year, they have said they will not raise it unless cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare are agreed to. In other words, they are going to hold the country’s full faith and credit hostage so they can push for cuts to the most popular programs there are. Sounds like a great way to win hearts and minds.

I have written before about the debt ceiling, why it is bad and why it should be abolished so feel free to check it out for more detail. If Republicans want to make entitlement cuts an issue again, that would be every Democrat’s dream come true. Trump temporarily killed it and deprived Democrats of a very effective weapon they had used against Republicans. Now, it looks like Republicans want to give that weapon back to them.

Unlike 2011, the last time the debt ceiling was held hostage, Republicans in the House are in a much weaker position. Their majority is razor thin this time. Several newly elected Republicans come from districts where Biden won handily in 2020. They will have a strong incentive to break from the national party on at least some issues and not destroying the country’s full faith and credit is the lowest hanging fruit there is. All this is to say that I am not worried about us defaulting on our debt payments. The position from Biden should continue to be what it has been and that is that the country’s full faith and credit is non-negotiable.

Election MVPs

Below are some things and people that deserve mentions for the role they played in this year’s elections. The list is hardly exhaustive. I do not mention abortion, for example, but it was certainly a huge factor, which I have written about before.

Trump: bless his heart. Every Democrat should be sending him the nicest thank you note ever written. He pushed for the worst possible slate of candidates in key races and almost all of them lost. He saved the Senate for Democrats, helped them keep some governorships while gaining Arizona and helped them in some key House races. Without his efforts, Mitch McConnell would almost certainly be majority leader again, Kevin McCarthy would have a much stronger hand and some Democratic governors would be looking for new jobs. His brand is toxic and Republicans who tried to imitate him flopped. Being associated with him is a kiss of death outside of red states. I am not going to speculate on what this means for his 2024 bid. We will find out soon enough, but he is in a very weak position for now.

Culture wars: not a winning message. Being a culture warrior is fun and great for riling people up, but not great for winning elections in swing states. What did Herschel Walker love to talk about? Transgender athletes and pronouns, with the former being featured in his first ad of the runoffs. He made sure to mention both of those things in every stump speech. For all the emotion those things have with a few people, among actual voters they are a dud. Almost nobody votes on that and those that care about it are not swing voters.

If being a right-wing culture warrior was a winner, Gretchen Whitmer would have lost in Michigan, as that is almost all her opponent talked about. Actual voters, on the other hand, do not care about any of that stuff and probably have no idea what 99% of culture war fights even are. I have no idea what most of those fights are and I’m much more in the know than most. Normal people care about real, concrete things that affect their lives. Inflation, education, healthcare and energy fall under that umbrella. Culture war fights do not, no matter which side of it you are on.

Democratic Senate incumbents: on paper, Raphael Warnock, Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto were extremely vulnerable. With Biden having an approval rating in the 40s and probably even lower in their states, they should have lost. None of them did. True, they got lucky in drawing terrible opponents, but they also ran phenomenal campaigns. A comprehensive account of how Warnock won can be found here. How did he do it? He focused on persuasion. He emphasized bipartisanship and showcased voters who supported Brian Kemp and were also voting for him. It was essentially giving Republicans a permission structure to vote for him. He deliberately avoided going out into left field and distanced himself from national Democrats when he felt he needed to.

Catherine Cortez Masto was arguably the most vulnerable Democrat. Her opponent was bad, but not as bad as some other Republicans in other races. Nevada was hit hard by the pandemic and had some of the highest gas prices in the country. On paper, she should have been a sitting duck. How did she win? By running an extremely disciplined campaign. She stayed relentlessly on message both touting herself as a champion of workers and attacking her opponent on things like abortion.

While vulnerable Senate Democrats sometimes emphasized differences with the national party, they did not veer off into right field. None advocated for anything like building a wall, banning abortion or eliminating capital gains taxes. In fact, many of the ads and messages they ran on were very generic and could be liked by most everyone.

Gary Peters: never heard of him? That is kind of the point. He is one of Michigan’s Senators. He was also in charge of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). His job was to keep the Senate in Democrats’ hands. He had a very daunting task. Democrats could not afford to lose a single seat. Between the history of midterms and Biden’s approval rating, things looked hopeless. To say the least, he did an amazing job. In fact, he did such a great job that Democrats want him to run the DSCC for the next cycle. Usually, a Senator will run a campaign committee for just one cycle and let someone else take over afterwards.

How did he defy history and preside over Democrats gaining a seat? The short answer is he focused on helping his colleagues and kept his head down. He was as far away from his Republican counterpart, Rick Scott, as one could be. Scott, who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), touted a red wave non-stop. He released his own way out in right field policy agenda, irritating Mitch McConnell, who he has fought with publicly many times. He raised close to $200 million for the NRSC only to set it on fire and spent two weeks during the summer vacationing in Italy when he was supposed to be helping candidates. Peters did none of those things. He stayed out of the limelight, got along great with Chuck Schumer and helped raise money for Democrats. Unlike Scott, the money he raised was well spent.

Persuasion: the key to how Democrats did so well. Of all the things that went wrong for Republicans, turnout was not one of them. Their voters showed up, often in substantially greater numbers than Democrats. In Maricopa County, for example, roughly 75% of registered Republicans showed up while 69% of registered Democrats showed up. Between that and registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats in Arizona, Republican candidates should have won. They lost because Democrats were able to convince a substantial number of Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates. Undoubtedly, extreme Republican nominees had plenty to do with that. Even though Democrats won most statewide races in Arizona, Republican House candidates did better than Democrats. The reason is because a significant number of Republicans voted Republican for the House, but for Democrats for statewide races.

Similar things happened in other states. In New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan was easily reelected, but Republican Chris Sununu was reelected governor by an even bigger margin. A significant number of voters there picked both of them. In Georgia, every Republican running for state offices won outright and avoided a runoff, but Warnock also won. A decent number of voters were convinced that Warnock was okay while they voted for other Republicans. A similar thing happened in Nevada.

Ticket splitting is hardly a new phenomenon. Historically, it has been fairly common although it has declined significantly over the last few decades. In the Trump era, it all but vanished, but that looks like an artifact of that time. Ticket splitting is still much less common than it was even 15 years ago, but it is not dead. That is probably a good thing and may be a sign of a decrease in polarization.

Persuasion is important because it means candidates cannot win in swing states by appealing only to their base. There has been an obsession on the left over the last decade with mobilization. The idea is that all Democrats have to do is mobilize their coalition of young and non-white voters along with some college educated white liberals and they will always win. Swing voters no longer exist.

That idea is a myth that needs to die. The notion that there are tons of leftists out there who are not voting because Democrats are too centrist is pure fantasy. That false belief has led many Democrats to make and double down on some poor decisions that have alienated a large number of voters. The reality is there are many swing voters out there. That is who decides elections. They are not leftists because if they were they would not be swing voters. Hopefully, after the success of campaigns like Warnock’s, more Democrats will realize it is persuasion that is the key to winning and will make better decisions because of it.

Democracy: I did not think many people really cared that much about it. It seemed like something most people only pretended to care about opportunistically. I did not believe that most people were craving for a dictator, but that they were not especially supportive of democracy in and of itself. I somewhat seriously believed that if an aspiring dictator came along promising everyone low prices, cheap gas, low crime and good schools, they would get 75% of the vote. It would not be the first time people chose that path, i.e., Germany in the 1930s.

In my gut, I thought people were concerned about inflation more than anything else, including democracy. Wanting low prices is certainly understandable. I like it as much as the next person. But I would never be willing to throw away democracy in the hope of getting it. I thought that was a minority view. It looked like people might well vote for election deniers in races across the country because they were mad about inflation.

After the results of the election, I have definitely changed my mind on all of that. People really do care about being able to choose their own government. Even in the face of 8% inflation and sky high pessimism about the present and future, election deniers lost in every key race, some by huge margins. Enough people in those states decided that election deniers were the biggest threat, more so than inflation or anything else. I do not know how much of the vote an aspiring dictator would get, but it is probably much closer to 25% than 75%. That is the most encouraging thing to come from the election.

Democracy can be messy and frustrating. There are plenty of instances where I believe our government has moved too slowly to take action and other times where the political process has watered down important laws. But I would take that over the most efficient and competent dictatorship in a heartbeat. Thankfully, there are many others out there who feel that way, too.

I have to admit that my own thoughts on how threatened democracy was here are a bit complicated and can even seem contradictory. My worry was never that we were going to get a dictator in the mold of Hitler or Stalin. If we ever did get a dictator, it would be more like Putin or Orban. Even then, Trump was never going to be a dictator. He is far too incompetent and shortsighted to pull that off.

The biggest worry I had was something along these lines: an election denier gets elected secretary of state and refuses to certify election results they do not like. Exactly what would happen then, I had no idea, but nothing good would come from it. I tended to believe democracy would survive, but that we may have to go through some ugly episodes. Exactly what those would be, I did not know, maybe more January 6-like events or riots. Now, since election deniers lost every key race, that scenario is no longer something to worry about.

What has been almost as encouraging as election deniers losing is that almost all of them have conceded. Of the few who have not conceded, such as Kari Lake, nobody seems to care and everyone seems to be moving on from them. They may retain an audience of the craziest MAGA types, but that will be the extent of the attention they get.

*Kyrsten Sinema has now become an independent. It will not change the Senate composition. Democrats will still have control and will be able to move faster on things like nominations. I am not a fan of hers. She embodies every way you can go wrong trying to be a centrist. This takedown of her approach is better than anything I have written. Her approach depended on Democrats losing in Arizona as proof that only a Democrat like her can win there. Since other Democrats just won, that is clearly not the case and makes her claims to be the only Democrat who can win there clearly wrong.