Democrats have been blissed out since Tuesday's romp in the off-cycle elections in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City and state legislative and local elections from coast to coast.
After a year of raising canes, they were finally raising Cain this week, and it no doubt felt very good for them. But does it mean anything?
Democrats did well in the 2023 off-cycle elections, even holding on to the governorship in deep-red Kentucky, scoring big legislative gains in New Jersey and Virginia and flipping a court seat in swing-state Wisconsin. But a year later, Democrats got soundly thumped in the 2024 presidential cycle.
We could tell the story of Democrats' successes in midterms, off-cycle and special elections in the first Trump term — and even their ducking disaster in the 2022 midterms — as being about voter intensity.
You know it well: In the new partisan coalition of the Trump era, Democrats have the high-propensity voters — affluent, college-educated, suburban and urban — while Republicans increasingly dominate with the lower-propensity, working-class electorate — noncollege, rural and small town. In lower-turnout contests like midterms, it gives Democrats the edge, but when the universe of voters expands by a third or more for a presidential election, the blue team gets swamped.
We know a lot about this phenomenon because it was exactly the story for Republicans in the 1990s, 2000s and into the 2010s. The midterm years were often great, but out of the eight presidential elections between 1992 and 2020, Republicans won the national popular vote just once, George W. Bush's 2004 reelection. Over the same period, the GOP dominated the House of Representatives, governorships and state legislatures. The smaller the overall turnout, the better for the GOP when it was the party of the affluent, college-educated high-turnout voters.
The great news for Democrats on Tuesday seemed to confirm that Democrats are now the party of big wins in small races. The size of the rebound from last year looked like an exclamation point on the analysis. And while it's great to punch above your weight class, in our current system of barely bridled executive authority and intense partisanship, losing presidential elections is too high a price to pay.
There are a hundred questions we could ask about the trend, perhaps most consequentially: Does the trend hold when President Trump is no longer a presidential contender? Would the Republican Party of heir apparent Vice President Vance do as well at motivating working class voters or to keep the upper quintiles so locked in with the Democrats? We can't know that any more than we can know what faction will be in control of the Democratic Party coming out of next year's elections. If it's a nationalist versus a socialist in November of 2028, heaven help the folks in the suburbs who have to choose.
But we did see two significant signs of encouragement for Democrats in the results this week.
First, Democrats' persistent unpopularity is self-inflicted. One of the big stories in politics of the past year has been about how no matter how low Trump's approval ratings have slid, Democrats have still managed to be more unpopular. While Republicans have been underwater with voters, Democrats have been worse.
But a new poll right before Tuesday's results came in suggested that is something of a mirage. A CNN survey said that Democrats were far more motivated to vote next year than Republicans — 67 percent to 48 percent — even as Democrats had far worse opinions about their own party, 15 points worse than Republicans' view of their own home team.
The Democratic Party is unpopular, because it is unpopular among Democrats. And that CNN poll shows us that not only did that not impede Democrats from going out and voting for a variety of candidates of different ideological stripes, it didn't seem to put independents off either. In the two races with the greatest implications for next year, New Jersey and Virginia, the Democratic candidates for governor won with independents in a rout.
The Democrats are in for a long, rough run between now and the spring of 2028 as they settle an internal conflict that has been simmering since 2020 and the grudging acceptance of former President Biden as their nominee, but it didn't cost them a thing this week. Trump is still enough to keep both parties remarkably unified, and there was no sign that the Democratic brand is so damaged that independents won't take relief there when they're fed up with the GOP.
And the turnout in both places was up significantly from four years ago, particularly in New Jersey, where turnout passed 3.2 million, climbing 23 percent from 2021. That's still a million fewer votes than were cast there in 2024, but there was no correlation between higher gubernatorial turnout and a better showing for Republicans. In fact, it was the opposite.
And then there's this, which was first detailed by Nate Cohn at the New York Times: clear evidence that Democrats flipped some 2024 Trump voters. Using exit polls and the voter files already available in some jurisdictions from Tuesday's vote is that some of the same voters who helped move the country toward the GOP last year pushed back the other way this week — something like 7 percent of the 2024 Trump voters in each state.
Again, these are little elections with imperfect predictive power for even next year's midterms. But there are signs here for a Democratic Party that has been struggling to stay afloat for the past year that the sailing may get easier.
[Programming alert: Watch The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt with newsmakers from both parties with the latest on the government shutdown, a breakdown of the election results, our best-in-the-business panel of journalists and an interview with author Malcom Gladwell about the lessons of "Revenge of the Tipping Point" for our current chaotic national moment.]
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