Liberal Analyst Warns Dems: So What? Big Deal

Democrats have had a pretty satisfying week, and for good reason. Republicans lost across the board on Tuesday, and didn’t just lose but got thumped. While these losses all took place in blue states — except some local races in Pennsylvania and Georgia, which are still concerning — it’s the scope of the losses that looks grim for the GOP. My pal Cam Edwards pushed back passionately in our VIP Gold chat yesterday at Republicans offering excuses for losses in Virginia especially, where a dozen state legislative seats flipped to Democrats, and warns that the GOP had better learn from this mini-shellacking before the midterms. 

Does that mean that Democrats discovered the key to the Resistance, as they and their allies in the Protection Racket Media gloated last night? Liberal analyst and pundit Ruy Teixeira threw a gallon of cold water on that notion today at the Free Press. Democrats had already demonstrated an ability to win in low-turnout elections, Teixeira writes, and none of these wins speak to actual momentum in higher-turnout elections — such as midterms, and in purple and red turf:

Let’s start with the inevitable risk that the party over-reads Tuesday’s results as auguring future victories. The historical record does not suggest these off-year elections are much of a guide to anything. In 2021, Republicans won the governor’s race in Virginia and exceeded expectations in the New Jersey race, only to be followed by a stunning over-performance by Democrats in the 2022 elections. And in 2023 Democrats held the Kentucky governorship, cleaned up in key races in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and crushed it in Ohio ballot measures on abortion rights and marijuana legalization. And we all know what happened in 2024.

All of this hits the mark. Off-year and special elections are good for PR, but lousy for predictability. They draw smaller turnouts, which means activists have more impact on the outcomes. In blue territory, that generally means that Democrats outperform, but that’s also true in purple and red territories as well. Democrats have a long-established organizational advantage over Republicans in GOTV efforts, which is a big lesson that the GOP needs to learn not just from this election but from a generation of elections. (I wrote about that at length in my 2016 book Going Red.) 

That doesn’t mean the Democrats have fixed the problems that created the losses in 2024. Teixeira took a look under the hood at the numbers, and one persistent issue emerges — their weakness with working class voters. The push for victory on Tuesday, Teixeira points out, largely came from affluent white female liberals (AWFLs) and the Academia elites:

Their strong performance among the college-educated continues to be the Democrats’ hole card, but their anemic support among working-class voters persists. This problem is highlighted by their peculiarly strong support among white, college-educated women. …

One of these groups is not like all the others! White, college-educated women increasingly live in a different political universe than the other groups. Democrats may wish to give some thought to whether politics so appealing to educated white women—especially those who report for duty in an election like this—are really much of an answer for their broader problems.

Once again, the problem is that the Democrats have not adjusted at all to the reasons for their loss a year ago. If anything, they have doubled down on disconnects between their party and the non-AWFL electorate. They have rushed to embrace fringe positions on consensus issues such as border security, crime, and the trans agenda despite overwhelming opposition among the electorate to those policies. And now they are fully embracing socialism on top of that, casting aside the “progressive” masks to go full Marxist.

Teixeira isn’t the only pundit on the Left shrugging these “victories” and the supposed path out of the wilderness. Nate Cohn also warned New York Times readers from taking much comfort from Tuesday’s results:

In many ways, the outcome of off-year general elections like these are deeply imperfect measures of the national political environment or the state of the parties. They’re not federal elections. They’re shaped by local issues and idiosyncratic candidates. And Tuesday’s were decided by the kind of highly engaged, lower-turnout electorates that have repeatedly backed Democrats in recent years.

Democrats also had an excellent showing in November 2023, one year before the last presidential election. They held the Kentucky governor’s mansion, won key races in Virginia, won a Supreme Court election in Pennsylvania, and were surprisingly competitive in the Mississippi governor’s race, while in Ohio ballot measures on abortion rights and marijuana legalization prevailed. Democrats thought it meant they had the political winds at their backs heading into the 2024 election; they were wrong. …

And while Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill fared extremely well, it is not at all obvious whether their campaigns offered a solution to the party’s problems. They campaigned on the cost of living and against Mr. Trump, but they didn’t find what the party has been grasping for: a way to channel the energy of the party’s base without alienating — or better still, appealing to — swing voters.

Four years ago, Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for Virginia governor did a lot of what Democrats probably wish their candidates might have done. He campaigned on a new set of issues by capitalizing on the simmering backlash against pandemic era restrictions and “woke.” In many ways, it foreshadowed the struggles that Democrats would face in 2024 and beyond. And it let someone who might have otherwise been a Mitt Romney-like private-equity establishment type turn into the moment’s conservative hero.

If the Trump era has brought a similar opportunity for Democrats today, they haven’t seemed to have found it yet.

Cohn thinks that the results this week portend well for the midterms, but also points out that the party out of power should do well in midterms. Polling thus far shows no evidence of support building for Democrats, he points out, which underscores how little Tuesday’s results may speak to elections where the turnout models become significantly broader than just the AWFL/activist set. 

Republicans shouldn’t take too much comfort from this either, but perhaps the panic is overblown too. They have time to tool up properly for the midterms, and the results this week may well have blown their complacency away. Hopefully, anyway.

For the last word on the elections (perhaps), I’ll leave you with the last word from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. Saddle up. 

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