Best place to fight is the ballot

Win in Wisconsin, losses in Florida, lessons from the thermostat & playing dead

It’s official: Democrats just won a $100m Supreme Court election tonight¹ in Wisconsin, and lost two special elections in Florida.

Those results hold larger lessons.

Political scientists have catalogued the thermostatic effect, where voters swing against the party in power like an air conditioner turning on to cool a house that is getting too hot.

That’s the research behind the controversial advice of James Carville, who wants Democrats to simply “play dead” and let voters sour on Trump. The idea being if you let Trump self-implode, Democrats will have a better chance to fight back:

With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.

Ten weeks into Trump: The Sequel, voters are already souring on MAGA. Trump’s approval rating continues to fall, down 15 points (from +12 after inauguration to -3 today).

The same bellwether bros whose endorsements were hailed as moving persuadable low-information voters to Trump last year are now complaining about various insanities of the Administration:

• CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who said in August to vote Trump “if you care about your paycheck” roasted him today (“knock down the stock market simply by opening his mouth … everything is good except one thing: we have a president angry at everyone except Putin”)

• Joe Rogan, who famously endorsed Trump to his massive audience, was shaken yesterday on the insane approach to deportations (“you got to get scared that people who are not criminals are lassoed up and sent to El Salvador prisons … it’s horrific”)

• Barstool’s Dave Portnoy, another Trump endorser, went viral last week demanding Trump start firing people from the leaky Houthi Signal chat.

So, it playing dead working?

Well, “The Democratic Party” cannot totally play dead. The Resistance marketplace has been revved up so hot for so long that it’s impossible for everyone to stay calm for long. There are cable channels and consultants and activist organizations who need to feed the beast.

It is true Democrats need to fight, but the style of fight will determine whether it is helpful or counterproductive.

The divergent election results in Wisconsin and Florida hold some lessons for where fighting may backfire.

---

Reject The Impulse

The Democratic-aligned candidate in Wisconsin cut a low-key profile, prevailing despite Elon Musk’s legally questionable offer of $1 million for petition signers and massive investment in the race. Musk tweeted, then deleted, his sweepstakes offer to voters before his rally in Wisconsin on Sunday. On Saturday, a judge allowed the rally and promotion to go on.

It is also possible that the GOP lost so badly because Democrats played it cool while Elon Musk showed just how much of a dangerous weirdo he is. Recall from our post on Trump cancelling the NY-21 special election for Elise Stefanik’s seat: the lower turnout is, the better Democrats do.

But former New Republic and Pod Save writer Brian Beutler was upset that more centrist Democrats weren’t calling on Wisconsin authorities to arrest Musk. I got into a back-and-forth with Beutler, whose line of reasoning exemplifies the modern leftist activist impulse to ignore the asymmetry of American politics and disregard any downside risks. 

This impulse is not so much “fight or flight” as it is “wildly wave a knife at the first subway passenger you see because it worked for a mugger once.”

And it has to be resisted. The impulse manifests itself in a few ways:

1. Create a false choice with inflammatory language

2. Ignore how to operationalize your advice

3. Disregard downside risks

4. Crank up lawlessness that benefits authoritarians

5. Raise salience of elections when Dems do better with low turnout

Beutler first set up a false dichotomy, with some fancy words thrown in about how centrists are sellouts. For Beutler, there are two options: demand Elon be put in cuffs, or you are a coward sellout wanting to let any rich person get away with anything

He then completely ignores how implementing his recommendation would work. The hypothetical combative centrist congresswoman from another state is supposed to call on … someone in Wisconsin to defy a judge’s order and just handcuff Elon?

Most dangerously, it ignores the core asymmetry of leftists ratcheting up the heat. 40% of the country is conservative, 25% is liberal. And when lawlessness is met with lawlessness, somehow the gun-less pluralist liberals are going to end up winning? Yeah, don’t think so.

Clear in the short run, however, is what raising the salience of elections - and dangerous weirdness - does to election results. Republicans now do better with lower-propensity voters, and cross-pressured voters badly want Democrats not to do weird extreme stuff.

Here’s how Cook Political Report analyst Matthew Klein put it:

Democrats are performing so well in low-salience races that you almost wonder if they’d be better off not advertising in special elections at all. The Dem base is extremely attuned to off-cycle races, even when they get no coverage. As spending goes up, more Republicans tune in.

At 3:40pm on election day, the biggest story for the local Fox affiliate in Wisconsin was weather and a dog biting someone at a mall: 

Brian Beutler thinks Democrats would be better off if the lead story was about Elon Musk getting handcuffed for something a judge allowed to proceed.

He is wrong.

Florida Man Too Much In The News

Meanwhile, down in Florida, there were two special congressional elections in typically Safe Republican districts. Funny enough, the FL-1 race to replace Matt Gaetz was quiet. 

But the special election to replace Signal chat instigator Mike Waltz actually did make a lot of news. And that turned out to lead to some unintended consequences for Democrats. Turnout exploded in FL-6, as Decision Desk’s Michael Pruser noted before polls closed:

The surprise is just how heavy voting is in FL-06.  This district is one of the lowest election day voting districts in the state (4th lowest), and that it's crushing FL-01 (2nd highest rate of ED voting) suggests Republican attempts to juice turnout here proved effective. 

After polls closed and results started coming in, there was another surprise: despite raising more than $15,000,000 the Democratic nominee will likely do relatively worse in Fl-6 than the quieter FL-1 race.

Democrats are doing better in the quietest special elections, and Trump’s loud extremism is causing agita among both mainstream voters and the bros who boosted him to victory.

Democracy is so good it is worth protecting - and practicing. So keep the cuffs off Elon, and win at the ballot box.

1. From where I sit in Massachusetts, where the governor appoints judges, having elections for the Supreme Court seems insane