Listen to the Democrats Who Are Actually Trying to Win
Listen to the Democrats Who Are Actually Trying to Win
Some Democrats will lose this November. When it comes to why they lost, don’t ask the leaders and groups who didn’t even try to win.
While Democratic doomsaying is overrated, the experts still forecast Republicans winning the House in November.
So if Democrats lose, who gets to set the narrative?
After recent elections, the far-left was eager and willing to pin the blame on mainstream Democrats. There are a few reasons for this (for example, media centers overlap with the deep-blue districts that elected Squad-like candidates), but let’s focus on an important one: Far-left leaders and organizations have plenty of time to prepare for winning the narrative because they aren’t trying to win general elections.
Meanwhile, mainstream and moderate Democratic leaders are consumed by fighting to keep the majority. There are leaders and organizations that produce high-quality work showing the reality that moderates win (and that voters prefer moderates, not the far-left).
But if an entire faction of a political party can focus on setting the narrative of election losses — instead of preventing those losses in the first place — then the media must look elsewhere for explanations.
Want to know why some Democrats lost in November? Do not ask the leaders and groups who didn’t even try to win.
How does the far-left handle losing (and winning)?
For a sense of how the far-left will respond in 2022, let’s take a look at how they’ve responded in recent election cycles.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s loss was followed by a chorus from the peanut gallery arguing that Bernie Sanders would have won instead. Well, maybe, Matt Yglesias writes. But then again, Martin O’Malley would’ve won, too:
“It’s of course impossible to know whether that’s true, but I think it’s a perfectly plausible belief. What’s much less plausible is the implication, typically intended by the Bernie stan, that Bernie would’ve won because the country is crying out for socialism. What I think is plausible is that lacking some of Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic handicaps (the emails, the decades-long poor relationship with the non-ideological press, the sense that she should be held responsible for stuff her husband did) would have been more than enough to overcome any disadvantages Bernie would’ve had.”
In 2018, a media-savvy team of far-left political entrepreneurs hijacked the narrative and created the misleading impression of a progressive ascendency. They diverted boatloads of attention away from the fact that moderates had flipped the swing districts that recaptured Congress and toward the four new Squad members who won in deep blue strongholds.
As Third Way noted in its post-mortem of 2018, the far-left had nothing to do with the “Blue Wave” that swept the nation and delivered the House to Democrats. Moderate, New Democrat-endorsed candidates won 79% of all red-to-blue seats that year, while the far-left groups Justice Democrats and Our Revolution didn’t win a single one. But even those unquestionably moderate victories were reformulated by the far-left as products of an imagined progressive streak among the candidates.
In 2020, moderate Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who won her seat as part of 2018’s Blue Wave, didn’t mince words after she nearly lost her race in Virginia’s 7th district. According to Spanberger, the unexpected closeness of her race (she narrowly won 50.82% to 49.0%) was due to the fact that the far-left brand had become a toxic liability among voters in her district. As she said at the time:
“The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police. And I’ve heard from colleagues who have said ‘Oh, it’s the language of the streets. We should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we’re talking about. If we don’t mean we should defund the police, we shouldn’t say that.”
She added:
“We want to talk about funding social services, and ensuring good engagement in community policing, let’s talk about what we are for. And we need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of it.”
Echoing Spanberger, Rep. Conor Lamb, who also rose to congress in 2018 by flipping a pro-Trump district in the Pittsburgh suburbs, had this to say:
“I’m giving you an honest account of what I’m hearing from my own constituents, which is that they are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking… The rhetoric and the policies and all that stuff — it has gone way too far. It needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense, in reality, and yes, politics. Because we need districts like mine to stay in the majority and get something done for the people that we care about the most.”
But the far-left ignored what these frontline candidates had to say about their worse-than-expected down ballot performances. In a post-election interview with the New York Times, AOC fired back at Spanberger and Lamb.
First, she argued (incorrectly) that progressive policies didn’t cost any candidates their races:
“But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.”
Then she blamed Lamb’s near-loss on his Facebook strategy:
“Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the Year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.”
Not once in the entire interview did AOC acknowledge Spanberger’s claim that the “socialist” label is a liability for Democrats trying to win the middle, nor did she engage with the argument against using provocative slogans like “Defund the Police”. She also didn’t acknowledge the fact that Spanberger’s Republican opponent had invited AOC to campaign in her district under the assumption that her presence would alienate swing voters from voting blue.
Most importantly, though, she entirely sidestepped the clearest indicator that the far-left brand is corrosive to swing district Democrats (something we call Ruy’s Razor, the Occam’s Razor of electoral politics):
“Republicans ran attack ads on ‘Defund’ in a majority of pivotal races in 2020 and then won more than they were projected to. The simplest explanation is the GOP did polling and focus groups with swing voters and found that the ‘Defund’ attacks worked. There may be a theory about how Republican media consultants had better ads but chose not to run them — or that they do not use any of the widely available tools to measure the engagement the ads received — but these fly in the face of the most straightforward explanation.”
All of this deflection and finger-pointing from the far-left ignores a basic facet of reality: Spanberger and Lamb both ran ahead of Biden! There are many things that can be said about these candidates, but arguing that they don’t know how to campaign in their districts isn’t one of them. Does AOC think these swing-district-winning, Biden-over-performing Democrats are incapable of knowing and responding to what their constituents want?
Who should we listen to?
This year, we can guess what the far-left will say after the midterms. They’ll divert attention to the fact that the Squad grew this year while pinning moderates in swing districts with the blame for their own losses.
They’ll also likely glaze over the fact that Democrats achieved a historic number of legislative victories with razor-thin margins in both houses of Congress over the last two years, instead blaming moderates for everything that didn’t get done. No anecdote better captures this self-sabotaging mentality than Bernie Sanders’ made-for-Fox-News diatribe against the largest climate investment in history just minutes before its passage:
But what they won’t say is that they’ve never flipped a swing district (and that the only Justice Democrats-backed candidate to run for a swing seat lost handily in a Nebraska district where Joe Biden won). They won’t say that they’ve mostly backed away from even endorsing candidates in swing districts, instead opting to target some of the bluest (and safest) districts in the country. And they certainly won’t say what political science and the historical track record have proven to be true: that moderates are more popular and tend to fare better than more ideologically extreme alternatives.
We shouldn’t be taking cues from people who didn’t try to win.
Instead of listening to the far-left, we should listen to the Democrats who fought tooth and nail on the front lines of the battle to save our democracy. Right now, the people who are worried about losing to anti-democracy Republicans in swing districts are telling us loudly and clearly that the far-left brand is a major problem for them (Tim Ryan, for example, is actively running against it in Ohio).
As you read last week, Mary Peltola knows what it takes to win in a “Safe” Republican district. Joe Manchin knows how to beat Republicans in West Virginia, one of the reddest states in the country. Abigail Spanberger and Conor Lamb ran ahead of Biden in their swing districts — they are in touch with their constituents in rural Virginia and Pennsylvania. AOC of New York City is not.
As the midterms draw near, let’s reflect on what we know. To the extent that Democrats lose this fall, those losses will be in swing districts (by their very nature, swing districts are the districts that could swing to either party). To the extent that they lose in those swing districts, it will not be because they aren’t far enough to the left — it will be because they will have been perceived as being too far to the left by too many swing voters.
After November, you’ll hear a lot about what worked and what didn’t. And you will definitely hear that Democrats should have just gone farther left, likely from someone who has been saying it all year — and someone who did not try to win back a Republican district.
The media should pass the mic to someone who tried to win.