Where's the Ketamine Crystal Ball?
Democrats needed to win four more seats, and need more outliers
Should Democrats force a government shutdown?
Josh Marshall has a thorough breakdown of why Democrats should shut down the government, while
has a convincing case for why Chuck Schumer was right not to.It’s complicated. We’re in a historically unpredictable environment. Stakes are high, and possible impacts stretch from the Department of Justice to Kyiv.
Our team lives in purple districts1 far from DC. We’ve spent the last five years learning how to win swing voters, not things like how the parliamentarian will rule on the continuing resolution if the cloture vote yada yada. Gotta be honest there.
What we do know is that Democrats really, really needed to win another four seats in the House of Representatives.
And a major plot line of Resistance: The Sequel seems to be losing our shit at the very people who got Democrats close to a House majority.
Must try harder to win tough races
Last March, we wrote why Democrats Should Try Harder To Win Tough Races. It focused on what we can learn from political outliers and how their legislative actions contributed to their electoral success.
Democrats need to win more races to get the 218 members necessary to elect a Speaker.
About 200 districts are relatively easy for Democrats to win. Another two dozen have been coin flips - with good coins well-flipped - in the polarized environments of 2020, 2022, and 2024.
But a few outliers had proven an ability to win and hold seats that were much harder than a coin flip: districts where you needed to run 5, 10, or 15 points ahead of Democrats atop the ticket.
What could we learn from those outliers?
We have spent years - and more than $11,000,000 - trying to answer that question and put it into practice. And one big lesson we’ve learned is to trust voters more and pundits less.
Outliers
One of those outliers represents Maine’s 2nd congressional district, which voted for Trump by 9 points in 2016, 7 points in 2020, and 10 points in 2024.
How does a Democrat hold that seat?
It’s not just magic words and tattoos. A lot of it has to do with legislation.
Every time I think of Jared Golden winning Trump voters2, a 2021 column from The New York Times comes to mind. Jamelle Bouie wrote why Golden was “Making a Big Mistake” by voting with the views of his voters instead of the highly-engaged Democratic keyboard class:
We are well past the age of split-ticket voting. If and when voters turn against Biden, they’ll turn against congressional Democrats too. Try as they might, these Democratic skeptics will struggle to distance themselves from their party and its leadership. If past elections are any evidence, they’ll fail.
Well, Golden did not fail in the midterms - he won his Trump district in 2022 by even more than in 2020, which was by more than he won it in 2018. And he won again in 2024, despite Trump having his biggest win there yet.
Like other outliers, Golden votes differently. And that contributes to winning - not only his seat, but persistent majorities (see the full article for the charts & graphs).
The age of split-ticket voting is not over. If it was, Republicans wouldn’t represent districts Trump lost badly, like Nebraska’s 2nd or Pennsylvania’s 1st.
And it cannot be over if Democrats are ever to retake the Senate again, where states that Trump won thrice already account for 50% of seats.
The Counterfactual
Golden was ahead of the curve in forecasting what would happen on inflation, on Biden’s electoral prospects, and now it looks like his statement on the shutdown was Chuck Schumer’s first draft.
Is avoiding the shutdown right?
Shit, I don’t know - I lack access to the crystal ball into Elon’s Ketamine-fueled brain and Trump’s dark magic to forecast what would happen.
But it sure seems like a lot of Twitter and Bluesky - and leaders of organizations like Indivisible - know exactly what would happen. And at least they know what will happen in the short-term: more outrage, more clicks, more members.
That’s how the modern attention economy works. And political conflict is a big industry.
Raising Cane
Last week’s Get Big Mad controversy was less complicated. Ahead of Trump’s not-technically-a-State Of The Union address, Leader Hakeem Jeffries requested Democrats maintain decorum. Then 77 year old Rep. Al Green memorably gave a visual for the frustrations of millions of Americans.
Democrats on social media compared it to the image of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert screaming at Biden. That was the defense of Green.
I took to Bluesky to ask if the image of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert had made voters more or less likely to support Republicans. No one took the bait.
When it’s the other side, it’s easy to see: “expressive advocacy” feels good to the base but probably hurts the party’s ability to win over voters in the middle.
Ten Democrats voted to censure Green, and were met with the full fury of The Weak Tea Party.
Beware Certainty
Like The New York Times’ premature obituary for Jared Golden, Chris Hayes is 100% sure that 100% of voters will not remember a shutdown ever happened.
Hayes just released a new book on The War For Our Attention, and in that respect he’s right: the Outrage Of The Week will mostly be forgotten in, well, a few weeks.
But the certainty here is disturbing. Former US Representative Marie Newman wrote even more aggressively on the Al Green censure, claiming there are no Americans caught between the two parties:
· People either are antichoice or prochoice, not halfway
· People either believe in climate science or do not believe, not in the middle
· Folks either believe in equity and equality for all or do not, they do not assign belief at a 40-60% level
· Folks either believe in fair wages or do not
· People either believe billionaires are not paying their fair share or not
· People believe prices are high or not
· People believe government helps or not
The reason politicians came up with the idea of “centrist or moderate” voters and collectively placing them in the magical “Middle” is this allowed them to not address issues at all or just nibble at the edges. Their logic is: The “Middle” does not like it when all the sides fight, so I will just stay out and not address it.
If this is true, we are doomed.
But, while we don’t know what would happen if the government shut down, we do know this nuance-free worldview is wrong.
And for Democrats to regain power, we need more outliers who can prove it.
Of the whole Welcome team, I live in the most-blue district. But it recently voted Republican for governor, and as a kid saw Scott Brown win an open State Senate district 50.4% to 49.4%, and then get re-elected with 50.5% of the vote. Years later he won a shock US Senate election. Outliers matter!!
I think about Jared Golden winning swing voters a lot, as readers may recall from posts like Reaching Escape Velocity + Golden Miracle + What the Polarization Hawks Aren’t Saying, etc.
On the piece about Golden and your rebuttal of progressive Jamelle Bouie's take:
"We are well past the age of split-ticket voting. If and when voters turn against Biden, they’ll turn against congressional Democrats too. Try as they might, these Democratic skeptics will struggle to distance themselves from their party and its leadership. If past elections are any evidence, they’ll fail."
I totally agree that Bouie has it bass ackwards on this and that if Dems don't distance themselves from the woke issues, weak on crime, ignore border security, they will continue to lose.
I support Welcome and will continue so, but I get more skeptical that this is correctable in the short term because Wolfy's political corollary to Newton's law shows that for every political action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and whatever pushback we can do, and it is worth doing, the progressives will push the other way.
It was notable that not one Dem Senator voted for the bill specifying that Title 9 is not for transgender women. This despite Newsome's recent correction. If Democrats want to die on that hill for XY humans playing women's sport, that even a majority of Democrats dont believe in I have less hope that Dems will shake their unpopularity.
Now, I am glad that Golden won, but that in the quirky state of Maine, and doesn't reflect the continuing trend of straight ticket politics, with all the Dem Senate spots left in Red states biting the dust - OH, WV, and MT.
It is worthy to keep trying but I am pushing a corollary third party approach, not to be antagonistic to Welcome, but to be a second front that I am calling the New Democratic Party ( https://www.facebook.com/groups/1865832800920360 ) with the general beliefs of the New Democratic Caucus. This is certainly a quixotic delusion of grandeur move as I am a devotee of St, Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and my last group Roy Cooper for President in 2024 never reached the threshold of minimal visibility.
But it does reflect a good idea. That if Democrats are unable to distance themselves from the always more vocal and media getting attention progressives, we need an alternative. As long as a third party refused to be a spoiler and would never do anything that would help MAGA, I think in specific races it could outdo a moderate Democrat.
The prime example imo is Dan Osborne who ran for Senate in NE, and ran well ahead of every Democrat in the US for statewide office in comparison to Harris' vote. He was supported by most Dems, but refused the party's endorsement, b/c he knew that in NE as in much of America the Dem brand is toxic