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In my first post, I want to spend some time reflecting on the 2022 midterms to flush out my own personal thoughts and explain why I think most people might have learned the wrong lessons from the outcome.
For a quick recap, this midterm cycle was a bit odd. The fundamentals that traditionally shape the landscape were way off, and the results, while somewhat predictable, were still a shocking surprise.
As told by a number of talking heads, President Biden was headed for a serious "shellacking," with the Democrats facing a torrent of impossible impasses to overcome, such as President Biden's low approval rating, unstable energy prices, high inflation numbers, and the rising crime rates across the country.
Despite these obstacles, Democrats avoided the crushing defeat that looked to be on the horizon. Voters rewarded Republicans for their efforts with a razor-thin 5-seat majority in the House while also expanding the Democrats' Senate majority by a single seat. The outcome of this year's midterms was one of the best showings by an incumbent party since 2004 when the Republicans managed to maintain and even expand the GOP's unified hold on Congress.
Outside of U.S. congressional elections, Democrats flipped state legislatures, won battleground state gubernatorial races, and beat out a number of election deniers for the key office of Secretary of State.
The anticipated red wave turned out to be a blue haze, with many pontificators asking why?
Republicans fumbled an easy layup this midterm cycle, and as a result, they are wildly pointing the finger to assign blame to something or someone. I’m not going to rehash some of those arguments here, but these are three arguments that I think to resonate the most with me: Candidate quality, the lack of a governing message, and the further abandonment of local issues—I will say this upfront. I do believe the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade played a role in this cycle's results, but I feel that its impact was more felt in local races such as gubernatorial and state house, and senate races, and that the issue through a motivator was not the all-encompassing factor that many points to as why the GOP had such a poor showing.
Candidate Quality
This cycle, the candidates that emerged, particularly in key battleground states and districts, were, for lack of a better word, a number of weirdos. From Joe Kent's falsely inflammatory remarks about his own district to J.D. Vance’s cringeworthy campaign ads to Blake Masters' overall awkward demeanor and tendency to say stupid things in front of a camera, all of these candidates struggled to win over support in traditionally GOP-dominated or leaning states and districts.
Out of all the GOP weirdos who ran in key races this cycle, only Senator-elect Vance managed to win his election, though his showing was piss poor in comparison to that of Governor DeWine, who won reelection handily.
Democrats used the GOP's selection of terrible candidates to their advantage in a machiavellian way, helping push the profiles of the most extreme candidates during the primary, betting that once the general election came around, securing the contested seat would be a piece of cake. The Democrats' risky play largely paid off, but unlike others, I am not quick to blame the Democrats for the horrible candidates that graced the stage this cycle.
That blame, in my mind, goes directly at the feet of President Trump and the primary electorate.
The issue of candidate quality can be largely blamed for the GOP's performance this cycle, but what makes this problem a bit more complicated is that the real issue is the disconnect between the base, the GOP establishment, and the wider electorate. If a good candidate cannot win a primary and the candidate who won the primary cannot, or severely struggles to, win the general election, you find yourself in a catch-22 situation.
The primary voter has essentially tied the hands of the party, preventing it from being seriously competitive in battleground districts and states, while party elites are so disconnected from their voters that they are actively contemplating ways to disenfranchise their own base to get the outcomes of candidates they want.
The relationship is more than sour, to say the least, and before the GOP can improve its overall issue of candidate quality, it must first improve the party’s relationship with its own base.
Candidates cannot be afraid to run for office because they think they'll lose the primary, and the primary voter should not be so alienated from the party establishment that they feel the need to unconditionally support the most extreme candidate they can find. Solving the issue of the party's disconnect from its base will require some serious soul-searching and possible reforms that may not sit well with establishment elites, but it should be worth it if it means regaining control over the party. All of this, of course, is a question that only local parties and election officials can answer, whether they want to or not.
Finally, in this debate over candidate quality, some more fringe Republicans have expressed their opposition to this line of argument because they perceive many Democratic candidates to be of poor quality, with the logic being at worst juvenile and at the best willful ignorance of what appeals to voters.
So I want to make this point absolutely clear.
Politicians like Tim Rayn and John Fetterman are good candidates for office—not because their policy prefrence is good but because they understand two things: the voter base they are trying to attract and how to tie in a message that gives voters a sense of authenticity that makes it easy for people to like them.
They both have cross-over appeal.
Ryan lost his race but managed to not only outperform President Biden but also make the race in Ohio so close that the GOP had no choice but to dump money that could have been used elsewhere. Ryan was such a strong candidate that despite his loss his coattails pulled up a number of Ohio Democrats in tough races. Fetterman on the other hand won his race despite his stroke because his overall campaign message screamed "authentic" and "relatable" to Pennsylvanians, convincing general election voters that he is one of their own.
One cannot credibly claim that the Republican nominee for Governor of New York, Lee Zeldin, was a good candidate but Ryan was not. Both of them proved highly effective at hitting on local issues and driving up cross-over appeal, which is needed to win tough elections. That's what a good-quality candidate can do, and the ability to recognize that in any candidate, no matter their affiliation, can save a lot of future electoral headaches.
Lack of a governing message
The GOP has not had an established governing platform since they decided to run Trump's 2020 re-election campaign strictly on vibes. For political junkies, the GOP's lack of policy coherence has become a running joke, but it has been a serious problem for a long time. The Republican Party has long been accused of not wanting to govern seriously, with tax cuts and austerity policies being their only truly held policy positions.
The troop has not abandoned this cycle, with GOP leadership going so far as to actively avoid or give vague answers to any discussion on what a GOP majority would do. To me, this was an odd move and a severely missed opportunity because the GOP, surprisingly, has a skeleton of a policy agenda they could sketch out: pro-family policies mimicking concerns brought to light in the Virginia Governor's election in 2021, tightening up on immigration and crime as exposed by many voters since 2020, and the framework for an industrial policy to increase competition with China, which they seem to have no problem advancing, all of which appear to be no-brainers for the GOP to run on, but for some reason, they did not. In their place, the likes of Senator Mitch McConnell preferred to let the aforementioned fundamentals dictate the outcome, believing they were on his side, while Senator Rick Scott, the man in charge of leading GOP Senate candidates to victory, had the bright idea of laying out policy goals such as cutting Medicare and social security as if they were popular proposals.
For all the deserved flak people give Senator Hawley, he was spot on with his criticism of the parties' lack of policy positioning, stating in an interview some days after the 2022 election night, "It's pretty hard to convince folks, particularly independent-minded ones who don't tend to trust the process much, to vote for you if you don't have something affirmative to say and offer."
This lack of serious governance on the part of the GOP is not an issue brought about by Trump or his ilk but can be credited to the GOP's libertarian anti-government leanings, which largely prevent many members from wanting to do anything. This orthodoxy is currently being challenged by members like Senator Hawley, who want to change the Republican Party from being the stooges of the chamber of commerce to something different.
Currently, the GOP is undergoing a transformation in which they are reconsidering their relationship with their previous political positions and conservative orthodoxy. Where this metamorphosis will lead them is anyone's guess, but right now the best pick is that the party will eventually pivot to a more diverse working-class base if Senator Hawley, Senator Rubio, and Senator Cotton get their way.
How this working-class pivot will reconcile itself with the GOP's current principles of limited government, low taxes, free trade, and an aversion to most forms of market intervention is beyond me, but until the GOP can come up with a coherent policy agenda that’s not the same old song since the 1980s, running on pure dislike of the Democrats won’t cut it.
Abandonment of local politics
If there is one thing that this election cycle should demonstrate to anyone who is willing to see it, it is that Tip O'Neill's adage "All politics is local politics" has never been wrong; we are all just too dumb to believe it at times.
From Governor Brian Kemp to House Representative-elect Marie Pérez to Senator-elect John Fetterman, understanding the electorate you're asking to vote for you will always be key to winning elections.
While the rest of the country experienced a blue haze, California, New York, Georgia, and Florida all experienced the red wave in what might have been the biggest shocker of the night. Democrats outperformed expectations in nearly every race, but in New York and California, they underperformed so badly that control of the House of Representatives was determined by election results in districts that could have been democratic holds or gains based solely on district makeup. Many in these two states would point the finger to explain why their performance was so bad, but all of their complaints, in my opinion, were just deflections from the real problem they faced, which was that many of them, especially those at the top of the ticket, ignored or outright rejected local issues, with the biggest nail being the reporting of high crime.
The fumbling of the state parties in New York and California should be viewed as a cautionary tale to be reflected on and not forgotten. For all the fuss by Democratic operatives all year that the local crime issue being raised by some in the media was "a right-wing talking point," meant to discredit progressives and hurt Democrats, we have countless examples of this just not being the case.
In California, one of the most politically progressive cities in the country, San Francisco, voted to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin by 55% for his light approach to the city’s rise in violent crime. Some would blame the media for fomenting voter fears, outright rejecting that crime was a serious issue, to begin with, while others acknowledged the rise in crime but shifted blame away from the DA and onto other factors. This willful ignorance of your own backyard by California party members would be compounded when Governor Gaven Newsom thought it appropriate to begin attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as if he was his opponent, even going so far as to challenge him to a debate, largely ignoring his own state. While Newsom turned a blind eye to his backyard to gain national attention, DeSantis and Kemp shored up support to deliver them and their party sweeping victories in their respective states.
In the case of New York, where New York City Mayor Eric Adams was lambasted by fellow Democrats for pushing "Republican talking points," because he dared to discuss the issue of crime any time someone put a mic in his face during the height of the campaign season, yet how quickly people forget that he won the 2020 Democratic primary and mayoral election by campaigning explicitly on tackling crime. Governor Kathy Hochul struggled against Lee Zeldin not because the NY GOP is so organized or because Zeldin was particularly a gifted politician in and of himself, but because Zeldin explicitly blamed Democrats for the state’s crime problem. Was it possibly true? Maybe not, but did it work? Well, Republicans have gained control of the House of Representatives, and a large part of that is thanks to Zeldin and the NY GOP running on an inherently local issue that Democrats and progressives especially have largely abandoned.
Localism is good, and localist candidates win elections. Representative-elect Marie Pérez didn’t win Washington’s 3rd congressional district, a deep-red district at that, by ignoring the local issues, and Governor Brian Kemp did not win reelection by leaning into the national conversation surrounding Trump. What many of the winners in key states had in common was not their embracement of national narratives but their rejection of them in favor of local ones. Both parties would do well to internalize that going forward.
Conclusion: Lessons not learned
One of my biggest issues with the current political landscape is the way in which traditional media has utterly failed to relay any relevant information concerning the strange nature of our politics, and that seeps heavily into their efforts to decipher voter trends, which resemble more wish-casting than actual analysis. While the media regularly fails at decoding voters, many mainstream political operatives, from both parties, take the cake for their utter inability to understand the voters they are supposed to be targeting.
Many mainstream GOP operatives take the loss of Trumpy candidates in 2022 as a sign that voters want the chamber of commerce libertarian wing of the party back in the driver's seat, while more fringe GOP operatives think they were not fiery enough and need to harden their resolve. Both of these assumptions are ludicrously wrong.
The Republican Party has many issues they need to deal with, but the most pressing at this moment is the issue of their conflicting images: what they think they are, what they are, and what they want to be.
Traditional Reagan Republicans or movement conservatives are, in my opinion, dead and have been since the 2008 financial collapse; they just are in denial. Mainstream Republicans are currently in vogue because the alternatives presented by the fringes of the party are more personality than substance and being batshit crazy doesn't help either.
Many mainstream Democrats on the other hand view this midterm as a tacit rejection of Trumpism, whatever that means, and an embrace of Democratic governance, which is in some respects almost more delusional than mainstream Republicans.
According to the latest polls, President Biden’s approval ratings are still in the toilet. A vast majority of people still think the country is going in the wrong direction, and Democrats are still unsure if they want to be pro-worker or pro-corporation, turning them more into a man possessed with two minds.
Having acceptable stances on social issues will continue to be a net benefit to Democrats until the duality of their hypocrisy further erodes any goodwill they may have left with the communities they champion. They cannot call for an increase in sick days for rail workers while also forcing those same workers to accept an agreement they already rejected.
Both parties have some serious reflecting to do but the question isn’t who will begin reflecting first but if either of them will admit to having a problem, to begin with. If the GOP has any hopes of once again becoming a functioning party it must learn how to strike the balance between the mainstream and the fringe to create a workable identity the party can take in the future. While Democrats are a party in large parts still panicking about the bleeding of support from their traditional voter base, yet they are quick to throw many of them under the bus if it enables them to further ignore the problem they have. Democrats need to take a hard look in the mirror and figure out who they are before they become the thing they used to say they were against.
I do not assume that my analysis of the midterms or my reading of either party’s misunderstanding of the results is profoundly insightful; what I do assume is that my analysis is simply not biased. In writing this, my aim was to flush out my own thoughts while giving others something to think about as well. Both parties are currently operating in a space of extreme delusion, and until they rejoin the real world with normal people, they will continue to operate this way, further tuning away millions from them. I suggest they seriously go touch grass, take a stroll to their local dying mall, and strike up a few conversations with store clerks so they can finally learn something useful.