It's the geography, stupid. Are Democrats doomed to lose the House in 2022?

[stevenkesslar]

2020 Democrats fared poorly down ballot, but we're winning the fight for fair election maps

Democrats will have much greater influence over redistricting in the coming decade than in the last one, despite state legislative losses this month.

 

As a Democrat, I found that article encouraging.  It's of course supposed to be encouraging, because it's in part propaganda written by someone with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.  But the arguments make sense, and reinforced these things I've been thinking all week.

It is interesting that after spending much of 2020 freaking out that it would be another 2016 and Trump would win, Democrats have done a reversal.  At some point, thanks to polls, we decided we were going to win in a landslide.  So something a lot like 2016 happened, and now we are surprised.  Which we shouldn't be.  And because we didn't win in a landslide, we're taking what happened as a loss.

Winning the Presidency obviously isn't a loss.  Nor is gaining one Senate seat, if that's all we do.  The obvious bad news is the House.  Maybe I'm in denial, but I don't see it as particularly bad news.  We won 41 House seats in 2018, including some that had consistently elected Republicans for decades.  We did it with what I've argued was an unsustainable turnout advantage of 10 million more House votes, nationally, than the Republicans got in 2018.   So in 2020 when Republicans turned out in droves we couldn't hold some of those seats.  None of this is a shocker.  And I still look at it as a glass two thirds full.  If we lose all the seats that are still razor thin and undeclared, we kept 2/3rd of the gains from 2018.  And, most important, we kept a House majority.

I've been reading one after another depressing article about how 2020 was a disaster for Democrats.  Again, maybe I'm in denial.  But I had this nagging feeling as I read them that this just doesn't sound right.  So when I read the arguments in the article above it confirmed my gut feeling.  Not winning, or not making progress, is simply not the same as losing.  I think it is very rational to say we are in a much better position than when the 2010 redistricting occurred.  In states like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin we now have Governors that can check the worst maps Republican legislatures try to draw. And since they already gerrymandered everything they could in 2010, it just seems like it limits their ability to do as much damage to Democrats in 2020.

Texas will be a disaster.  But even there, if I got the numbers right, the 100 to 50 or so advantage Republicans had in the Texas House has been gradually clawed down to a 83 to 67 Republican advantage.  So you can say it was a disaster because Democrats hoped to win back a majority.  Or you can say it wasn't a disaster because Democrats held the net gain of 12 seats in the Texas House from 2018.  The long term trends that delivered Arizona and Georgia to Biden are also at work in Texas.  So Republicans will have another shot at making it harder for Democrats.  But they can't stop demography.  

Sean Trende has written this two part series guessing how redistricting and gerrymandering could change the House map.  He's saying a good placeholder is about 10 seats will shift to Republicans, in part because Democrats will lose some seats in blue states that have shrunk and red states will get more seats due to the census that Republicans can draw red.  My takeaway is that every Democrat should plan on the fact that we will lose the House in 2022 - unless we figure out a very good plan for defense.  We should have done that after 2018, and instead we let ourselves get giddy about offense.  Let's not make the same mistake twice.

Here's a conclusion the article above reached that I rabidly agree with:

Quote

If the 2020 election was proof of anything, it’s that a blank check for final-month television ads is not enough for Democrats to win close elections. Last-minute pledges from shiny super PACs are certainly not how we’ll flip our next Republican-controlled state legislatures. It takes years of decidedly unglamorous, grinding work building state and local party organizations, and the cultivation and training of inspiring local candidates.

In other words, it's a long slog.  No surprise there. 

At some point I hope somebody writes a book about what the Trump 2020 ground game actually did.  I've been reading bits and pieces of it for years.  Having 1 million volunteers knock on doors every week.  Registering tens of thousands of new voters.  I worried that Team Trump was building an army that would overwhelm Democrats on Election Day.  Based on their surprising turnout and Democratic underperformance in purple and red parts of just about any swing state, I think we can conclude that we underestimated the importance of all that organizing work Team Trump did. 

We also overestimated our ability to buy our way into winning elections in places like South Carolina, or even North Carolina.  It looks like base turnout in cities like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia was mediocre.  So we got lucky because lots of Whites in the suburbs had simply had enough of Trump.  2020 was a unique year, and I'm not critical of Democrats not pushing door knocking in a pandemic.  But I don't think it's at all surprising that the outcome was what it was.  We underestimated the passion of the Trump Party base to hold on to power and thwart Democrats.  On ground game, they appear to have done a good job.  They basically will admit they did what Team Obama did in 2008 and 2012.

There's a lot of dust left to settle.  But if we internalize and correct what went wrong, I think we can hold the House in 2022.  Trende is right that Democrats are bound to lose some seats through redistricting.  The silver lining in the cloud of our 2018 losses is it gives us some seats that are prime targets to win back in two years.  There are a few that are in what is now solid Trump country, like the rural Minnesota seat Colin Peterson lost.  After 2016, he was living on borrowed time.  I don't think we should waste time fighting the trend on them.  But Biden won the 2 to 4 Southern California House seats Democrats look to lose.  These are areas where the trend is working for the Democrats.  We should be able to win them back.

The other depressing thing I keep reading is that Democrats are doomed to lose the House, anyway, because the incumbent party always does badly in midterms.  If I look at it as a Democrat, that sure sounds true.  My two experiences in my adult lifetime are 1992 and 2010.  Both times Democrats had won a trifecta, did liberal things like Obamacare, and then got blown away by the reaction against liberalism.  Especially in the House.    I sort of factored that in.  In my wildest dreams, we'd win a handful of House seats, maybe have 53 to 55 Senate seats, and two years to get whatever laws we could passed - like some version of a Green New Deal - before we had hell to pay in 2022.

If there is a silver lining in the clouds of 2020 for democrats, it's that we didn't set ourselves up for that in 2022.  The best hope for Democrats, I think, is what happened in W.'s first term.  It's similar enough to what Biden will face.  There was a 50/50 split in the Senate, but when Jeffords switched parties in June 2001 Democrats took control.  Republicans picked up a handful of House and Senate seats in both 2002 and 2004.  There was no midterm curse.  Some might argue that was a one off because of W.'s popularity after 9/11.  I don't see it that way.  The key question is whether Biden governs well.  If Americans believe he got us through the pandemic and got the economy going again, and also was trying to bring the country together in a difficult situation, I don't dismiss that Democrats could thwart any midterm curse.  

Edited November 18, 2020 by stevenkesslar

[stevenkesslar]

I’m not a f---ing socialist’: Florida Democrats are having a postelection meltdown

Trump Didn’t Win the Latino Vote in Texas. He Won the Tejano Vote.

Understanding the difference will be key to Democrats moving past their faltering, one-size-fits-all approach to Hispanics.

Both of those are revealing looks under the hood in Florida and Texas.  I think they make a bunch of general points about what Democrats got right, what they screwed up, and what those of us who are Democrats should be relentless about if we want to keep the House in 2020 - despite the unavoidable setbacks redistricting and gerrymandering will bring.

They also make a bunch of specific points about Latinos.  The second article is right that Latinos helped Biden nationally, relative to Clinton 2016.  The most important and obvious way they did that was by delivering Arizona and Georgia to Biden.

I'll probably say this a dozen times over the next months because it annoys me and seems ungrateful that White liberal journalists are moaning about how Trump did better with Latinos than in 2016.  In both elections, Latinos voted about 2 to 1 against Trump.  In both elections, a solid majority of Whites voted for Trump.  White liberals like me should be saying Gracias! a lot.

The argument goes like this.  Clinton's winning 38 % margin with Latinos (66/28) was cut to a 33 % margin with Biden  (65/32).  Que lastima!  It's true, and we know for a fact that it hurt Democrats in Florida and Texas, which is why those stories above are worth reading.  That said, here's what it leaves out.  Over 11 Presidential elections from Reagan on, the average margin Democrats won the Latino vote by is + 33.  Biden was right at the average.  In addition, with four of the five incumbents who ran for re-election before Trump, Latino support for the incumbent increased.  So as that Pew report shows, Reagan's margin went up + 2, Obama went up + 8, W. + 9, and Clinton  + 15.  The only incumbent who did slightly worse with Latinos was George H.W. Bush. So Trump going up + 5 fits right into the long-term trend.

Those two articles reinforce my strong hunch that the main reason Trump did marginally better with some Latinos is that they felt Trump was good for the economy.  That Texas article screams it.  Every story I've read about what drove Latinos in places like Arizona to vote for Biden is they way Trump was going after Latino immigrants.  If you read the Texas story, Tejanos don't feel that way.  They're not immigrants.  They're Americans.

It follows that if you just assume the trends since 1980 continue, Biden has an 80 % chance of doing better with Latinos in 2024 than he did in 2020, if he runs again.  The likely reason they turned against George H.W. Bush was the 1992 recession.  So if Latinos feel Biden did a good job on the economy, past trends suggest he has a nearly 100 % chance of increasing his vote share with Latinos.

How Biden handles the economy and COVID will obviously be the two big factors in whether Democrats lose the House in a midterm re-election when redistricting tips the odds against us.  The feeling that is growing inside me is that have dividing government - even if Democrats win both Georgia seat - is obviously bad news when it comes to legislating, but could be good news when it comes to 2022. 

If you start with Clinton, three of the last four Presidents got wiped out in their first mid-term.  But the same three cam into power with Congressional trifectas, and were perceived as going too far in their first two years.  Hence, the reactions in 1994, 2010, and 2018 were powerful reactions. 

The exception of the last four Presidents is 2002.  W. had a similar situation as Biden.  He'd won a much closer election, and had a 50/50 Senate split.  In both 2002 and 2004 his party won both House and Senate seats.  And he won re-election.  Of course 9/11 and for a while Iraq were massive winds at his back pushing him along with strong majority support.  It may be a historical one off.  But the general principle is that the economy got better, he was seen as trying to unify the country, and people felt he'd done a good (2002) or at least good enough (2004) job as President.  If Biden does that, I don't think a similar outcome in 2022 and 2024 is out of reach.

There's some things that really stood out to me in those two articles above that I really want to elevate.

First, it is the economy, stupid.  In both cases those stories are examples of culturally conservative Latinos where talking about cultural or social hot buttons just helps Republicans.  The thing that sounds like utter political malpractice to me is that progressive Democrats ran a minimum wage initiative in Florida in 2020 that won by 61 %, but meanwhile Democrats got destroyed for being socialists.  They had at least one simple and popular message right in front of their noses.  "We're not for socialism.  We're fighting for a fair minimum wage."  It's probably unfair, but it sounds like the state's most prominent Democrat, a White woman, was more interested in polling what "Latinx" voters think (hint: they don't call themselves Latinx) than in leading an aggressive offense about how Floridians deserved better wages.

Second, there really does have to be more emphasis on math.  From the losing Democratic House districts I looked at, Max Rose in NY is one book end and Donna Shalala in Florida is another.  Max Rose is a courageous fighter, and he probably did everything right.  But he was in a district that voted for Trump by 10 points in  2016.  And it was a district where no Democrat has ever gotten much more than 100,000 votes (Rose got 99,224 votes in 2020, which was more than he got in 2018), whereas a Republican getting 140,000 votes was not a heavy lift (Rose's Republican opponent got 136,382 in 2020, which was actually less than the Republican incumbent did in 2016).  Shalala is the exact opposite.  Clinton won that district by 20 points in 2016.  How could you possibly fuck things up that badly?  Lots of Democrats in lots of districts that voted for Trump in 2016 survived. 

There should be a bloodbath in Florida after this outcome.  Because somebody missed something obvious.  We know that, because we read there was a big problem in Miami Dade in news stories all Fall.

Third, the worst should be over.  Here's a list of House incumbents in districts Trump won in 2016.  I did not bother to look at which ones Trump won again in 2020.  But just scan it and it explains who lost and why.  Here's Democratic losers and the percentage Trump won their districts by in 2016:  MN-7 Peterson (Trump +30.9), OK-5 Horn (Trump + 13.2), SC-1 Cunnigham (Trump + 13.1), NM-2 Small (Trump + 10.2), NY-11 Rose (Trump + 9.8).  The good news to me is that most of these Democrats held on in districts that are kind of Trumpy.  If Biden is wildly unpopular in 2022, it will be another Democratic bloodbath.  But if he is popular, like W. was in 2002, the Democrats in mildly Trumpy districts who held on in 2020 should be okay. 

In Southern California, the problem was the opposite.  The 2 to 4 seats we look to lose there were all areas both Clinton and Biden won.  But they were held by Republicans for a long time.  Close Democratic wins in a whole bunch of districts in 2018 were reversed by close Republican wins in a few of them in 2020.  That should be reversible in 2022.  My greatest hope is that Democrats in 2022 are focused on defense.  I hope whoever Pelosi puts in charge targets a smaller number of districts where we either barely won and need to hold on, or barely lost and can either win them back or finally push them from red to blue.  Some of these districts we did not win in Texas in 2020 might be winnable in 2022 when the turnout dynamics change.

Fourth, I think Republicans just kicked the shit out of Democrats on direct voter outreach in 2020.  I keep going back to their claim that they were knocking on 1 million doors a week and registering voters like crazy.  Florida was at the top of their list.  It is reasonable to think they spoke to millions of voters there, often face to face.  They clearly won the messaging war in Miami Dade.  Where Democrats did something like that, like in Georgia, it appears to have paid off.  So once the pandemics is over, Democrats need to decide which states and House districts we really think we can win in 2022.  And we need to do what the Republicans did, which is in their own words is what Obama did in 2008 and 2012.  (In 2012, Democrats won Senate seats in  Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, and West Virginia.  Go figure.)

My simple math goes like this.  80 to 90 % of "the message" voters get comes from TV - from CNN to ABC to Fox - and then you add some talk radio on the right and podcasts on the left.  That's why Trump as incumbent, and as carnival barker, had such a huge advantage.  My initial theory about why Trump did better than expected in 2020 is that a lot of people bought his relentless daily message that is was the best economy ever.  Just like 70 % of Republicans are now buying his message that this election was somehow unfair.  Havin that bullhorn every day makes a huge difference.  So Joe Biden having the bullhorn will help Democrats a lot, I think.  If he fucks it up, plan on a 2022 bloodbath.  But there's every reason to hope it could be like W. in 2002. 

The other 10 to 20 % is ads and turnout.  And Democrats mostly underperformed Republicans in 2020, I think.  Especially on turnout, which is understandable since they were okay with door knocking and we followed pandemic protocol.  That actually means they had an advantage that they won't have in 2022.  If we pick areas like these districts in Southern California and Southern Texas and Miami Dade, and the ones that have been close calls like Arizona 6 which we have narrowly three times in a row, we ought to be able to win back some of these seats and maybe gain a few.  But it is going to have to be based on a lot of face to face volunteer and paid contact in those districts Politico describes above.  

The biggest fear of all in both South Florida and South Texas was that Biden would bring in socialism, or at least a weaker economy.  So if the economy turns out to be better in 2022 and COVID is mostly a bad memory that right there is a huge plus. 

There's an anecdote in that Texas story about how one of the Democratic Tejanos was begging with the state Democratic Party to send her stuff that would help specifically based on the interests of that one border district.  They sent her signs that said, "Todos con Biden."  If that's an accurate symbol of Democratic messaging, we only have ourselves to blame.

Edited November 19, 2020 by stevenkesslar