The Democrats' 2022 Playbook Blew Up On Them A Year Early On Tuesday Night

 I remember a time when very few people were plugged into the off-year gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey or seeking any national implications from the outcomes.  Democrat Mark Warner and Jim McGreevey's victories in the 2001 gubernatorial races in VA and NJ, for example, did not send "shock waves" through the Bush White House of impending doom the following November.  Those days are most definitively over though, and for good reason.  Tip O'Neill's old adage of "all politics being local" is no longer true.  All politics is national in 2021, so when a snapshot of even a small slice of the electorate shows profound movement from one party toward another, that snapshot should be seen as a harbinger of what direction the country's about to go.

I predicted that Republican Glenn Youngkin would upset Democrat Terry McAuliffe by 2 points in the main event Virginia race, and that's pretty much exactly what the final margin was.  And while I didn't speculate on this blog about the New Jersey gubernatorial race, I put myself out there elsewhere predicting a very narrow re-election victory for Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy, who most believed would cruise to re-election.  The final vote to be counted since Tuesday night has leaned heavily to Murphy and it looks like he'll win by about 3 points, but if you'd told most election analysts that Republican challenger Jack Ciaterrelli would get within single digits of Murphy a month ago, few would have believed it.

But there were local races even more worrisome for Democrats in key electoral areas.  Anyplace where county-level elected officials run with a party label and were up this year, the Republicans cleaned up.  This includes upscale New York suburbs on Long Island, and even more problematically, the suburban doughnut counties surrounding Philadelphia.  As much of the Keystone State has trended Republican, the consolidation of support by Democrats among affluent Philadelphia suburbs has kept the party in the game, but that demographic swung dramatically back to the GOP on Tuesday night in local races.  The Democrats' "coalition of the culturally fashionable" is breaking down, and with it their chances of winning just about everywhere on the map.

Here are some of my key takeaways from Tuesday night.....

Legislative Accomplishments Aren't Very Relevant to Partisan Tides--Before the election on this blog, I shrugged off the oft-cited notion that if Democrats pushed through their agenda in Congress that it would help boost Democratic turnout and save Terry McAuliffe.  I said it before and I'll say it after.  Voters don't go to the polls to say thank you to an ambitious governing party.  If they did, those $1,400 checks everyone got in the mail last winter would have lingered in voters' memories since they were as direct of a benefit as one could ever expect to get from their government.  Nonetheless, that conventional wisdom continues to be hilariously regurgitated by the Beltway media and Democratic politicians alike.  Last night they passed the infrastructure bill and the scuttlebutt on the morning shows is that "it passed a week too late to save Terry McAuliffe".  I can understand why politicians like the idea of believing elections are traditional performance evaluations, but that's not the way it works in American elections. 

Voters have short memories and are often detached from legislative accomplishments and their effects on their lives.  This is why LBJ's party pushed through Great Society in 1965 and was wiped out at the polls in 1966.  This is why Barack Obama's party pushed through ObamaCare in 2009 and were swept out of office in 2010.  It doesn't mean that sweeping legislation to affect change isn't good, for those Presidents then or for Biden now, but voters will almost always interpret it as either an overreach or disappointingly insufficient, shifting the political center in the other direction.  It may not be the life cycle of politics most places in the world, but it is the life cycle in the United States and that shows no sign of changing.  The quickest way to lose your grip on governance is to be given a couple of years to govern.

The Governing Party Very Rarely Has a "Mandate", and Biden Had Even Less Than Most--Last month and before, I discussed how breathtakingly narrow Biden and Congressional Democrats' victories were in 2020.  Out of more than 150 million votes cast, Democrats at all levels ultimately prevailed by margins in the tens of thousands.  As I said last November, the coalition was unwieldy and poised to quickly fall apart because they barely got across the finish line with a combination of voters who wanted a seismic leftward shift in the country's governing direction and voters who simply didn't like Trump and wanted a "return to normalcy".  Right now, Biden and the Democrats are falling short on both measures.   

Even though there's fairly strong popular support for individual measures in the Democrats' Build Back Better agenda, millions of country club Republicans who don't support any of it voted for Biden last year to steer the train back on course.  He couldn't afford to lose their support and still have a workable voting coalition, but it was inevitable that we would because these voters are instinctively still Republicans.  All this group of voters wanted from Biden was to not be Trump, to not embarrass the country on the international stage, and to return the country to post-pandemic, post-Twitter account normalcy.  With COVID still raging a year later and the humiliation of the Afghanistan pullout, coupled with the return of a muscular federal government vowing to spend trillions of dollars, this group of voters was never gonna stay in the Democratic basket.  Meanwhile, a lot of downscale voters who are okay with Biden's spending proposals and whose lives would benefit from them are still voting against Democrats because of cultural issues just as they did in 2020.  

In 1932 and arguably in 1980, newly elected Presidents had a legitimate mandate from voters to press forward with transformative policy changes.  There really haven't been any other Presidential elections in the last century that I would say that about, and I definitely wouldn't say it about Biden's win in 2020.

"Education" Was Really Just a Proxy Fight for General Racialist Exhaustion--Two years ago, I predicted on this blog that cultural fragmentation along racial lines was poised to become the nastiest internal fight in America in the decade to come.  Our racial differences were the centerpiece of essentially every conversation, with the managerial class consensus always pointing to irredeemable structural racism in every facet of life.  That was several months before the George Floyd murder which turned the situation exponentially worse.  For well over a year, the reductionist obsession with race in the media, academia, and the corporate boardroom has been in voters' faces.  Downscale whites were the first to feel they were being unfairly targeted, but it was only a matter of time before upscale whites followed suit, fairly or unfairly associating the Democratic Party as being in alignment with the dark and divisive turn in the conversation that they felt was being unfairly foisted upon them.  I think it's fair to say that even many Black voters feel infantilized by the relentless portrayal of their victimhood, and that the 1967-style black vs. white analysis on race is accelerating a trend I've long speculated would come to pass...of Hispanic voters beginning to realign as "culturally white" with their political preferences poised to transform accordingly.

This simmering culture war finally had its first litigation on Tuesday in Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin cleverly tied the ever-expanding rhetoric of antiracist dogma to education.  His critics disingenuously cried that critical race theory is not taught in Virginia public schools, and while that may be technically correct in that it's not relayed in a formal academic manner, the topic has been the centerpiece of teacher training for years and Virginia parents witnessed it in real-time while their children were taking Zoom classes during the pandemic.  The issue would not have resonated so strongly in the public education debate if parents hadn't been on the receiving end of the same divisive debate in their personal and professional lives in the last couple of years.  Even the possibility that their elementary kids were being discounted for their "white privilege" in math class was gonna be a problem for the party running against Glenn Youngkin's characterization.  If the Democratic Party is unable rein in its culturally left flank that cannot stop reminding the electorate of why our racial differences define the country's past, present, and future, they can expect a lot more election nights like November 2, 2021.

The Progressive Party Loses More Battles Than It Wins--I generally agree with the critique from conservatives that "America is a center-right country" but it understates a more universal understanding of the human condition that is transferable to nations outside of the U.S.  Put simply, most people are instinctively conservative on cultural issues, which is why the progressive party tends to lose more elections than it wins, at home and abroad, despite voters being more likely to agree with the liberals on meat-and-potatoes issues.  Meanwhile, the culture war keeps reinventing itself and forcing people to take sides. Critical race theory and vaccination mandates weren't on anybody's radar four years ago, yet in 2021 people are in busting onto the public square in a purple-faced fury debating both matters.  The  majority of the population is gonna find themselves behind the curve of fast cultural change, and that will make them perennially vulnerable to the messaging of the conservative party, in America and elsewhere.  Bottom line:  It's debatable whether Trump himself was a political winner for the GOP, but its hard to dispute that Trumpism itself, and the cultural backlash it represents, is not only a big political winner, but it's a winner that presents a custom-made model transferable to nearly every election cycle moving forward.

High Voter Engagement is the New Normal--One of the most astonishing factoids about Tuesday's results is that, even in defeat, Terry McAuliffe still got more votes than Democrat Ralph Northam got in the Virginia gubernatorial election four years ago which Northam won by 9 points.  Likewise, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy got more votes in 2021 when he won by 3 points than in 2017 when he won by 14 points.  This is part of a trend that has defined the Trump era.  Voters are showing up to vote on both sides.  While you could argue that this is a good result for democracy, it's nonetheless shattered the long-held article of faith by Democrats that boosting turnout means more lopsided victories for their party.  In 2018, the Democrats had something resembling a wave election, but particularly in the Senate their gains were limited because their own record level of midterm turnout was matched by a record midterm turnout by Republicans.  Donald Trump, even in defeat, got 5 million more votes than Barack Obama did in 2008 when he beat McCain by 7 percentage points.  Last Tuesday night's results were a continuation of that trend.  I think it can be explained by two corresponding trends.  A lot of moderate rural voters who used to be reliable Democrats were realigned into Trump Republicans, and are now just as reliable turning out for the other side.  And a lot of instinctively conservative white voters who were almost entirely disengaged in politics and rarely if ever voted before Trump, took to Trump's populism and have since become reliable voters.  Whatever the case, the myth of the "white Trump voter receding from the national stage and aging out of existence" is not backed up in the slightest by GOP turnout numbers in good Republican years and bad.

The Days of Ticket Splitting are Over--As I said above, all politics is national in modern-day America.  If you're voting Democrat at the top of the ticket, you're almost certainly voting Democrat downballot....and vice versa.  This has not been the case through most of my lifetime, or the lifetime of just about anybody alive, to the degree that it is today.  Last year, there were only 42 counties out of more than 2,000 counties in the nation that had Senate races in 2020 where the winner of the Senate race was from a different party than the Presidential winner.  The maps were basically identical between the Presidential county map and the Senate county map in state after state.  Fast forward to Virginia on Tuesday night.  While the gubernatorial race at the top of the ticket was expected to be competitive in the campaign's final weeks, just about everybody believed Democrats would comfortably win Virginia's Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General races.  Wrong.  The Republicans narrowly won both races,, with margins all within a half percentage point of the Governor's race margin.  This intense degree of partisanship will make it extremely challenging for either party to groom good candidates in states where they're at a partisan disadvantage.  As a consequence, democracy will suffer for this degree of tribalism.  

Democrats' Collapse in Rural Areas is the Biggest Political Story of Our Time--For the last two cycles, the consensus among the media and political analysts has been that the shift of the suburbs toward Democrats was poised to be the most enduring political story of our generation.  Particularly after Biden eked out a victory last year, this narrative has gained currency, but I never bought it as holding up long-term.  And if Tuesday's numbers are any indication of what's to come, the Democrats' aforementioned "coalition of the culturally fashionable" is unraveling to a ruinous degree.   On the other hand, both Glenn Youngkin and New Jersey Republican Jack Ciatterelli ran up the score in rural counties to numbers even higher than what Donald Trump did last year.  And Trump himself ran 10-15 points higher in most rural counties than did most Republicans who preceded him.  These gigantic margins out of rural counties--places that 10 years ago may have gone 65-35 Republican but now go 85-15 Republican--keep raising the GOP sea wall that Democrats have to crest in order to win, meaning that if the cities or suburbs underperform expectations, as both did last week, Democrats can't and won't win the vast majority of statewide races.

Immigration Continues to be Democrats' Silent Killer--We didn't hear much about the disastrous situation on the Mexican border impacting election results, but I'd be willing to bet a paycheck it was a key motivating factor for many of those rural voters whose ascent to kingmaker status has largely evaded notice by the same media incurious about why they've consolidated to the GOP so lopsidedly.  I won't get into the psychology of why illegal immigration burns so hot in the hearts of rural voters, but as a product of rural America myself, I can safely predict that any political environment where 2 million new border crossings this calendar year were made possible by a loophole in the asylum process that the majority party refuses to acknowledge is a problem and all but guarantees another 2 million will come next year, those aforementioned 85-15 Republican margins in rural counties will only get more lopsided.

Democrats Aren't Likely to Succeed Running on the Midterm Message They Had Planned For--Finally getting to the main point I raised in the title, the results of November 2021 portend serious peril for the effectiveness of what Democrats wanted to run on in November 2022.  Aside from their Beltway naivete about voters responding favorably to their passage of legislation, Democrats are not fools.  They know they're swimming against a partisan tide next year.  If American election history is any indication, and it usually is, they will lose both the House and Senate next year, along with a number of swing-state Governors and potentially hundreds of state legislative seats.  They're under no illusion they were gonna reverse those anemic rural voter margins and they probably knew even before Tuesday that they weren't gonna match Biden's numbers with upscale suburbanites.  But they were hoping to alleviate losses by playing the two electoral cards that they probably felt were their strongest, and which I would have agreed packed the most punch given the conditions.  And those cards were abortion and Donald Trump.

As a general rule, running against the most recent losing Presidential nominee or running in defense of America's most lingering culture war touchstone would be a bad idea.  But Donald Trump, for good reason, aroused an unusual degree of disgust among a faction of voters who didn't neatly fit into ideological or partisan lines.  If the Democrats could convince the millions of voters who felt this way to stand by them in 2022 out of fear that Trump had irredeemably infected the opposition party and that he was poised for an inevitable electoral comeback in 2024, perhaps the Democrats could hang on to some seats they might have otherwise lost.

Likewise, the Texas abortion law that the Supreme Court refused to hear earlier this fall seemed like it could have serious electoral legs.  By a decisive and perhaps overwhelming margin if you can believe any polls anymore, voters don't want to see Roe vs. Wade overruled, but Republican politicians almost unanimously do want to see it overruled.  This is a disconnect that had the potential to keep upscale center-right moderates onboard the Democratic train just like the continued presence of Donald Trump on the political scene.

And Terry McAuliffe harped on both issues, warning Virginia voters that women's reproductive rights could be at imminent risk while busting Youngkin's chops about his ties to Trump to an almost cartoonish degree.  But there's no indication that either worked, despite Virginia being the kind of place where both issues would be likely to resonate more than the majority of the country.  The target demographic for McAuliffe's message appeared to yawn at the prospect of criminalized abortion, even though pending Supreme Court rulings could very easily produce a situation where Virginia state government, whose effective control was flipped to the GOP on Tuesday, will outlaw abortion in the state in the next two years.  Similarly, the target demographic was also unmoved by Youngkin being one and the same as Trump.  

Virginia is part of the Beltway, and even there voters seem to have shrugged off the Trump-era GOP's role in the insurrection just 10 months ago that the media and Beltway insiders assured us would poison the electoral well for Republicans for the foreseeable future.  They were willing to forgive and forget Republicans for that just as quickly as they forgot about the $1,400 checks they got from Biden and the Democrats a couple of months later.  A new wave of issues has arisen since then that voters have prioritized.  And if voters aren't prioritizing the issues that Democrats want them to on friendly turf on behalf of Terry McAuliffe and Phil Murphy, then that's a pretty good tea leaf of how screwed Democrats like Tony Evers, Stacey Abrams, Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Rafael Warnock, and Catherine Cortez Masto are gonna be in 12 months.