Yeah, wake me when that happens.
Out of all the bad things 2020 has brought us, the return of Downfall memes is surely the worst.
That’s the best one though.
So many premature downfall memes in 2016, I feel like I jinxed myself by watching this new one. But it is really well written. I am hoping I can enjoy it more fully later on today…
Congressional Republicans escape from the Trump years with a tax cut, a stocked federal judiciary, an absolute stranglehold on the Supreme Court, and almost certainly a majority in the US Senate. They did lose the House in 2018 and didn’t win it back in 2020, but Democrats’ majority is now slim. And Republicans will dominate the redistricting process next year, setting themselves up nicely to make a big run at the majority in 2022.
For years, Democrats dreamed of turning Texas blue by mobilizing the notoriously low turnout population of the heavily Latino counties of the Rio Grande Valley. In recent years, the dream switched to one powered by growing Democratic clout in the booming suburbs of Dallas and Houston.
The goal wasn’t even necessarily for Biden to win the state (though they did want to win it) but to at least compete robustly enough to flip one or two or three House seats, and maybe take control of the state House of delegates and thus get a seat at the table in redistricting. None of it worked.
Trump’s 6-point win in Texas was the smallest of any Republican in years, and as urban Texas keeps growing, Democrats will keep competing. But Democrats missed all their targets, which means Republicans will get to redraw the maps next year and make it even harder for Democrats to win. Perhaps most embarrassingly, Trump actually flipped a bunch of those heavily Hispanic counties while making what appeared to be significant inroads with Texas Latinos.
National polling averages showed Biden up by 8 or more points. Ultimately, it looks like Biden will win nationally by about 4 or 5 points, but possibly as much as 6. This means those final national polls were off by a bit, which happens.
But the state polling in many critical races appears just really, really bad. In the FiveThirtyEight polling average:
- Biden was up by 8 in Wisconsin, where he in fact won in a squeaker.
- He led by 2.5 points in Florida, which he ended up losing by roughly as large a margin.
- Trump led in Iowa by just 1 point, but ended up winning by about 7 or 8 points.
- Ohio was considered a dead heat, but Trump ended up winning by 7 or 8 points there, too.
I mean, again, i hate to say it, but i’m not 100% sure anymore with electronic voting, how suddenly Republican run states get massive swings toward Republicans. Maybe 95% sure i guess? I’d really like to see some quants break this stuff down on a precinct level. I wish we also had samples of post-voting voters to check if there were any irregularities.
Basically the other answer is that Trump drove out Republican voters even more than before, and/or converted all the independent/3rd party voters to the GOP, and/or got some Dem voters to switch? It’s just strange.
I woke up this morning thinking of a scene from Blazing Saddles. The camera has zoomed out to reveal that they are on a film studio lot and a small transition scene shows costumed actors from various movies taking a break in a cafeteria. In the foreground we see an actor dressed as Adolf Hitler chatting to an actor dressed in a boxer’s robe and we hear him say “They lose me right after the bunker scene”. I love that scene.
I think Yglesias’s note about ActBlue is something to ponder:
The waste of money is a shame on its own terms. But the interplay between viral internet fundraising and losing Senate campaigns also raises a broader question. Democrats’ big problem in the upper house of Congress is that the map is tilted severely against residents of big diverse metro areas. To win a majority, Democrats need candidates who can find ways to run and win in states that are much more conservative than the national median. But can candidates like that compete in the fundraising race with less promising candidates who adopt a more donor-friendly posture?
My initial thought was “We were flush. Was there a better way to allocate that money?” I’m not sure there’s a good answer to that. BUT, I think it probably is worth considering that we might have to try to rebuild something like the Blue Dogs in order to try to retake the Senate. It’s not a fundraising failure, per se: more a recruiting failure. We need candidates who can run successfully in rural, conservative states.
Isn’t Bullock a blue dog, more or less? I don’t think he was short of donor money.
I mean yeah. And candidates like Bullock and Gross spent a bunch of campaign effort distancing themselves from the national party. I wonder if there’s a better way to create space for candidates like that. Shift messaging for Democrats. Dem messaging is dominated by liberals (because liberals are a plurality of Democrats), which makes people like me happy, but maybe we should more emphasize the big tent nature of the Dem electorate.
My hot take is that centrist Democrats have a much harder time in these states than further-left candidates would.
What good are they, though? I don’t really care if a D is next to your name if you just vote more or less like a R would. Big thanks to Blue Dogs for helping to get the public option killed. People keep floating the idea that right-leaning Democrats would be able to take red states, but this never seems to work out in reality. Why vote for the off-brand when you can get name brand? People just vote Republican instead.
You have to give people a real alternative on issues they care about, not just be a watered down version of someone else.
I agree here, to a point. You have to be left but not be able to get branded as a socialist. You need more Roy Coopers.
I’m sympathetic to that sentiment. For reals. But the Senate is always going to be just out of reach. And our slipping share of Latinos should be sounding alarm bells. We’ve been crowing about demographic majority for two decades. Without that, we might actually just be fucked. Democrats are already a big tent party. Liberals aren’t a majority; just a plurality. Would it really be terrible if we added a couple of Jon Testers to the Senate, particularly if it means we get a Democratic majority leader?
I mean that’s going to be the Great Debate among progressives and liberals for the next year. And to be honest i think that both sides have merit. There’s nothing that any Democratic candidate can do, so it goes, to win Republican voters at this point. OTOH, there’s evidence that Fox has polluted and tarred every Democrat with the “socialist” label, which for better or worse is apparently an effective slur - not because it’s accurate, but effective because it drives voters against them.
That’s what i’ve been saying about immigration and the Hispanic vote for a while - it all looks pretty scary if 50%+ of Hispanics vote GOP. The question liberal Democrats have to answer is what exactly does the party policies look like to make that big tent.
To be honest at this point, because the GOP represents the absence of governance and a rejection of policy, you might say that any policy that puts competent governance back into power is the right policy, whatever the losses to liberalism are.
Republicans are crazy. Moderate Democrats aren’t watered down versions of that. That’s the contrast you have to draw. And it can only be done with retail politics, so you need candidates skilled in that and well-grounded in their localities.
This is true, and it’s going to be a sticky issue for the left over the next little while. But there’s got to be a way to overcome that. McConnell’s sole argument for reelection was basically “If you don’t vote for me, the scary Democrats will get control of the Senate!” There must be a way to get around that paper-thin argument, especially when you’re pushing Medicare for All and other initiatives that are going to improve people’s material conditions.
This strategy is not working.
What is the evidence for this?