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midterm elections
What Democrats Can Learn From the 2022 Midterms to Beat the GOP in 2024
An honest self-appraisal from 2022 and the ethic that offense-beats-defense can improve the odds for Democrats in 2024, if not crush Trump's party.
Dec 24, 2022
"Of all the talents bestowed upon me, none is so precious as the gift of oratory…a power more durable than a great King." —Winston Churchill
The post-mortems have been nearly unanimous: Republicans "underperformed" in the midterms due to the taint of Trump, dismay over January 6th, backlash to the Dobbs decision, and realization that President Joe Biden, as was said of Wagner's music, "is better than it sounds."
Democrats cannot depend on this White House—helmed by two likable, lower-voltage moderates—to prosecute the negative case against a GOP playbook drafted over decades by such gunslingers as McCarthy, Nixon, Gingrich, and Trump.
Ok…Democrats beat expectations. But where's any after-report explaining how Democrats also allowed the most lawless, lying, reactionary party in American history to narrowly control one Chamber of Congress? Campaigns, however, aren't horseshoes. According to the zero-sum math that matters—the GOP won the House by a margin of three percentage points and Jim Jordan will chair the Judiciary Committee hearings starting in January.
Good enough wasn't quite good enough.
The 2022 midterms can't predict the next presidential election (anymore than the 1982, 1994 or 2010 ones did). Still, what lessons might the Democratic party have learned to prevail in two years? To wit:
–how could they have failed for nearly all of two years to craft memorable messages and slogans to galvanize swing voters ("Build Back Better" not being it)?
–why didn't they make Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert the angry face of the GOP as they shouted at Biden during his State of the Union?
–why haven't they aggressively exploited their vanishing majority in these post-election two months to conduct hearings that set the table for the 118th Congress, say on student debt and a Censure Resolution against Greene for remarks endorsing political violence? (One exception—a House Judiciary hearing into possible misconduct at SCOTUS.)
–and why did prominent Democrats flinch at relentlessly portraying Trump's party as untruthful, unlawful, violent, even fascist?
If a review of Democratic performance last November merely concludes with a big "whew!," they'll more likely lose the next one as well. For they will soon face the amplification of both a vengeful House leadership and weaponized Twitter.
While it's obviously hard to predict what issues will dominate the next cycle, lessons from the midterms should inspire Democrats to start playing offense as soon as early 2023. Fall, 2024 is too late.
Step one means tattooing a very unpopular Trump on nearly all Republicans. Whether he runs seriously or not for reelection (since being a criminal defendant in several courtrooms during a campaign is not a plus—Trump has the potential to destroy them as a political majority for a generation. Hoover was a pinata for some 50 years. Carter for 20. Trump should be radioactive no less than they were. Notwithstanding the current hard polarization, the goal should be realignment, not merely narrow majorities.
Some Democratic pooh-bahs, however, have counseled candidates "not to look back," which is as foolish as ignoring the disgraced Nixon in l974 since he was no longer "on the ballot." Republican officeholders who have been either complicit or silent during Trump's carnage need to be held politically accountable for shredding the truth and the law.
When it comes to "accentuating the positive," the Biden White House will certainly keep touting real gains from its first term on jobs, drug prices, climate, gun safety, gay rights, Covid, Ukraine, plus what's to come in a possible second see (WinningAmerica.net, organized by Ralph Nader and the author, for a possible future agenda).
But Democrats cannot depend on this White House—helmed by two likable, lower-voltage moderates—to prosecute the negative case against a GOP playbook drafted over decades by such gunslingers as McCarthy, Nixon, Gingrich and Trump. (And given the inevitable race-to-the-bottom among 2024 presidential candidates—plus likely indictments of Trump and his clan from six grand juries—the negative side of the ledger will only grow.)
Effective counter-attacks are more likely to emerge from outside public advocacy groups, a handful of aggressive Members, and new wordsmiths at the DNC ideally with the polemical skills of a Samuel Adams (or at least a Frank Luntz). Think of how Elizabeth Warren (man)handled Michael Bloomberg in the second Democratic presidential debate. It took her ferocity to break through the billion dollar bubble protecting the ex-mayor.
Instead, Beltway consultants this past Fall failed to respond at all to GOP fear-mongering that called Democrats "Marxists, Communists, baby-killers" and, in Donald Trump's thoughtful formulation, "scum." In today's Age of Rage, there should be little space for "when they go low, we go high."
Nor did Democrats even attempt to neutralize such fatuous "culture war" slogans as CRT, groomers, vaccines, defund, woke—that is, DeSantism. All of which are variations of George Wallace, whose North Star, in his own phrase, was never to allow a political opponent "to out-n****r me." If unrebutted, to many these manufactured crises will appear undeniable.
Recently a federal court asked a lawyer for the State of Florida to define "woke" and was told it was the "belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to redress them"...as if Martin Luther King, Jr. was just some "woke" clergyman.
Hitting back will require more than disclosing additional outrages that largely serve to worsen scandal fatigue among weary voters and a cynical media. More urgent are convincing metaphors and narratives since by now the whole-is-greater- than- the- sum-of-its-parts when it comes to Trumpism and DeSantism.
As Churchill understood, galvanizing oratory matters. See how history still resonates with TR's "a chicken in every pot," Lenin's "land, bread, peace," Reagan's 'Morning in America." Recall how Newt Gingrich cleverly renamed "the estate tax" as the more alarming "Death Tax", Frank Luntz got even Democrats to talk about not "global warming" but the more anodyne "climate change", and some reactionary genius got people referring not to "Social Security" but a free lunch-sounding "Entitlement". Eisenhower's mention of a "Domino Effect'' in Southeast Asia and Reagan's concocted "welfare queen" dominated policy for decades.
Hard to think of a Democrat in memory who's said anything as enduring. Words matter and it's a mystery why Republicans—infinitely worse at policies to help families—are better at messaging which hurts them.
Last, it's corny but true that "good policies make good politics," in the estimate of Senators Schumer and Warren. As less inflation, more jobs, cleaner air and lower drug prices presumably take effect by the next election, some swing voters will take notice.
Among others, the new House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, Jamie Raskin and Eric Swalwell have shown real talent for oratory that can keep the opposing party on the ropes.
The possibilities seem endless: "Progress is America…One Party Delivers, the Other Divides…Getting stuff done beats dangerous extremism…Let's party like it's l789…It's up to you America—Freedom or Fascism?"
An honest self-appraisal from 2022 and the ethic that offense- beats-defense can improve the odds for Democrats in 2024, if not crush Trump's party. Otherwise, Greene and Musk will be happy to flood the political zone with their QAnon conspiracies and stochastic terrorism in an effort to make January 6 a trial run.
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Democrats' Fantasies About Midterms Could Cost Party Big in 2024
It isn't as if citizen advocates and civic organizations have neglected to advise, warn and urge the Democratic Party to win by standing for the people with authentic policies, messages, strategies, tactics, rebuttals and pithy slogans.
Dec 20, 2022
The Democratic Party can't cease congratulating itself about the mid-term elections results defying the pundit's predictions of a red wave. (Newt Gingrich even predicted that Herschel Walker would win the Georgia senate race without a runoff.) This is a self-serving, self-destructive standard by which Democratic operatives measure their performance. They need to unfailingly look into the mirror and list their losses.
The pernicious influence of corporate PACs leads to capitulation by the Dems, such as giving the Pentagon tens of billions of dollars more for the military budget than the White House requested.
First, they lost the House of Representatives to the worst Republican Party in history. The GOP is corrupt, lying, and violence-prone. It opposes policies supporting labor, consumers, patients, and children. It favors the greed of its corporate paymasters over vital community protections and necessities. A GOP House means the end of any Biden-proposed legislation for the next two years.
The narrow margin (GOP 222 Dems 213) between the House Democrats and the House Republicans was provided by two debacles - the election of two GOP candidates who were part of the partisan crowd rushing Congress on January 6, 2021, and the boomeranging of the New York State Democratic Party's redistricting plan.
Instead of netting four or five more seats in the House from New York, the Democratically controlled legislature overreached in its re-districting exuberance, leading to a 4 to 3 court overturn and the appointment of a special master to redraw the map. The new map produced a net GOP gain of 4 House seats.
Those two failures made the difference in the House of Representatives, turning all the committees and control of the House floor agendas over to probable Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his cronies, bent on political revenge, not protecting people's interests.
Early causes weakening the Democratic Party were in 1979 when it started taking corporate PAC money big time and in 2011 when it cut an unwritten deal with the GOP that was beyond the pale in its legislative cowardliness. The deal, to secure GOP support, was that every dollar added for the social safety net had to be matched by a similar increase in the bloated military budget.
The pernicious influence of corporate PACs leads to capitulation by the Dems, such as giving the Pentagon tens of billions of dollars more for the military budget than the White House requested. By a House vote of 350-80 Democrats and Republicans expanded the current bloated military budget by another $45 billion, more than even the Generals requested. Moreover, the Democrats joined with the GOP in this deficit spending without even trying to pay for this $45 billion by restoring any of Trump's 2017 tax cuts for big business. The Congress has yet to provide adequate funding for public health necessities and Covid-19 responses in the U.S.
If the Party has to beg the GOP for aid to needy children, for instance, it is not likely to go into the districts of Republican leaders, such as former Speaker John Boehner's backyard in Ohio. It reached a point in 2014 when the Democrats did not even field an opponent to Boehner, thus freeing him to help his GOP buddies with his unused campaign money.
There is little indication the Democrats have turned up the heat in low-income Bakersfield, California, the hometown of Kevin McCarthy. Compare this with junior member Rep. Newt Gingrich, who built, from scratch, a revolt that toppled two Democratic House Speakers, Jim Wright (by resignation) and Tom Foley (electoral defeat by Gingrich's hand-picked opponent) before Gingrich took over the speakership in January 1995.
Another causal blunder is the ceding of huge territory in the U.S. over the decades to the GOP - now dubbed the red states. In an Electoral College system of presidential elections that has led to the ceding of the White House even to GOP losers in the popular vote (e.g., G.W. Bush and Trump).
By abandoning the mountain states and North & South Dakota, a virtually uncontested GOP started out with 8 to 10 surefire Senate seats in states which used to have Democratic senators when the Party was more of a true national Party.
Other self-inflicted wounds include refusals by the Democrats, when they do win, to roll back bad Republican passed laws as well as health, safety and economic regulations or de-regulations benefiting big business over all the people. Stripping down the IRS enforcement budget that could catch the plutocracy's evasions, undermining the Postal Service, still run by Trumpster Louis DeJoy, not getting out of the Bush/Cheney illegal wars of aggression, and Bush/Cheney shielding Wall Street crooks from proper regulation of the financial industry, which led to its collapse, were some of the Democratic Party's self-defeating permissions for these GOP disasters. (Note when Obama became president, his administration failed to prosecute the Wall Street looters.)
The Dems invariably decline to roll back outlandish subsidies, giveaways and bailouts initiated by the GOP and often expand them. Nor do they hold hearings on the corporate crime wave, corporate welfare binges and other critical "let the people know" events to build support for corporate law and order actions.
It isn't as if citizen advocates and civic organizations have neglected to advise, warn and urge the Democratic Party to win by standing for the people with authentic policies, messages, strategies, tactics, rebuttals and pithy slogans. (See winningamerica.net).
The Democratic Party won't even come up with memorable slogans and is constantly outnumbered by fabricated GOP accusations that put the Party on the defensive against the likes of Trump and Trumpster Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). The Dems are so unorganized and leaderless that Taylor Greene could say with impunity about the January 6th assault at a Republican gala in New York City last week, "I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would've been armed." Where are the Democrats that are needed to move to censure this violent inciter against our national legislators?
Heading into a perilous 2024 election on a cascade of self-anthems is not an auspicious forward path. The Party is facing a disaster in the Senate. Twenty-three Democrats (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) are up for re-election with only 10 Republican senators mostly all from safe states. If the Dems could barely keep the Senate in 2022 when these odds were reversed in their favor, what do you think their chances are, with the same old, tired campaigns, for keeping the Senate in 2024?
These are the same campaign consultant regulars who have brought the Party to ruin in winnable election after election. Still, they get retained and place a cocoon around their candidates. These consultants make sure their regular corporate clients are not upset.
Again, the National Democratic Party has to set aside the champagne and rigorously face its disastrous failures--they should be landsliding the GOP. They can start with the two dozen civic leaders who volunteered to provide the path to victory in a July Zoom conference. They were largely ignored by the Party's corporate-conflicted political media consultants (losers who are expecting to be retained for 2024). (Again, see winningamerica.net).
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2022 Midterms: What We Learned
Democrats ran hard and Republicans did, too.
Dec 13, 2022
The final midterm votes have been counted. Rather than being swept away in a "red wave", Democrats increased their Senate majority (51-49) with the re-election of Raphael Warnock. And the Republicans gained a slight House majority of five votes (222-213)--with one Democratic seat (VA 4) open because of death. Here are three observations:
1.The United States is deeply polarized: This shouldn't come as a shock. What surprised me was that in an election where Trump wasn't on the ballot, Republicans voted in big numbers. Many of their voters seem locked into a mentality of "any Republican candidate is better than a Democrat."
In the midterms, Democrats ran hard and Republicans did, too. While Democrats can take pride in the fact that they defeated dreadful Senate candidates, such as Herschel Walker, the fact remains that, in Georgia, Walker garnered 1.7 million votes. In Arizona, another dreadful Republican candidate, Kari Lake, garnered 1.27 million votes in an unsuccessful campaign for governor.
The retirement of Nancy Pelosi indicates a shift to younger Democratic leadership in the House.
Republicans drank the Trump kool-aid and voted accordingly. More Republicans voted than did Democrats. It took a focused Democratic effort to (temporarily) stem the dark tide.
In 2024, even if Donald Trump is not a viable candidate, it seems likely that Republicans will operate in a different reality than do Democrats. What will it take to bridge this gap? Perhaps recognition that we have to unite in a response to climate change.
2. It helps to be an incumbent: All the Senators running for reelection, won their seats--including the dreadful Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Democrats picked up the open Pennsylvania Senate seat when John Fetterman defeated Mehmut Oz. Only one incumbent governor lost, Democrat Steve Sisolak in Nevada. Nine House incumbents lost their re-election campaigns: six Democrats and three Republicans.
The key element in these races was support of "independent" voters. According to the Cook Report ( https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/senate/senate-charts/senate-governors-charts-chew-how-independents-and-meh-voters-split?), where incumbents had the support of Independent voters, they won. (For example, in the Nevada Governor's race, Sisolak lost the support of independents.)
Three excellent Democratic Senate candidates--Barnes, Beasley, and Deming--were defeated because the Republican Party ran negative racist ads. Because of Trump the GOP has become the party of white supremacy--another indication Republicans are operating in an alternative reality.
3.The House races were very close. In the House of Representatives, the Republican margin of victory was five seats. The closest five Republican victories (AZ 1, CA 13, CO 8, NT 17, NY22) were decided by 10,249 total votes; for example, CO 3 was decided by 546 votes. Just a bit more effort could have resulted in a Democratic victory.
The blame for the Democrats loss in the House can be allocated between New York and California. In New York the Dems lost five blue seats. (https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/new-york-democrats-congress/ ) In California the Dems lost one blue seat (CA 13) and failed to swing several winnable seats because of low voter turnout. (In California, total 2022 turnout was 10.9 million. In 2021, for the recall election, it was 12.8 million. In 2020, turnout was 17.7 million and in 2018, 12.7 million.)
Writing in the Cook Report, David Wasserman observed: "Despite warnings from both parties that the midterms were existential to the future of the country, Americans cast just over 107 million votes for House, down from 114 million in 2018... The decline was highly uneven: in districts that are 75% white or more, turnout was on average 72% of 2020 levels (by total votes cast). But in majority/plurality Black districts, it was 61% of 2020 levels, in Hispanic majority/plurality seats it was just 57.9% of 2020 levels. Across all majority-nonwhite seats, it was 60.7%."
(For an alternative perspective, the 538 website (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/redistricting-house-2022/) argues that "Republicans flipped a net six seats because of redistricting.")
What's ahead? We're in a period of dramatic transition. If you watch the stock market--not a task for the faint of heart--you know that at least once a week there's a change of opinion about what direction the economy is headed. Today it's a bear market; tomorrow it's a bull market.
There's a lot happening in the United States. We're still struggling to get out of the pandemic. The impacts of climate change are more evident. The war in Ukraine indicates that the global order is shifting. The US economy is volatile. Trump has (so far) eluded prison. Etcetera.
The retirement of Nancy Pelosi indicates a shift to younger Democratic leadership in the House. I predict that this will happen with Democrats in general, and that Joe Biden won't run for reelection in 2024. There are many Democrats who would be acceptable replacements.
Donald Trump has had a pathological impact on the Republican Party. In 2024, I don't expect him to be a viable candidate, but I do expect his malignant influence to continue. Recent polls indicate that many Republicans prefer DeSantis to Trump. (Another possibility is Elon Musk.) Republicans are struggling to replace Trump with pathetic clones. The GOP is afraid to root out the malignancy.
I'm hopeful that 2024 will be a change election. In the meantime, hold on tight; we're traveling through rough water.
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