I joined Perry Bacon on The New Republic’s Substack Live today to unpack last week’s election results. My main takeaway: This should be an accountability election for the commentariat that keeps telling us the wrong thing about what’s going on in America. For instance:
There was no grand “realignment” where key demographic groups, like young Black and Latino men, “moved right.” We should think of people who decide American elections not as demographic categories, and not as “progressive” or “moderate,” but as a group of people who are pissed off at the party in power or dissatisfied with how politics is working for their lives.
Discourse has been captured by a group of analysts and strategists who have lost sight of how you actually win elections and make big gains—as if the only thing that matters in football is extra points and field goals, not touchdowns. (It’s silly to argue about which style field goal kicker you should draft when your team is down by 10 in the fourth quarter.)
Democrats should be much more ambitious about how many races are put in play when it could be a wave year. In 2006, Rahm Emanuel arguably cost Democrats seats by discouraging investment in a number of winnable races—including one candidate in Minnesota by the name of Tim Walz.
“Turnout” and “persuasion” have become ideologically coded as “progressive” and “moderate,” respectively—but that’s not how people decide who to vote for, or whether to vote at all. It makes perfect sense that for the same reasons, some in the “pissed off” block who stayed home last year would realize they needed to show up this year, and some who gave Trump a chance last year would switch to vote for the Democrat, or stay home, this year.
