The answer for the GOP is.... everything!
I’d like to start my article by positing an alternative theory about midterm elections: Yes, turnout is — generally speaking — much lower than Presidential elections. In fact, the winning side rarely gets a total of more than 25% of all of the nation’s registered voters. And, yes, the party not in power in the White House wins most of these, but not because the election is about the President. Midterm election coalitions are different than the coalitions that turn out for each party in Presidential years. In fact, they are more like primary elections. The most energized, the most angry wins. It just happens that in most years, the President — as a single face of national politics — drives more of that anger.
Not this year.
This year, the political fates have coalesced around high profile moments that have redefined the Republican party from the anti-Biden coalition to the coalition that wants to take away your rights and frequently breaks the law. And this will be what defines the election, unless something even larger and more dramatic in the news cycle can alter this trajectory.
Four huge topics are generating the perfect storm of what could actually build into a Democratic wave (not that I’m not predicting this yet, it’s still too early). These are so much bigger for voters than inflation, gas prices, etc. and this has the much vaunted “red wave” heading for the crapper. And the Republicans know it — you can see it in what they are doing to “undo” the “undoing” of it — but more about that later. Here’s the quartet of issues moving voters:
1. The Dobbs decision and the evisceration of Roe vs Wade. This may very well be the first time in American history that the Supreme Court took a right away from a majority of the country. Women are furious — it’s clear from the data we see in voter registration numbers and a results of special elections across the country since the decision.
2. The extremism against democracy — including anti-abortion overreach — and the obvious partisan nature of pro-authoritarian ideals that are being shown during the Jan 6 Committee hearings. This is all kind of one big pot of threat to our freedom, in a way that hasn’t materialized federally since the days leading up to the Civil War. It’s easy to understand, and it scares the crap out of independent voters.
3. The blatant, easy-to-understand, horrifying potential Trump crimes connected to espionage and the stealing of top-secret documents from the White House. Not only does resurface the worst part of the Trump brand just in time for November, but his typical legal delaying tactics — we are already seeing these — will just extend this into the fall. Add to it that the more into trouble Trump gets, the less motivated to vote his voters will be — just as this will be another notch in the topics that motivate Democratic turnout.
4. Democratic legislative success. The latest bills and Biden executive moves are winners, and not just because they got done. The topics are all very popular with massive numbers of voters. You can see it in Biden’s increasing popularity, even further blunting anti-Biden sentiment as a motivating force on the right.
So, where do we go from here?
Back to the Republicans: They know they are in trouble, and they are looking for an issue to blunt this new environment. GOP candidates are scrubbing their more extreme views on choice and women’s rights from the public record. The right is lashing out at the new college loan debt cancellation as “unfair” to working class people who haven’t attended college.
All of this seems rather small and meager compared to the overriding issues of protecting democracy, codifying Roe versus Wade, and saving Democracy. My feeling is the Republicans will need another HUGE curve in the road to election day to change this trajectory.
But, there are the issues around voters’ rights, gerrymandering, etc., which could have an impact on the US House and State races.
We need to maximize turnout and run these races without assuming the anything is “baked” into the vote. This is a perennial mistake Democrats make (it cost us House seats in 2020 because we didn’t tie Republican House candidates to Trump).
Most of these Republican candidates from Governor and Senator on down have left us plenty of sound bytes defending Trump, loving January 6, and attacking abortion. All of them should be attacked for it — there’s really no time to scrub your website and pivot away from years of this behavior.
For Democrats? Sure, all politics is local on some level — but this year the issues are at the same time national and individual. They are emotional for many of our voters, and they connect to even broader issues around racism and bigotry, access to the ballot box, and general equality that are so meaningful to the Democratic coalition today.
So from Senator to Town Selectman/Councilman (and everything in between), Democrats should be pushing their opponents hard. Advertise putting them where they’ve been on these huge issues, not where they want to be today. Challenge them in debates with their own words and actions, and keep control of the campaign narrative.
The ball really is in our court right now and we need to fight hard against “wrong.” If we don’t, and “wrong” wins — we are all going to suffer.
