The first jolt to the DC punditry has been trying to absorb that, actually, Tuesday was a wave election and Democrats totally kicked butt (perhaps even in the Senate given the electoral map). But here's the second mind-blowing realization for Washington journalists: Democrats were a vision of symmetry and downright wicked discipline in the midst of Trump's whirling Tasmanian devil routine.
In fact, while the GOP caucus practically disintegrated before our very eyes, the New York Times reports that Democrats homed in on a message early and then just pounded on it like a jackhammer to create their own path to victory. As Nancy Pelosi told reporters Wednesday: "We made our own environment because we knew how important health care was."
Early in 2017, as the Republicans tried to jam their healthcare repeal bill through, Pelosi and her leadership team decided Democrats would counter the effort by focusing almost exclusively on the pre-existing conditions part of the Affordable Care Act. They also planned to emphasize what they called the "age tax," a GOP provision that would have allowed insurers to charge older customers higher premiums.
They, in fact, chose those aspects of the law over talking about Planned Parenthood and Medicaid. “Those things are in our DNA," Pelosi would often say, "but they are not in our talking points."
What they also settled on was simply letting Trump be Trump and ignoring him entirely. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico told the Times how difficult it was.
“Every time he would say something or tweet something, it would come back: ‘We need to come right back at him! Define him!’” Mr. Luján recalled. “We would say: Look, we don’t need to talk about him, he’s going to do it himself. We need to continue to have a conversation with the American people about kitchen-table issues.”
By focusing on healthcare repeal and the votes most congressional Republicans had cast in support of it, Democrats could localize the races to some extent by making GOP candidates the targets of their policy-driven campaigns. In the meantime, with every dawning day and every new tweet, Trump would nationalize the race on his own.
Democratic strategists also warned that Republicans would make Pelosi the villain of their campaigns. What their calculation around that was, wasn't exactly clear from the Times's reporting. But it almost certainly led to Pelosi giving all the Democratic candidates room to disavow her as speaker. (Note that while Trump spent part of Wednesday grousing about Republicans who didn't "embrace" him enough, Pelosi only celebrated the unity of her caucus and its incoming members. "Working together, voting together, we were able to make our case," she told reporters the day following the election. Unlike Paul Ryan and the GOP, Pelosi and her caucus spent 2017 taking votes that both incorporated feedback from constituents and played into their electoral strategy.) One other thing clearly proved to be true, Pelosi couldn't possibly be more scary than Trump already was, so she wasn't near as big a drag on Democrats as Trump proved to be on Republicans. Whatever elements of the GOP base were motivated by Pelosi were already motivated by Trump. But in terms of independents, Trump was the driving factor.
What Democrats did during the 2018 cycle, particularly in the House, was inspired given our current political climate and the constant unknown of Trump. The choices Democrats and their leadership team made and their unified push on policy stood in stark contrast to the deepening fissures within the GOP caucus, which Republicans merely papered over with a thin veneer of fealty to Trump.
Simply put, Republicans, led by Ryan, made bad choices from Day One. Democrats, led by Pelosi, made good ones. So maybe the media can put the "Democrats is disarray" theme on ice. Washington pundits spent an unbelievable amount of time harping on Democrats for not having the national message that was, in fact, happening right in front of their faces. Voters were obviously picking up what the Democrats were laying down—the results speak for themselves.