Welcome to another recap of The Brief! In this week’s episode, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld talk all things midterms, with an eye toward how several recent pieces of legislation, Supreme Court decisions, and executive actions out of the White House have shifted the tides for Democrats.
Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network and the New Policy Institute, joined as a guest to dissect primary and special election results so far that appear to be harbingers for what is to come in November; the longer-term consequences of the end of Roe v. Wade for the GOP; and the rising power of women and young voters.
After the Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision that brought an end to nearly 50 years of federally guaranteed abortion rights under Roe, Americans have seemingly been making their outrage heard at the polls, with a number of elections having had unexpected results for Democrats.
As Eleveld put it, “There’s nothing like losing rights to ignite people, to just animate them and enrage them.” She recalled how LGBTQ activists were enraged after Barack Obama entered office and Proposition 8 passed in California, taking away the rights to same-sex marriage.
According to Rosenberg, Republicans had already been slightly underperforming in what limited public polling he saw, but after the Dobbs decision, things shifted quickly. Four days after Roe was struck down, he recalled, a special election in Nebraska was held where Democrats overperformed their 2020 performance by 10 points. “Overperforming our 2020 numbers in a red wave year by anything was going to be a lot, but we overperformed by 10 points,” he emphasized.
The most important data about an election is voting statistics, Rosenberg argued:
Voting always matters more than polling, or anything else. In the five House special [elections] and in the Kansas vote [on abortion rights] that took place, we’ve dramatically outperformed expectations, and outperformed even our own polling. In the NY-19 race, I talked to the DCCC that afternoon and they said they thought they were going to lose by three to four points. So they were shocked that we ended up winning that seat by almost two and a half points.
Women are turning out in record numbers to vote as well, which may be contributing to these shifts in numbers. Rosenberg, citing findings from TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier, also pointed to a huge surge in women registering to vote and voting in these elections. “The registration numbers have shifted much more Democratic since June 24 across the country, and in those states where you can request an early ballot, women are way outperforming their normal distribution in the electorate in those states,” Rosenberg said. “And so you see women are energized — particularly young women — and they’re obviously leaning much more Democratic.”
As he put it, all of these numbers are telling a particular story, one where the tides may be shifting for Democrats come November:
I think what we’re seeing is that this data kind of aligns, where you’re seeing the public data of the polling, the election results, the registration numbers — all of this is telling the same story, which is that this is a very competitive, even leaning Democratic election at this point.
“We’ve got a real shot at keeping both chambers if we do the work,” Rosenberg concluded.
Moulitsas, Eleveld, and Rosenberg also discussed how Democrats are now targeting several districts that they view as “flippable.” Now, it seems the terrain has shifted to the point where there’s palpable energy and Democrats are now actively looking for more opportunities to pick up seats, versus simply defending the ones they already have.
Eleveld brought up the issue of Biden’s decision to cancel some student debt, and how that may have affected voter behavior as well—despite the fact that Republicans believe it was a huge misstep and will harm Democrats come November.
Rosenberg echoed those sentiments that student debt relief, and other recent legislation pushed forward by Democrats, has been a positive change for younger people:
Young people are an overwhelmingly Democratic part of our coalition, and they also are the least likely to show up in the midterms. They also had — we know, from polling — enormous distance from Joe Biden. They felt very distant from him, and Biden had really lost an enormous amount of ground with young people over the last two years.
But look what’s happened now. You had the mass shootings that took place, we passed a major piece of bipartisan gun legislation, which I still think we all forget actually happened, which is almost an unbelievable miracle that Republicans were so scared about what they were seeing that they agreed to [pass] gun legislation. And then you had the ending of Roe, which disproportionately affects young people in the United States. And then you had the biggest climate bill in the history of the country, and you had student loan relief. So this is a whole series of things that make it far more likely that young people are going to be engaged and show up in this election.
Despite this development, these shifts among young voters are often not well-captured in the election modeling, as young people historically do not vote with as much frequency as other age groups, Rosenberg cautioned. However, what Democrats have seen so far is already showing that there could be more young people and more women in the electorate than the polling has revealed thus far. “If anything, we may be underestimating the final Democratic vote as opposed to overestimating it based on what we’re seeing,” he added.
Rosenberg thinks that after looking at midterm election data, it is becoming increasingly clear that Republicans are struggling to bring their coalition together—especially since they only received 46% of the vote in the last three elections. As he put it:
For them to do well, they need to not just hold what they have, but they need to gain voters or have a bunch of our folks stay home. The likelihood of our folks staying home is now significantly diminished … and I also think they’re not going to get very many people to switch. The question now is whether a MAGA-led Republican party is struggling to even put that coalition of 46[%] together.
A very significant, national-level effort led by Republicans to tell other Republicans not to vote Republican is also happening, due to infighting between MAGA and non-MAGA groups. According to Rosenberg, this could make a huge difference come November. The effects of this have already been seen in the ranked-choice Alaska congressional election, where Mary Peltola bested Sarah Palin, and may affect other elections to come as well.
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