It wasn’t quite a wave -- it was more like a spate of droplets – and it wasn’t totally blue – there was definitely some red mixed in as well. So, what did Tuesday bring? Purple rain! Purple rain!
Actually, it was more like an indigo storm – a heavily blue purple storm – but Prince doesn’t have a song called “Indigo Storm,” and I couldn’t come up with a decent Indigo Girls pun. The point is, the midterm elections were very-good-not-quite-great for non-Trumpists and disappointing-not-disastrous for Trumpists. I didn't have a panic attack laying in bed at night, which is a departure from two years ago. I was definitely sweating it out early in the night though. I was watching the FiveThirtyEight real-time House odds, and it wasn’t calibrated correctly early in the night, so it was too aggressively changing directions. When things opened kinda sluggish for the Dems in the Southeast, the dial moved from 90% in their favor to 55% to 30% (!) in about a half-hour. My first reaction was “oh no… it’s happening again!” But I wasn’t totally freaking out because I could see the Dems hadn’t suffered a big upset in a House race or anything like that, so I suspected maybe something was up. Then Nate Silver posted that indeed something was up, and they were changing the settings, and then the odds immediately went up to 55% Dems and trended up the rest of the night from there. In fact, they probably overcorrected and made it not aggressive enough because it was only at like 70% Dems when the Upshot (the New York Times' forecasting team) had it at more than 95% Dems. Whatever... it is now at 100%, even though there are still some races pending.
Trump, of course, claimed victory because the Reps gained some seats in the Senate. But he already had control of the Senate and this election map was incredibly tilted in their favor. The Dems had to win or hold serve in a bunch of red states, and that's just too tall an order in today's political climate. (A big take away from the night is that we are hardening even more into a red state/blue state country. With some exceptions -- Joe Manchin and Jon Tester won Senate seats in states Trump won and Kyrsten Sinema might also. Bill Nelson probably won't.) The biggest upset Trump can celebrate is the governor's race in Florida (probably). The Democrat Andrew Gillum was up pretty big in the polls and lost to a Trump acolyte – possibly because Trump campaigned for him.
The flip side of this, however, is that a ton of winning Dem House candidates campaigned expressly against Trump. Living in DC I see a lot of Virginia political ads, and Jennifer Wexton was calling her opponent Barbara Comstock “Barbara Trumpstock.” No points for creativity, but it worked. And those who didn’t run hard against Trump explicitly, ran against him implicitly, because he dominates the ether. In a lot of suburban swing districts I think Trump very much worked against the Republican candidates. He turns people off, and because he makes everything about him, the Dems don’t have to waste their resources attacking him, and so they can focus on other things. By many accounts, it was healthcare, not rabid anti-Trumpism, that swung things back in the Dems favor.
And this I think delineates the best strategy going forward to the 2020 presidential election. Don’t run against Trump explicitly. Run on other issues – healthcare, inequality, etc. Call him out on his lies and bigotry, hold him accountable for his shady dealings, don't be pushovers, but don’t get bogged down in a morass of Trump hate. It only serves to entrench people and make the Dems look “just as bad.” Of the people I know who didn’t vote for Hillary that was their main reason why. They didn’t really like Trump, but they saw the election as a partisan squabble between two unlikeable people – so what difference did it make? That’s a very wrong way to see it, in my opinion (and objectively), but that’s how they saw it. And I think that’s how a lot of people saw it. If I were advising the Dems for 2020, I would advise them to give voters as little reasonable as possible to think the only message they have is “fuck Trump,” even though that’s what we all wish they could run on. Again, the reason this could work is because Trump turns enough people off on his own. "Fuck trump" is already baked into the cake.
This is also why I agree with people who think it would be a mistake for the newly elected Dem majority in the House to go gung-ho, guns-a-blazin' against Trump. I don’t think they should try to impeach him (for now, at least). The trick, I think, is to investigate behind the scenes, hold him accountable, but try to expose him without making it look like something the public will just chalk up to a partisan fight. It’s not easy, and it might not work, but I think it’s the best bet. I heard a commentator on a podcast say something to the effect of “Liberals need to stop dreaming about the magic bullet that will defeat Trump – impeachment, the Mueller investigation, etc. The way to defeat Trump is the way to defeat any other politician. Vote him out.” I think that’s right. But also, I could be wrong about all of this. I’m open to the possibility that nobody really knows anything about political strategy and that the people who are “good” at it are just lucky, because the sample size is so small. I mean, if you had a million people guess the outcomes of 100 coin tosses, some of them are going to do very well, and if we didn’t know any better we would think these people are good at predicting coin tosses and value their opinions on the matter. Maybe that’s what’s going on with politics.
Anyway... if you were curious about the biggest upset of the election, meet Democrat Kendra Horn in Oklahoma's 5th district. FiveThirtyEight only gave her a 7% chance of winning. I went to her home page and read about her policies. She's touts fairly standard Democratic positions -- education, health care, gun control (somewhat surprising for Oklahoma) -- and you know who she doesn't mention? Trump. And she won. See, it worked this one time in an election of 250,000 Oklahomans, therefore it will always work on the national level. That's just good extrapolation.
Until next time...
Actually, it was more like an indigo storm – a heavily blue purple storm – but Prince doesn’t have a song called “Indigo Storm,” and I couldn’t come up with a decent Indigo Girls pun. The point is, the midterm elections were very-good-not-quite-great for non-Trumpists and disappointing-not-disastrous for Trumpists. I didn't have a panic attack laying in bed at night, which is a departure from two years ago. I was definitely sweating it out early in the night though. I was watching the FiveThirtyEight real-time House odds, and it wasn’t calibrated correctly early in the night, so it was too aggressively changing directions. When things opened kinda sluggish for the Dems in the Southeast, the dial moved from 90% in their favor to 55% to 30% (!) in about a half-hour. My first reaction was “oh no… it’s happening again!” But I wasn’t totally freaking out because I could see the Dems hadn’t suffered a big upset in a House race or anything like that, so I suspected maybe something was up. Then Nate Silver posted that indeed something was up, and they were changing the settings, and then the odds immediately went up to 55% Dems and trended up the rest of the night from there. In fact, they probably overcorrected and made it not aggressive enough because it was only at like 70% Dems when the Upshot (the New York Times' forecasting team) had it at more than 95% Dems. Whatever... it is now at 100%, even though there are still some races pending.
Trump, of course, claimed victory because the Reps gained some seats in the Senate. But he already had control of the Senate and this election map was incredibly tilted in their favor. The Dems had to win or hold serve in a bunch of red states, and that's just too tall an order in today's political climate. (A big take away from the night is that we are hardening even more into a red state/blue state country. With some exceptions -- Joe Manchin and Jon Tester won Senate seats in states Trump won and Kyrsten Sinema might also. Bill Nelson probably won't.) The biggest upset Trump can celebrate is the governor's race in Florida (probably). The Democrat Andrew Gillum was up pretty big in the polls and lost to a Trump acolyte – possibly because Trump campaigned for him.
The flip side of this, however, is that a ton of winning Dem House candidates campaigned expressly against Trump. Living in DC I see a lot of Virginia political ads, and Jennifer Wexton was calling her opponent Barbara Comstock “Barbara Trumpstock.” No points for creativity, but it worked. And those who didn’t run hard against Trump explicitly, ran against him implicitly, because he dominates the ether. In a lot of suburban swing districts I think Trump very much worked against the Republican candidates. He turns people off, and because he makes everything about him, the Dems don’t have to waste their resources attacking him, and so they can focus on other things. By many accounts, it was healthcare, not rabid anti-Trumpism, that swung things back in the Dems favor.
And this I think delineates the best strategy going forward to the 2020 presidential election. Don’t run against Trump explicitly. Run on other issues – healthcare, inequality, etc. Call him out on his lies and bigotry, hold him accountable for his shady dealings, don't be pushovers, but don’t get bogged down in a morass of Trump hate. It only serves to entrench people and make the Dems look “just as bad.” Of the people I know who didn’t vote for Hillary that was their main reason why. They didn’t really like Trump, but they saw the election as a partisan squabble between two unlikeable people – so what difference did it make? That’s a very wrong way to see it, in my opinion (and objectively), but that’s how they saw it. And I think that’s how a lot of people saw it. If I were advising the Dems for 2020, I would advise them to give voters as little reasonable as possible to think the only message they have is “fuck Trump,” even though that’s what we all wish they could run on. Again, the reason this could work is because Trump turns enough people off on his own. "Fuck trump" is already baked into the cake.
This is also why I agree with people who think it would be a mistake for the newly elected Dem majority in the House to go gung-ho, guns-a-blazin' against Trump. I don’t think they should try to impeach him (for now, at least). The trick, I think, is to investigate behind the scenes, hold him accountable, but try to expose him without making it look like something the public will just chalk up to a partisan fight. It’s not easy, and it might not work, but I think it’s the best bet. I heard a commentator on a podcast say something to the effect of “Liberals need to stop dreaming about the magic bullet that will defeat Trump – impeachment, the Mueller investigation, etc. The way to defeat Trump is the way to defeat any other politician. Vote him out.” I think that’s right. But also, I could be wrong about all of this. I’m open to the possibility that nobody really knows anything about political strategy and that the people who are “good” at it are just lucky, because the sample size is so small. I mean, if you had a million people guess the outcomes of 100 coin tosses, some of them are going to do very well, and if we didn’t know any better we would think these people are good at predicting coin tosses and value their opinions on the matter. Maybe that’s what’s going on with politics.
Anyway... if you were curious about the biggest upset of the election, meet Democrat Kendra Horn in Oklahoma's 5th district. FiveThirtyEight only gave her a 7% chance of winning. I went to her home page and read about her policies. She's touts fairly standard Democratic positions -- education, health care, gun control (somewhat surprising for Oklahoma) -- and you know who she doesn't mention? Trump. And she won. See, it worked this one time in an election of 250,000 Oklahomans, therefore it will always work on the national level. That's just good extrapolation.
Until next time...
What I'm excited about, besides the record number of women (and women of color!) elected to Congress, is how many candidates won who openly support common-sense gun legislation. This is no longer a third-rail issue and that is a huge step for the cause, even though it will most likely continue to be baby-steps as far as actual reform, at least for the foreseeable future. Also, more scientists are running, and winning, than ever before. Let's hear it for critical thinking! As you mentioned in a previous entry, anger can be an asset. It's certainly an enemy of complacency.
ReplyDeleteYeah, as I mentioned I was surprised (pleasantly) to see a politician in Oklahoma make gun control one of her stated issues. And she won!
ReplyDelete