What To Read About The Democrats' Electoral Victories This Year
Last night, Democrats enjoyed comfortable wins in the Virginia and New Jersey's governor races and made significant gains in Virginia, Georgia and Washington's state legislatures, among other legislative victories across the country. This Election Day marks the first time anti-Trump sentiment has translated into real electoral success for Democrats, but it remains to be seen whether this year's results are a fluke or a harbinger of more Republican losses to come. To help you figure out what to make of the off-year election results, we've compiled five of the sharpest bits of analysis and commentary about what happened and why.
The GOP's Suburban Nightmare
First, a big-picture read: Back in June, Politico's Charlie Mahtesian took a look at the demographic and cultural shifts that ended up delivering suburban areas — once a Republican stronghold — to Democrats last night:
What happened in between Reagan and Trump? These suburbs gradually came into political alignment with their neighboring cities, moving the longtime antagonists toward something like a metropolitan alliance. At roughly the same time, the GOP largely gave up on competing among minorities and in the most densely populated areas.
The new GOP iteration differs in at least one important way from the one that dominated the suburbs in the Reagan years: It is now a conservative party that rejects metropolitan values, rather than a metropolitan party that embraces conservative values.
[Politico]
The Limits Of Trumpism
Slate's Jamelle Bouie analyzes the failure of the Republican strategy in Virginia and New Jersey of stoking white resentment by scapegoating immigrants and nonwhite Americans, and argues that this means Republicans will have to go back to the drawing board if they want a fighting chance in 2018:
"Trumpism without Trump" is just a euphemism for the politics of white identity — for campaigns tuned to white racism and designed to stoke white racial resentment. This politics consumed the last weeks and months of the Virginia election, and its decisive defeat is one of the most important outcomes of Tuesday's voting…
Had either Republican won, or come close, other Republicans would have taken note, charging into 2018 with campaigns aimed at the same kind of voters, with the same kind of message, with the same basic goal: to obscure an otherwise unpopular agenda with targeted appeals to white racism.
[Slate]
Democrats Cheer, But They May Have To Do Better In '18
The Upshot's Nate Cohn explains that last night's results don't necessarily forecast a Democratic sweep in 2018: this year's big elections were held in relatively favorable districts and states, while next year's will take place on less friendly territory:
Yes, the political divisions of the 2016 presidential election wound up working pretty well for Democrats in Virginia, a highly educated state. But that might not be the case for Democrats in a lot of the rest of the country. There are only 11 Republican-held congressional districts in the United States where Mrs. Clinton won by five points or more. Even if Democrats swept those 11 districts, it wouldn't get them that far toward the 24 seats they need to flip the House.
To my surprise, it's not obvious that a rerun of the Virginia House of Delegates election on a national scale would yield Democratic control of the House. Without greater strength in areas that supported Mr. Trump, it would still be a tossup.
The Fundamentals Favor Democrats In 2018
Meanwhile, the other stats-driven Nate (Silver) delves into last night's results and argues that Democrats still have a decent shot at taking over the House in 2018, despite unfavorably gerrymandered districts and their unpopularity among the white working class:
Democrats have quite a few pathways toward winning the House that rely primarily on middle-class and upper-middle-class suburban districts, plus a few districts with growing nonwhite populations. Many of these are in coastal states or in blue states, including four of them in Virginia, four in New Jersey, four in Illinois, five in New York and eight in California, according to Cook [Political Report]'s list. It might not be advisable for Democrats to only target these sorts of districts; history suggests that parties usually benefit from competing ambitiously in all sorts of districts and seeing where the chips fall. But it's plausible for them to do so and reclaim the House.
The Anti-Trump Wave Has Come, And Republicans Can't Stop It
Jonathan Chait points out that last night's sweeping results make Republicans' plan to cut taxes for corporations and the very wealthy even more politically unwise:
What is remarkable is that the Republican plan to avert this catastrophe is to inflict economic hardship on these very constituents. The party has convinced itself that the solution to its unpopularity is to vote through an unpopular plan to combine tax cuts for corporations and rich people with tax increases on a large minority of the middle class. The highest doses of fiscal pain of the Republican plan would be concentrated on upper-middle-class voters who live in blue states — like, say, New Jersey, New York, and California.
Republicans believe regressive tax cuts hold the solution to any problem — the economy is too slow, the economy might become slow in the future, the surplus is too high, there's a war, etc. Many of them will convince themselves that the Virginia blowout is all the more reason to pass their tax cut (as opposed to finding some actually popular measures to pass).
[New York]
