You Might Not Know Many Democrat Candidates Could Make History This Year. And That Might Be The Reason They Accomplish It

 

Every time I've done a Mary Peltola phone bank this cycle whoever's in charge gives us a briefing sessions of things about the candidate they want us to talk about in our calls and things they don't want us to mention. At this point I've done somewhere between 15 and 20 so I tuned the briefing out and some of it was stuff I already knew.

For example I knew even before I was told that if Peltola were to win she would be the first native Alaskan and the first indigenous woman to serve in the Senate. At the start of every briefing we're reminded of that fact but we're also told not to mention it when we're calling voters and its not in our scripts.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I assumed that Alaskans already knew this about Peltola and didn't need a volunteer to remind them. I also figured that Peltola's been in politics a long time and that she knew what worked when your running for office in Alaska better then me. There have been many outreach programs for other major ethnic groups as volunteer opportunities and since the campaign also tells us not to say anything negative about Republicans like Sarah Palin or Lisa Murkowski, I figured this was part of what was necessary in a state with such as a complicated balloting process (ranked choice voting, a major Independent Party).

It wasn't until earlier this week when I read an article in the Times that I made a different connection, one that I've written about last month in regard to the New Hampshire Senate race. The Democratic candidate Chris Pappas – at this point the overwhelming favorite to win  in two weeks –  would be the first openly gay man to be elected to the Senate. This would be a huge victory for the LGBTQ+ community who hasn't elected an openly gay man to Congress since Barney Frank back in the 1980s. But Pappas, even though he is married, has basically not made this part of his stump speech and whenever he's attacked on it by some Republicans he has always turned the other cheek rather than respond with defiance.

And while everyone in America knows about Abdul El-Sayid they might not know that if elected he would be the first Muslim to serve in the Senate. Again Mike Rogers has been bringing that up over and over on the campaign trail and it bothers quite a few Democrats. But El-Sayid has rarely used his religion to argue it as a history making moment, trying his best to argue that he is there to represent Michigan, not Muslims. (I will get back to this a little later.)

One of the biggest calling cards of the Democratic Party in my lifetime has been that it has been a big tent, most famously when Jesse Jackson famously referred to it as a Rainbow Coalition in 1984. For the first two decades of the 21^st century the Democrats went out of their way to highlight diversity with Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton running in 2008 based on historical significance as much as policy. Up until 2016 many seems to believe this was going to be not only our party's great strength but a sign that the Republicans were doomed as one.

After the shocking results of 2016 most of the left chose to argue that this was the sign of the racial bankruptcy of the electorate and for most of the next ten years the party chose to highlight its diversity as the critical difference against MAGA and Trump. But after Kamala Harris' defeat in 2024 when Trump made the greatest inroads in various identity groups such as African Americans and Latinos in nearly half a century for a Republican it might have caused some in the party to do a reckoning. If you're running on  a policy of being diverse and equal against a candidate who has embraced a coalition of bigotry and racism – and that candidate keeps winning – there has to come a point when you consider that you have to change your approach.

I've written about this a few times in the past two years, most notably in a series I started last year and hope to finish sometimes next year. (There's a good chance that after November I may be able to put a happy ending on it, which is nice.) 'How The Democrats Lost Dixie' was meant to illustrate how the Democrats didn't immediately lose the South after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed but that it took the better part of 40 years for it to finally happen. The theme of the piece, which I believe still has merit, is that the Democrats stopped running moderate white men in the Deep South and started to run African-American candidates who always lost. For one example I mentioned two separate attempts to defeat Jesse Helms, one of the founders of the conservative movement in North Carolina

Some believed a chance for a pickup was lost in North Carolina ( in 1990) when Jesse Helms won reelection to his fourth term and Harvey Gantt, the African-American Mayor of Charlotte. Factors would retroactively be raised such as his famous 'Hands' ad as well as Michael Jordan's refusal to endorse Gantt, saying "Republicans buy sneakers too." But in fact Helms won reelection by a slightly wider margin then he had in 1984 when he had run against the Democrat governor Jim Hunt where over $26 million was spent and Helms only managed to win due to the appearance of Ronald Reagan campaigning for him in the leadup to election day.

Helms was a despicable figure to be sure but by nominating an African-American to try and unseat him in 1990 the Democratic Party lost votes compared to when a white politician six years earlier. But it is because of the belief of how Helms chose to win that leads many to dismiss the electoral relevance of his defeat.

And we saw this pattern play out quite a few times during the last decade. In 2020 Jaime Harrison was nominated by the Democrats to run against Lindsay Graham running for reelection in South Carolina. Many predicted a close race but Graham won by nearly 10 percent. In 2024, after Beto O'Rourke nearly defeated Ted Cruz in his first reelection bid in Texas, the Democrats nominated the African-American Colin Allred to run against him. Cruz beat Allred by 8.5 percent, six percent larger then his margin in 2018.

Stacy Abrams was considered a national hero when she came within 1.5 percent of beating Brian Kemp for the Governor's race in Georgia. Abrams made numerous claims of election activity that allegedly unfairly affected the results. Four years later she ran against him in a rematch – and she lost by nearly eight points. That same year the Democrats tried to run Val Demings who'd been a Congresswoman for three terms to run against Marco Rubio in Florida. Rubio crushed her by 16 points. I'm not convinced Angie Nixon will do much better against Ashley Moody as both her race and far left politics are definitely not going to work in her favor.

For decades the left and other moralists have frequently torn out their hair every time a Republican has run an ad or campaigned on 'the race card' as morally bankrupt. It is. But it's also proven to be politically sound for them for just as long. I sometimes wonder if the main reason so many states have nominated people of color as Democrats across the South is due not just to how small the Democratic party membership is in these states but because it makes it easier to cry racism in fundraising if and when these candidates inevitably lose. The left has been using this as an increasingly whining battle cry and forced the Democrats to march to it for much of the last decade and as a result in 2024 we suffered our biggest electoral defeat to Trump in his 8 years on the public stage. Perhaps that has played into the narrative the left wants to argue but if you actually want to make changes in policy at some point you have to stop running into a stone wall.

We've seen this cycle how the Democrats have been learning from their mistakes both in recruitment and across the South. I find it difficult to believe Jasmine Crockett could have beaten Ken Paxton but it looks very much like James Talarico is about to do just that. Roy Cooper is going to flip a seat in North Carolina and Jon Osoff is going to keep his seat in Georgia – while it's looking less and less likely that Keisha Lance Bottoms will be able to win the governor's race in that state. And despite Trump's Julia Letlow successfully primarying the incumbent Bill Cassidy in Louisiana I see no sign that Jamie Davis will be able to turn that seat blue, no matter how many ads I've gotten arguing about the racism of MAGA in that state.

It has to be said that part of the reason Abdul El-Sayid is having more difficulty winning in Michigan then Haley Stevens would is because of how poorly he did with African-American voters – which make up 12 percent of the state – in the Democratic primary. Whatever chance Mike Rogers has of defeating him will no doubt happen in large part because the traditional Democratic coalition of minority voters is uneasy with El-Sayid the way that the mostly progressive white voters who nominated him is. El-Sayid has tried not to focus on being Islamic but Rogers and every Republican surrogate is going to remind them. El-Sayid is still favored to win but it's much closer than it should be and its another in the endless line of reasons as to why these kinds of racial politics frequently hurt Democratic candidates for office rather then help them win.

Then again, sometimes fate throws you a curve. The major argument for Annie Andrews campaign from the ads I got was how big it would be if a woman could represent South Carolina in the Senate. Well thanks to a certain amount of pressure by the President a woman currently is representing South Carolina in the Senate. Andrews can now run against Darline Graham without having to play either the gender card or the history making card and can run on a far better one: competence and effectiveness. Something it's pretty clear Darline doesn't quite have at the same level of her brother and who the President has shown he has little respect for his legacy recently.

It is very much looking like the midterms will be a historic one for the Democratic Party. And part of that reason is that the Democratic candidates and the national party have remembered its more important to have candidates win as Democrats, not win as a specific identity group and then as a Democrat. Let's hope the lesson sticks this time, for the good of America, the Democratic Party and then all the other parts of the melting pot that make up our coalition.