This past week's election was an
enormous balm to my soul. Not just because it was a repudiation of everything
Trump and Republicans have represented a decade. Or the historic nature of so
many of the places and candidates who won. Or how it may very well have laid
the groundwork for a new era of politics going forward.
No one of the smaller joys was where,
how and what caused this Democratic landslide across the country was that it
basically dismantled so many of the cherished beliefs the left has had about
American politics, the electorate, how they think and the country itself.
To be clear I have no illusions that
the self-styled progressives themselves will see it that way. I've known for
years that the result of every election, no matter which side wins or by how
much, the left will find a way to make it clear that the results proved that
America wants progressive values, even in the aftermath of a Republican victory
as we saw just two years. Even now they are trying to find a way to prove that
this election was a validation of how they think and how every single candidate
who was elected was in truth arguing for progressivism even if they never met
them.
The thing is reality doesn't have a
liberal bias and that is not true for the results of elections. The results of this one basically disproved
many of the core tenets that the left has sworn by for decades and that have
calcified ever since the 2016 election. All of them had a grain of truth and
certain historical evidence to back it up but never quite that deep beneath the
surface was how the left has always viewed the world and how their own flaws
have shaped realities that the Democrats have spent years, if not decades
trying to overcome – and then this cycle actually did.
So here are five of what have been the
biggest talking points of the left for the last decade, the truth behind each
one and how they were spectacularly disproven this past week even before all
the votes have been counted.
1. The South has been Republican ever
since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed and will never change.
For decades the left has ceased on the
fact that supposedly when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he said that
"I think we just handed the South to the Republicans for a very long
time." That he said not out of celebration but mourning is something the
left leaves out as well as the fact that it didn't happen overnight.
As I wrote in a series of articles
during the rest of the 20th century a New South of moderate
Democrats managed to win Senate seats and governorships during the 1970s and
two of the latter Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would eventually become
President. In the aftermath of Clinton's election the Blue Dog Democrat coalition
was founded of more moderate Democrats, mostly in the south at their height
numbering over 20 percent of all Congressional Democrats. They only began to
lose their seats when the Democratic Party started to move to the left in
Obama's term, something progressives convenient leave out when they recount the
history of the rise of Republicans. (They do that a lot as you'll see.)
Reality: The left has always felt the
South is irreparably racist and has always gloated about how badly these states
suffer compared to the north.
This has been true as far back as the
antebellum era when it was by far the most genuinely true and they held this
position throughout Jim Crow when America fall intents and purposes ignored the
South. (They also try to leave out that the Democrats had one party rule from
Reconstruction until the 1950s.) They've viewed how Republicans such as Nixon
and Reagan would lean into racist overtones to win the South electorally as
well as their eventual Republican lock on it. But they always seemed to think
that Democrats shouldn't bother to go near it because that would mean they'd
have to moderate their views.
This was particularly true in regard
to Joe Manchin, who was the bete noire of the left during Biden's
administration to the point that he eventually chose to not only not run for
reelection in 2024 but leave the party altogether. The fact that Manchin had
been a Democrat for eighteen years in one of the reddest states in the Union
didn't stop them from labeling him a DINO. If you're not a progressive, you
might as well not be a Democrat at all.
2. The Christian Right has used the gospel as a
tool to maintain political power rather than actual faith.
While it's difficult to argue the
fundamental truth of this fact, given the power the Moral Majority and other
similar organizations used to use Christianity as an arm of the lord from the
early 1980s on it ignores the basic fact that to the left…
Reality: Religion is the opiate of the
masses.
Often used in the way the left attacks
Reagan as being a tool of the Christian right is their saying that Jimmy Carter
was a real born again Christian and Republicans rejected him because he
rejected church's tax exempt status. Left out of that recounting is that during
the 1970s many liberal Americans thought Carter's devotion to scripture
off-putting, leading to what they called 'a weirdness factor'. Furthermore
Carter was very much a centrist and a Southerner, which were always two strikes
against him during the 1970s anyway.
Like all institutions organized
religion is something the traditional progressive considers just something that
is used to mislead the masses, just like military service and patriotism, and
has always caused them to view them with contempt. That this has given an
opening to Republicans that they used on the voters for half a century is
something that they also choose to ignore.
3. The Republicans have gerrymandered
the system so thoroughly that there is no point to even trying to compete in
certain districts.
It's very hard to argue this basic
truth, particularly in the face of the mid-decade gerrymandering that
Republican states forced down legislatures in states like Texas and Florida in
the past year, as well as what they've done ever since 2010. When the right will gleefully refer to the
way they redraw map as 'ratf---ing' it's hard not to argue how corrupt they've
been. The thing is we've seen evidence in the 2020s that there are ways for
Democrats to overcome these obstacles and we got the biggest proof of it this
cycle.
Reality: The left doesn't want to
compromise and try to win conservative votes.
As has been made abundantly clear
during the last decade members of the Squad such as Ilhan Ohmar and AOC have
had a hostile relationship with Blue Dog Democrats such as Jared Golden and
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez as well as swing district Democrats such as Laura
Gillen and Tom Suozzi. That these
Democrats had to win Republican votes in order to be reelected – something none
of the Justice Democrats or DSA candidates ever have to worry about – is
something that in the minds of the left should not be a factor. One must do the
moral thing and if the voters in your district don't get that, well, they're
just dumb.
This is part of the antiestablishment
mindset that the left has always had, never mind that once you're elected to
Congress you are de facto part of the establishment. That these Democrats are needed to help build
the majority to even try and get the votes in order to even try and pass some
of the legislation the left wants is not relevant to Justice Democrats and DSA
members. That it's been dragging down the majorities in both Houses of Congress
ever since 2018 is another fact they refuse to acknowledge but the DNC could
not.
4. Too much power is given to states
where 'nobody lives'.
Even before the 2016 election the left
was very big on how 'unfair' it was that DC and Puerto Rico weren't represented
in Congress and argued how much more population they had then smaller and
usually more conservative states. Much of this was legitimate considering how
the way Mitch McConnell had essentially ground the gears of democracy to the
hall by using the filibuster.
The problem was even after 2016 the
Democrats still had a presence in many of these conservative states. Heidi
Heitkamp was representing North Dakota, Ben Nelson was still representing
Nebraska, Jon Tester was still serving Montana and Claire McKaskill was still
representing Missouri. Democrats could win in these states and were still
there.
Reality: The left hates flyover
country.
There's a more judicious way to say
this, particularly how urban America has always looked down on rural America
but increasingly during the last decade the left has developed a 'red states
bad, blue states good' mentality. They seemed to rejoice about how many states
that were led by Republican governors and senators were doing much worse at so
many levels then those of blue states. The fact that minorities, women, LGBTQ+
and other Democrats lived in these states along with all the MAGA people and no
doubt suffered as much by these policies – more than they would in blue states
– never seemed to enter that consideration. They seemed to rejoice at how many
people were migrated from these states into urban areas, never thinking for a
moment that some of them might be Republicans as well.
By their own definition the people in
these states needed the leadership of progressives in order to be saved from
the decades of Republicans who were using them solely for political ends and
didn't care if they suffered. But there was never even a trace of empathy for
the people in Alabama or Idaho, only the idea that they were collectively
reaping what they sowed.
5. The Electoral College has cheated
the people of Democratic Presidents.
Reality: See Number 4.
This argument has faded slightly in
the aftermath of the 2024 election where Trump managed to win his biggest
popular and electoral majority in his three runs. But I have little doubt it
will pick up again the closer we get to 2028.
The left never got over the robberies
of 2000 and 2016 each time arguing that the Democrats won the popular vote. In
both cases the correct response was "California won the popular vote for
the Democrats." In 2000 Al Gore won the popular vote of George W. Bush by
about 500,000 votes but carried California by 1.3 million votes by far the
biggest margin Gore had in any of the states he carried. In 2016 Hilary Clinton
won the popular vote over Donald Trump by over 3 million votes but won California
by nearly 4.3 million votes the largest margin by any Democrat since 1936. I
don't remember anyone pointing that out during the next four years.
I understand this part: the Democrats
have been struggling with the label of being coastal elites for decades and it
doesn't help that both of results in these elections spell out their biggest
flaws. But it also gave weight to the left's sincere belief that the people
really wanted Democratic (read progressive) leadership and it was only an
antiquated system that the right was rigging that kept them in place. In their
minds autopsies of the 2016 election or indeed any election Democrats lost was
unnecessary: Republicans could only win by cheating. In other words do exactly
what the left has been preaching and the wins will come. That this was proven
disastrously wrong in 2024 did nothing to change the left's approach.
Now after the results of midterms have
unfolded it's clear how each one of these progressive bubbles has been popped.
- The Democratic Party has won more
races in the South both at a
Congressional and state level in nearly thirty years, most of them in states
that were deep in the heart of Dixie. Annie Andrews won a Senate seat in South
Carolina, the first time a Democrat has in 28 years. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first
African-American woman in history to be elected governor when she won the
governor's race in Georgia. Scott Colom is on the verge of becoming the first
African-American to win a Senate seat in Mississippi since Reconstruction.
Roy Cooper's win North Carolina has
reshaped the Congressional delegation in that state where it seems like it will
have a majority Democratic Congressional delegation. Combined with Jon Osoff's
landslide reelection in Georgia, it's clear the Democrats can win in the South.
- Seven of the Democrats who won
elected office this cycle were ministers or pastors. The most prominent is Adam
Hamilton, leader of the biggest church in Kansas who has become the first
Democrat to win a Senate seat since 1932. James Talarico, the Democratic
Party's new hero for his triumph in Texas, has freely used the gospel while
campaign.
In addition many of the freshman democrats
in Congress have campaigned on their background in the military, including Cait
Conley in New York and Rebecca Bennett in New Jersey. All of this contrasts
tremendously with the majority of the Justice Democrats and DSA members, the
vast majority of whom are activists.
-One of the biggest stories of
election night is just how much the radical gerrymandering of so many states
blew up in the Republican's faces. This is true not just in Texas and Florida,
where the most public abuses took place, but also in Alabama and Tennessee.
More importantly to this point 52 Democrats have flipped seats that were
overwhelmingly Republican for decades. By contrast the DSA, which was
considered the big story of the primary season, have a grand total of eight
members for the next Congress. The Blue Dog Democrats alone have fourteen new
members – and they may change immense as the New Congress takes shape.
- In the aftermath of 2024, there were
no Democratic Senators in states Trump carried remaining. After Tuesday there
are already six Democrats in those states and by the time all the votes are
counted there will likely be two more: Scott Colom in Mississippi and of course
Mary Peltola in Alaska.
The Democrats also flipped
Congressional seats in many red states, including three of the four in Iowa,
one in South Carolina, one in Missouri, one in Montana, Utah and Nebraska. In
addition the Democrats flipped the governor's race in Texas (naturally)
Georgia, Iowa and Ohio. Even the state everyone was sure they would lose – Kansas
is looking like it will stay in the Democrats hands.
-In 2016 the Democrats had just 16 states
under gubernatorial control. Ten years later they now control 28 governorships
a majority for the first time since 2006.
As was recording these 28 states control 392 electoral votes. Of
the major electoral prizes on the map only Florida managed to keep a Republican
governor – and not by that much.
And keep in mind in this entire
election the Republicans didn't flip a single Democrat Senate seat, governor's
race and look like they might flip at most 2 or three Democratic seats. All
their gerrymandering, all the money spent, everything they did to rig the system
and it was nearly the extinction level event that Ron Desantis said it was.
It remains to be seen if this has
stalled much of whatever momentum there has been for left-wing organizations
like the DSA and the Justice Democrats; what is clear is that the media that
has given it so much of the oxygen that has driven it in the decade since
Bernie Sanders' primary campaign is basically considering a footnote in the
aftermath of the results.
The best example of this came in Nithya
Raman's victory in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Just one year ago Zohran Mamdani's
victory for a democratic socialist in New York City had the media's attention
for weeks and months after election day. Now another democratic socialist has
done the same in an even larger city – and it has been regulated to an
afterthought in almost every major network this week. The media has been focusing the entire week waiting
to see how Mississippi and Alaska turn out, they could give a damn about what's
happening in LA.
That's the clearest sign as to how
little the left now matters in the national media sphere. For months the world
was convinced that Abdul El-Sayed would be either the savior or damnation of
the Democratic Party. By the time he won at 3 A.M. early Wednesday morning,
everyone wanted to talk to James Talarico or Adam Hamilton instead. It took
until Friday for MSNBC to talk to a Justice Democrat/DSA winner – Chris Rabb –
and when they did they illustrated how many districts the Democrats had flipped
in comparison to how many the DSA had won. All the discussion of Congress was about how Democrats
in both houses were planning to work together, now that the left could be
regulated to a statistical insignificance in the House and how Adam Hamilton
made it clear he wanted to be the best friend of Jerry Moran, the same thing
John Fetterman had been doing when he worked with his Republican colleague Dave
McCormick for the good of Pennsylvania.
There has been an unprecedented
historic landslide, a sea change in American politics. And it must bug the hell
out of the left that it not only went against everything they've been preached
about America for decades but also that the rest of the country, never mind the
Democratic Party, cares much less about what they have to say then they
did a week ago. I have no illusions the left will be any less loud and
obnoxious then they have before last week, but I take great joy in the fact that
the entire country made their voices heard and that the left's opinion was very, very small
compared to everyone else's. Let's hope that it lasts for all our sakes.
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