Today is Veterans Day, a federal holiday and a day off from school, and normally we wouldn’t run a new piece. But this continues to be a critical moment for shaping public understanding of the momentous electoral events that just unfolded, and we didn’t want to leave you high and dry.
I also think it sometimes does a bit of violence to the complexity of events to sweep everything into a totalizing narrative. The overall composition of the House Democratic caucus is shifting decidedly to the center, but you’ll also see the biggest and most empowered insurgent left group in recent history.
So, because many things are true at once, here are 23 somewhat scattered thoughts on both the results and the narrative. We’ll be back with a full article on Thursday.
Most of the candidate quality debate happens among Democrats, so the focus tends to be on the differences between Democrats. But even in defeat, Susan Collins is clearly a stellar electoral performer. Republican Governors Phil Scott and Kelly Ayotte survived a blue tsunami. If you look up Dem-side 2024 wins-above-replacement ratings, you’d think Angela Alsobrooks is a freakishly bad politician, but that’s actually Larry Hogan being a freakishly good one, even though he also lost.
One of Donald Trump’s largest impacts on American politics has been saddling the Republican Party with a bunch of bad Senate candidates. We remember the ones who lost, like Ken Paxton, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, and Darline Graham. But Julia Letlow, who won, also seems very weak, and JD Vance was an underperformer in his one election.
I think the left is on the run in the post-election takes game, largely because they got arrogant about their media echo chamber and made the Bond villain play of explaining their plan in advance. The D.S.A. told people they were hoping for a narrow House majority so they could squeeze Hakeem Jeffries, and A.O.C. told a fundraiser that she was going to spin El-Sayed winning Michigan by any margin as debunking all electability concerns, so analysts were ready.
Some people wonder why I’ve been so dogged about this, but doggedness and preparation matter. There was a good Aaron Blake article in CNN about progressive underperformance, and Nate Cohn also explained it well on Derek Thompson’s podcast. Word is getting out because commonsense Democrats are more organized than before.
As well as the midterms went for Democrats, they could have gone better. Imagine if John Bel Edwards had been the nominee in Louisiana, if Seth Bodnar had just run in the Democratic primary in Montana, and if Gary Peters had run for re-election in Michigan and all the money spent there was plowed into Florida instead. I think that’s very plausibly three more seats.
S.N.L. did a cold open sketch over the weekend where the joke was that it’s funny to imagine anyone giving Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer credit for Democrats’ strong performance — I don’t think that’s fair (they did well!), but it’s a real assessment of where we’re at as a party.
Ultimately, I think Jeffries and Schumer end up being poorly served by not having defeated challengers in order to secure or hold their posts after 2024. If there’d been a contested race where Schumer said, “Here’s my plan, it’s going to work” and then he’d won his contest and then his plan worked, he could say, “See — it worked!”
For that exact reason, I’d love to see an actual challenge this year. It would be great for someone to explain their plan to maximize Democratic gains on the 2028 Senate map and then for Schumer to explain what, if anything, he disagrees with about that plan. Ultimately, I doubt we’d actually see much disagreement, and this whole thing is kind of BS.
When people say the impact of ideology on electability is small, pay attention to the details. My read is that the gap between a progressive and an establishment Dem is small and that the gap between an establishment Dem and a moderate is small but that the prog/mod gap is actually pretty big because it’s a double gap.
Ideology, in my view, is about what positions you actually take, not a kind of ascriptive personal identity. Angie Nixon of the D.S.A. and ex-Republican David Jolly are two very different kinds of people, but they didn’t actually take different positions on the issues except for Israel, so they did pretty similarly. This is what you’d expect — Jolly did better, but not a lot better — if you think ideas matter. It’s not what you would expect if you think “progressive” and “moderate” are fixed personal characteristics.
Halina is too ethical to say this, but Colorado getting Dem supermajorities in the state legislature and electing Phil Weiser as governor is probably bad for the state. Colorado’s residents benefited from a moderate form of Democratic Party governance under Hickenlooper and Polis, and there’s a big risk now of the state adopting some of the more dysfunctional policies of blue states. There’s no electability problem with Weiser, but a more moderate governor would be better on the merits.
Sometimes good politicians are a little bit subpar as electoral performers, and that’s fine! I really like what Kathy Hochul is cooking in New York, but her results were slightly bad. New York is not a swing state, and in fact, beating Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman on Long Island might be enough of a political show of force to shock New York Republicans out of their turbo-NIMBY mode. I wish I could factually say she’s a huge overperformer, since I like her a lot. But it isn’t true, so I don’t say it, because I’m not a dishonest person.
I think the question of which people can say accurate things is ultimately more important than these modest differences in performance.