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Yesterday CNN headlined that President Biden returned to a Democratic “nightmare”. The Times Peter Baker said Biden was returning to a “different country”. There’s no doubt Democrats had a rough night. They lost a close governor’s race in Virginia, a state they have come to see increasingly as home turf. They also narrowly lost control of the state House of Delegates which they first took control of in 2019. And while Democrat Phil Murphy won in New Jersey, Republicans made a very close race of it, in large part by a big drop off in Democrats showing up to vote.
As I wrote Tuesday night, this isn’t a surprising result. The President’s popularity is underwater. Polls say the public sees the country going in the wrong direction – a reality regardless of whether you or I think it is an accurate perception. But let’s also get real: the incumbent President’s party has consistently lost these two governorships every cycle for more than 30 years. The one exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013. Murphy’s victory in New Jersey sees the first Democrat reelected governor in that state in 44 years.
After this result, Republicans are out taunting and bullying as though the Democratic party didn’t exist anymore it saw such a devastating result. The national political press, which I’ve argued remains wired for the GOP, routinely portrays Democratic reverses as existential threats to the party itself. Electoral reverses mean their basic policies are wrong and that their collective perceptions of the electorate are faulty. I saw another CNN chyron that read “Democrats face reckoning after misjudging the nation’s mood.”
In a word, drama, drama, DRAMA!
But to a great extent they are mirroring the emotional tenor of Democrats themselves: the doom and gloom, the drama, the recurring final step on the road to oblivion. They are also demographically and sociological similar to Democratic party elites: affluent, educated and cosmopolitan. It was a rough night. Mostly because it’s a warning sign about next year’s midterm elections in which Democrats face a host of structural challenges which would be the case even if the President’s polls were at 55% approval and not 45% or below.
But the midterms didn’t happen yet. The way national press treats Democrats is to a great degree a mirror of how Democrats treat and understand themselves and the glass-half-empty mentality that is ingrained in party. When Republicans win, they stomp and bully and gloat. When they lose they claim they’ve been cheated and double down on how much they’ll bully and taunt and gloat after their inevitable victory next time.
This comes out most vividly and comically in party solicitation emails. Dem email campaigns almost all come back to: “All hope is lost! Send money!”. Trump Era GOP emails almost all amount to: “Where the fuck is the money? Trump is asking…”
This is not only about weak knees. It is also rooted in the differing sociologies of the two parties. White Christian conservatives are the dominant force in the Republican party and have been for decades. Not everyone in the GOP is white, Christian and conservative of course. But if you’re in the GOP you’re in their house. And what they say goes. Those folks know what they want and when the electorate chooses not to give it to them deciding to want something different isn’t really the first option that comes to mind or even an option that ever comes to mind. The Democratic party, on the contrary, is a coalition of fairly disparate groups: white liberals, African-Americans, left-wing progressives, Hispanics, the LBGTQ community, organized labor, women, immigrants. There is a constant intramural struggle over who should be running the show and whose issues get first dibs. The party’s achilles heel is that every reverse triggers a re-litigation and second-guessing of whether the mix was right, who should have been calling the shots and whose issues should be on top.
And yet a lot of it does come down to weak knees, whatever their roots in the structural dynamics of the party and its coalitional nature. It is also rooted in the qualities people on the center-left value most. Empiricism and at least an idealized version of civic democracy are rooted in skepticism and doubt. The taproots of Authoritarianism are confidence and aggression. We don’t come to these things, either side of the political spectrum, by accident.
The only answer or path to repair is … how can I put it? Well … really to grow the fuck up. Dust ourselves off, try to build and internalize an ethic of strength and resilience even if it is only at first within ourselves.
