The Aftermath
The elections on Nov. 2, 2021, are a wake-up call; we must course-correct or face defeat in 2022.
There is no point in sugarcoating that the election results from Nov. 2 were bad for Democrats. Whether it’s losing the Virginia governor’s race, the House of Delegates, the narrow win in New Jersey, and a string of other contests across the country, these are elections that will undoubtedly have effects at the local level. These elections will also begin to shape the conversation on the national level about just how much trouble Democrats, and, by extension the country, is in with the 2022 midterm election right around the corner. It is critically important that we, as Democrats, do not allow this defeat to spiral out of control and instead remain disciplined in messaging and understand that even though the past is prelude and 2022 will undoubtedly be an uphill battle for Democrats, not all is lost.
It may be easy to dismiss someone when they say that not all is lost in the runup to a midterm election, but the fact is that up until last night 2017 and 2021 have been very different. When looking at elections that took place in 2017, Democrats overperformed by an average of 9 points in special elections that took place that year, barely missing a number of Congressional Districts that never should have been competitive in the first place. When you throw in Sen. Jones’ victory in Alabama, that average skyrockets to a 16-point overperformance. When you combined these data points with Democratic victories in state legislative races all across the country, it painted a very clear picture of the blue wave that was coming to sweep Republicans out of power in the 2018 midterms. What ultimately served as evidence that Republicans had a problem brewing was the margins of their victories; winning a district by only 3% of the vote when your party has historically won it by at least 15 is obviously cause for alarm. But what has been going on in 2021?
The picture in 2021 has so far been less clear than what it was in 2017. A good reason for that might be simply because we’ve had fewer special elections than in 2017. Due to the slim majorities in Congress, a lot of House and Senate talent that might otherwise have been tapped to take on cabinet roles remained in their respective chamber to hold down the fort, but we may still glean some information from those who were nominated. In Ohio, Congresswoman elect Shontel Brown underperformed HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge by 1.3%. But on the other hand, in New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury overperformed the 2020 margins of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland by 2.1%. If we look at other elections that took place earlier in the year, we find similar trends. In the California recall, Governor Newsom won by 61.9% of the vote, garnering as much support as when he was first elected in 2018 and in fact winning over 100,000 more votes, and only underperforming Biden by 1.5%. This is not the kind of electoral performance we saw in 2017 that could be expected from the formation of a wave year. However, it should be noted that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. Joe Biden does not create the same generalized fervor in the electorate that Donald Trump created, and because of this, the general feeling of electoral madness that drove the 2017 democratic overperformances is not something we should expect to see in these smaller special elections.
That brings us to the place where you could expect to see electoral overperformances: elections with statewide consequences such as the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races. As the smoke has cleared from the Virginia race, it is clear that Republican Glenn Youngkin has won the election by a little over 2%, and Republicans have flipped the House of Delegates in the state, flipping at least 5 seats. Prior to tonight’s election, Democrats held a 5-seat majority in that chamber of the Virginia State House.
The larger problem with regards to Virginia comes from the governor’s race. When looking at it on its own, the fact that Democrats lost the Virginia race may not seem problematic when one takes into consideration the fact that Virginia had a Republican governor eight years ago. This can be explained by the simple fact that polarization in this country has occurred asymmetrically; the bottom line is that more Republicans will only vote for Republicans than Democrats will only vote for Democrats. This, combined with the fact that Republicans on average field candidates that are more likely to be viewed as moderate than Democrats gives them an edge in gubernatorial contests, particularly in reliably blue states like Virginia. With this in mind it might be easy to cast aside any fears democrats may have of trouble brewing in Virginia, but this would be a mistake.
Even though results matter, margins matter just as much. For our purposes, McAuliffe winning by 1 and Youngkin winning by 1 is essentially the same because these margins represent an erosion of electoral power when compared to both Biden’s performance in 2020 and Northam’s performance in 2017. The current swing in the gubernatorial race is 11.4%. The swings are more pronounced in some of the House of Delegates races. In HD12, the swing was of 18 points, in HD75, the swing was of 7.4 points, in HD28 the swing was of 6.2 points and in HD83 the swing was of 2.8 points. Taken together, the average swing in the State, for seats that were flipped, was of 9.1 points. This is disastrous for Democrats at the statewide level, especially when you consider that Joe Biden won the State by 10 points. Applying these swings to the congressional level, even a minimal swing like what happened in HD83 is enough to cost us a congressional seat in VA 7, and a swing like the one in HD12, applied uniformly across the State, would flip the delegation from a 7-4 Democratic majority to a 7-4 Republican majority, completely eroding the democratic majority in the house. An average 9.1 swing across the state loses us at least two seats, VA07 and VA02, and makes VA10 uncomfortably close.
Lets turn to New Jersey. Biden won the State in 2020 by 15.8 points, a very healthy margin. Murphy won the 2017 gubernatorial race there at a similar 14.1 points. Flash forward four years and the story is different and uncertain. Murphy won the election by about 2.6%. New Jersey, much like Virginia, is no stranger to Republican governors, in fact, the governor of the State prior to Murphy was Chris Christy, known for famously taking down Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations in the 2016 primary, and more infamously, for his Bridgegate scandal. The swing from Joe Biden’s performance in the state is of about 15.17 points, larger, and much alarming, than the 11-point swing from the Virginia Gubernatorial race. The fact of the matter is that Virginia will get more play because it played more in the media, but if the Virginia results were a small tremor, the New Jersey results, regardless of who wins, should be taken as a massive 8.0 earthquake. The governor’s race should never have been this close in such a reliably democratic state. While there are no official results for the legislative races in the State, Republicans are currently ahead in at least four State Senate races for seats currently held by Democrats. Because of the volatility of the results in New Jersey, it is still unclear how things will pan out in there. However, if the final number in the State is anywhere near the 15.17-point swing that it currently stands in, this election, win or lose, should serve as a wakeup call for the party. We can’t be caught sleep walking into 2022.
It should be said that swings are never uniform, and an application of a uniform swing is mostly academic, but the fact of the matter is that democratic incumbents are vulnerable in the runup to the 2022 election and the party needs to take the necessary steps to either shore up these incumbents to beat back a potential republican wave in Virginia and elsewhere, be prepared to make up the difference elsewhere in the country (although its hard to see where these pickup opportunities exist), or be prepared to spend the foreseeable future in the minority.
None of us want to see Republicans retake the majority so the work ahead is arduous. I will be talking about what, in my opinion, Democrats need to do to avoid a disaster on election night less than a year from now, but the first step is to pass Build Back Better and show voters explicitly that the Democratic Congress delivers for them.