US Election Week 2020

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't really buy that Schumer's comments will have any impact on those races at all. The fundamentals for the Dems to win either race were poor to begin with, and it is not amazingly likely there is much they can change about it. Ossoff has ran a few campaigns now and come up short a few times, he's not going to cut the sort of inspiring figure that I think is needed to make the "New South" coalition that delivered Georgia for Biden come out for him. I think he should try to get really close to Stacy Abrams organization and hope for the best, but I just don't see it.

Now Warnock I think actually has a much better chance, I think he will still lose simply because Democrat turnout in special elections is something you would historically be very foolish to count on. But Warnock being black, a bit socially conservative, a pastor, much more charismatic, I think he's the sort of candidate that can win in the "New South." It also helps that Loeffler isn't particularly appealing either, in Ossoff's race Purdue is kind of boring but not deeply offensive.

I don't really think the idea that Democrats should be running these campaigns acting like it's a secret that they will determine who controls the U.S. Senate is particularly smart. Voters may be low information as a rule, but they are not that low information, as a whole. People in Georgia know what they're voting for, and they know the implications. The last thing they're going to be talking about is Chuck Schumer.

For what it's worth I think this habit the GOP has of running ads in congressional races demonizing the top Dem in the House (Pelosi) and in the Senate (Schumer) simply because they are more liberal than people in the flyover states, has never been particularly smart. I think it's just what happens when you route too much money through the same right wing ad firms over and over again. They ran ads against Pelosi in basically every contested race at every level of Government from 2016-2020, you could certainly cherry pick some races where Republicans did good and say it was because of those ads, but the evidence I see suggests very few voters actually vote in an Iowa Congressional race based on what Nancy Pelosi is doing. A lion's share of the GOP strategy in the '18 midterms was anti-Pelosi advertising and it basically failed for them across the board.

I think instead the best evidence is that the Democrats do better when they focus on the traditional political paths to doing better: good candidates, ground game, money allocated towards the appropriate races, a broadly cohesive national message, and good local messaging. In 2018 they basically did all of that and did very well. In 2020 I would argue they didn't, the Biden campaign ran pretty damn well to elect Joe Biden. I don't know that it was engaged in the sort of ground game, message building and etc that would have helped House candidates and Senate candidates. Biden's strategy to let Trump "punch himself out" and dominate the airwaves was probably smart at defeating Trump, but I think you had a real messaging void for the entire Dem party because of it, which may have helped Biden, but probably hurt down ballot candidates who were facing a different sort of reality. Also of course--Trump generated a genuine red wave to go along with the genuine blue wave that came out to defeat him--and because of the geographic distribution of these voters it meant that even in states where Biden outperformed Hillary and won, you had greater concentrations of Republicans in certain areas that likely doomed Democratic congressional candidates who may have done everything right because their districts were just much Trumpier in composition than in 2018.

FWIW some more data coming out that suggests Dems need to just focus on fundamentals is emerging with the Latino vote. In the Rio Grande Valley and in Miami-Dade, both areas where Republicans courted Latino votes and Democrats did poorly. In the Rio Grande valley the simple effect of Republicans courting Latinos and Dems doing nothing was on full display, it's not shocking that voters you don't court at all vote for you in lower numbers. In Miami-Dade, Biden certainly put money into the state, but there were articles going back to June saying the GOP's full court press in Miami-Dade was huge and Biden was doing minimal to resist it. He started throwing more money into the area in September or so, but Miami talk radio (which is overwhelmingly right wing and conservative on Spanish language stations) really counter-messaged against Biden with Biden himself and his surrogates more or less having no real counter message to present at all. It's really not surprising to me given how they ran it, how Biden underperformed with Latinos in South Florida. I think Biden was smart to not really push hard in Texas, it's a huge state and thus expensive to run in, and was never going to go blue unless Biden had already secured a massive electoral college win, so diverting resources from must win states to Texas was questionable. But Biden clearly wanted to win Florida and was right to want that, since it's a knockout punch versus a Republican President, and I think they campaigned poorly there.

Then you go to Arizona where Latino enthusiasm for Democrats in Maricopa county was extremely high and gave Biden his victory--he pulled 75% in some majority Latino precincts. The Biden campaign ran really aggressively in Arizona and courted Latino voters, and the Trump campaign didn't run well there (to be honest in terms of traditional campaigning effort, Florida was where the Trump campaign did best and they also have in some respects been campaigning in Florida for four years.)

I think there's positives and negatives for both sides to draw in 2020. The biggest positive for Republicans is they've now proven in a true turnout election, they can be competitive. I think they should genuinely rethink their efforts to make voting harder, I actually think it is costing them votes. They have also learned if you go out and campaign for those voters, you can increasing minority vote share for the GOP. In many ways this is a good thing not just for the GOP but for the country--a less white GOP likely helps diversify the party not just in race but in mentality, which it sorely needs not for political purposes but for "not being a decaying cesspit of a political organization" purposes.

The biggest take away for Democrats should be that the time to just coast on "Demographics is Destiny" is not 2022 or 2024, I don't even doubt the demographic argument, I just think the GOP has shown their white working class base can basically turn any election into a coin flip right now and likely we're talking another ten years before that changes such that it becomes entirely non-viable (at which point the GOP  has to cobble together a widening coalition, most likely built on the share of the Hispanic and black population that is socially conservative.) If the Dems run an election in 2022 or 2024 like they did this year, they will do very, very badly. 2018 was in many respects a healthcare election and it won the Dems a lot of seats. I think Democrats need a singular and non-controversial topic like that to do well in elections, and they need to pair it with well selected local candidates.

[The Brain]

Trump wins NC.

Isn't NC a Shaggy song?

[crazy canuck]

I'm with AR. I get what you're saying but the messenger and messaging matter and this still seems like an own goal.

Would Ossof and Warnock invite Schumer to come and campaign in Georgia? No - so he should just shut up beyond "we've got great candidates and I look forward to working with them after they've won". There's no need for him to insert himself into this.

I am pretty sure the people of Georgia already knew a Democratic senate would mean Democratic legislation getting passed through Congress.   And that has got to be the way they get their vote out.  Want real change?  Want to undue all the Trump harm.  Give us control of the Senate.

[Sheilbh]

He really goes on a journey in this tweet:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
For years the Dems have been preaching how unsafe and rigged our elections have been. Now they are saying what a wonderful job the Trump Administration did in making 2020 the most secure election ever. Actually this is true, except for what the Democrats did. Rigged Election!

[Josquius]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

[Caliga]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

Not to my knowledge?  Hillary wasn't saying the 2016 election was rigged, he was.

[Valmy]

It is just whataboutism. Even if the Democrats constantly accused people of election fraud without evidence that hardly justifies Donald Trump doing it.

[The Brain]

Trump might be spouting nonsense.

[Barrister]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

He's referencing the Russians in 2016.

[Razgovory]

Democrats pushed for a election security bill a while back.  No one said it was "rigged", though.  Republicans were opposed to it because it required campaigns to alert the FEC if a foreign national tried to give a campaign money.

[PDH]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

He's referencing the Russians in 2016.

Stop being an enabler, he is just spouting out idiotic BS.

[Barrister]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

He's referencing the Russians in 2016.

Stop being an enabler, he is just spouting out idiotic BS.

I'm just trying to be a Trump-decoder.

When Trump says "the Democrats claimed elections are rigged" he's talking about how the Democrats raised warnings about how the Russians were interfering in the 2016 election.   The fact that the Russians were interfering doesn't factor into his reasoning.

[Valmy]

I just want to point out nobody was claiming that therefore Hillary Clinton won unless they were talking about the popular vote. Because the person who gets the most votes winning elections hurts farmers.

[grumbler]

The dems have been saying elections are rigged?

He's referencing the Russians in 2016.

How could you possibly know what he was refencing?  Even he didn't know what he was referencing! 

[grumbler]

I just want to point out nobody was claiming that therefore Hillary Clinton won unless they were talking about the popular vote. Because the person who gets the most votes winning elections hurts farmers isn't how the US Constitution arranged the election of the US President.

FTFY