Outcomes, Process, And 2022

How To View The Past

Part of the reason I was so surprised by Wisconsin going red in 2016 was the fact that it had voted blue in every Presidential election since 1988, which I blindly assumed meant that it would vote for Hillary Clinton. The same logic applied to Pennsylvania and Michigan (with the difference being HW Bush won those states), but that logic was incredibly moronic in Wisconsin, a state where Democrats had won by sub 1% two of those times, and only won by more than 6% once, at least before the Obama era. I assumed, just because it hadn’t flipped, that it wouldn’t, as opposed to understanding that Democrats had gotten lucky to have two coin flips - 2000 and 2004 - come up blue both times. Think about how much differently we would have felt about Wisconsin going into 2016 and 2020 if Bush had gotten it once or both times, and how much it was a function of luck that Bush lost by about 6000 votes the first time and 11000 the second time. But it went blue, so we all just sort of skipped over that.

The same thing is happening now with North Carolina, where the fact that Democrats consistently lose the state’s federal offices is held up as some proof that they cannot win the state, as if that is some infallible rule, as opposed to a matter of circumstance, and in some ways, bad luck. These things are more luck than anyone wants to admit, and just because Democrats have lost federal statewide office since 2008 does not mean they will forever more, and yet, people seem inclined to suggest that North Carolina is a longshot that Democrats can’t win.

Remember how, before January, Democrats had lost every Georgia runoff ever? Remember how David Axelrod went on CNN and told people at 6PM on election day that Democrats had done worse in 8 of 8 Georgia runoffs, and that it would be a very hard hill to climb? The thing is, I clown on that Alexrod quote a lot - like, all the damn time - but he didn’t say anything untrue in that statement, he just said something that lacked both a historical context for why and a proper understanding of where we were that time, and that streak ended up getting broken as both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their Senate seats. Again, nothing he said was untrue, but a lot of what he said was irrelevant, and it ended up being irrelevant. What happened in the 90s ended up not mattering to the result in 2021, because things have changed in a permanent way.

We look a lot at outcomes, and not at how those outcomes were achieved. This is leading plenty of people to (wrongly) assume that Sherrod Brown is a strong candidate who could possibly win again in 2024, when in reality, he did so well in 2018 because the NRSC and Senate Leadership Fund left town months out and he got to outspend his paper candidate by $20M+. I mean, sure, if that happens again in 2024, sure, Sherrod will win again, but that won’t happen, and that’s why his massive overperformance is a mirage. But in the same way, the idea of how the GOP are going to waltz home in 2022 is also just built on this idea of outcomes, and it feels like it could end the same way.

I am not saying that North Carolina will flip, or that Democrats will hold the House, but the idea that they’re substantial underdogs for either isn’t defensible if you look at how 2020 played out and why Democrats did so badly in 2014. If you’re actually interested in thinking critically about a midterm where low-propensity Trump supporters won’t turn out, and one in which the Global Fucking Realignment means that turnout effects with whites mean we will be in a much stronger position than in 2014, then you come to the conclusion that 2022 is a perfectly winnable midterm for Democrats, and that Cheri Beasley is at worst a coinflip to win the seat. If you realize that Democrats just need to activate Black turnout and hold Biden supporting educated whites, you realize that the task in front of them is not some Herculean effort, but actually eminently doable - which is not to say that it will happen, but that it might happen.

Head to North Carolina, and you see a very, very obvious path forward - if Beasley can boost Black turnout, and we can hold in the educated white areas of the metros, Democrats can easily overturn the 2020 margin in the state, especially as Trumpian whites in the white parts of the east of the state fall out of the electorate, as they have every single time Donald Trump is not on the ballot. Now, is it unreasonable to suggest a Black candidate can boost rural Black turnout in a southern state? I mean, Warnock just did it, and Beasley’s campaign seems to understand what they need to do to win, so it is certainly a justifiable presumption. The case for why the GOP will win the state seems to just be “because they always win it”, an argument that they seem to ignore when it comes to Nevada, which last elected a Republican to statewide office in 2012 and is more Biden-friendly than North Carolina is GOP-friendly. 

If you actually want intellectual rigor, and not just bland platitudes, then you have to actually think not just about what happened in the past but why it did, and whether that past means anything or not. Sometimes it does, but more often than not things change. A rigid assumption about how past partisanship intersects with future electoral outcomes would have led you to think Hillary's blue wall would hold in 2016, that Labour's red wall would hold in 2019, that David Perdue would still be a Senator, and that Democrats would have won Florida in 2020 - or, at least, that it wouldn't have sprinted to the right on a night when the nation moved left. You know what all those things had in common? They were all wrong. Understanding why things happened the way they did - as opposed to starting and ending conversations with the outcomes - would make a lot of us wrong less often.