Sunday Strategy: 2022, And Cultural Comfort
How To Win The Right War In 2022
One of the things you inherently learn when you're gay is the concept of looking for safe spaces - not in the sense of ideological groupthink on college campuses, but spaces - and groups of people - where you can feel comfortable being yourself. There is an ingrained fear in every step you make, every room you're in, of the consequences of being wrong - of being too forward, of being yourself. If you're a gay man in a public space with your significant other, is this a place where you can feel comfortable being affectionate, being together, being no different than you'd be if you were straight, and your partner was a woman. It's exhausting, having to always be on guard, but it's the life chosen for me. It is what it is.
Funnily enough, the places in America - outside of San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC - where you can feel most comfortable aren't always Democratic strongholds. Southlake, Texas - where Mitt Romney nearly broke 80% of the vote in 2012, a Tarrant enclave full of well-off white social liberals, would have been much more culturally accepting of the kinds of measures of affection from gay people that often feel taboo, just because of the gender involved, than much of the formerly Democratic rust belt and Appalachian states, and that seems odd - but it's true.
Democrats lost a lot of ground in 2016 in those rural, rust belt/Appalachian places because Trump's messaging - when he had any - was actually effective. "NAFTA sucks, China is stealing our jobs, and that's why we need to Make America Great Again," wasn't a bad message, honestly - it's cultural comfort for the voters he needed to, and did, flip and excite. That cultural comfort also cannot be dissociated from the fact that I would not be caught dead showing that sort of affection in, to pick a county entirely at random, Ross County Ohio. But I would in Southlake, or Forsyth, or the Milwaukee collar counties.
If you want to know why Democratic gains with well-off white social liberals are here to stay, that's why. It's not hard, once you think of it in those terms. People who have no cultural discomfort with homosexuality - not the abstract concept of it, but literal displays of it, in real people - are not as willing to vote for the Republican Party anymore. They're just not, because the modern Republican Party - for all the rhetorical sophistry of some of the politicians - is full of people who do not feel comfortable around people like me, and that manifests in people with gay friends, and a comfort around homosexuality, bailing on the GOP. Until the GOP manages to fix that cultural problem, they're not going to make that ground back up.
By the same token, that is the reason that Democratic losses with cultural conservatives - both white and non-white - are probably relatively close to permanent too. We aren't getting back to Hillary numbers in the Rio Grande, or even her numbers in the aforementioned Ross County, Ohio, for a while, because of that same cultural discomfort. As the Democratic Party becomes more culturally monolithic around these sorts of social issues, the Democratic Party will lose the kinds of voters who would recoil - whether they'd ever admit it or not - at the sorts of soft comforts that a relationship often shows. You'd never feel comfortable with a quick kiss or even just a soft side hug in what so often get called Ancestrally Democratic areas, the sorts of things that would never cause someone to flinch if it were a man and a woman. And that is why the realignment isn't going to dissipate at either end.
This matters, because we will have new Congressional maps for 2022, three Senate seats that Democrats are squarely competitive in (and then, I guess, Ohio, maybe), and a whole lot of political terrain to cover. And I'm certain - as certain as I have ever been about anything in public - that many people will want to try and win back lost ground in the rural and exurban areas that we've lost in recent years. And my response to that is absolutely fuck no.
If the Democratic Party is to avoid the mistakes of 2020 - and yes, they made a lot of them - that process starts and ends with not making idiotic strategic decisions and totally misreading the map we are playing on, as they did in 2020. They should have lost the House, given how bad Democratic spending was targeted, but they just got lucky that the GOP fucked up as badly as they did. Remember, both the Republicans and the Democrats (through House Majority PAC) put 7 figure ad buys into suburban Philly's PA-01 in the final week of the campaign, a seat the GOP would win by *drumroll* 13%.
That's not a typo, we all were that stupid. We spent double the money to lose by 13 in that final week in suburban Philly as we did in SC-01, where everyone just assumed Joe Cunningham was home and dry (which, uh, wasn't true). We spent more on trying to stop Lauren Boebert in that final week than we did shoring up our actually vulnerable incumbents, because Democratic strategists definitely knew what they were doing the entire time.
If the Democrats make the same mistakes again, they'll lose the majority, pure and simple, and I can already see where the errors will be made. Democrats will prioritize the "Youngstown And Other Shit" district that the GOP draws in Ohio, they'll prioritize Boebert (again), they'll prioritize the redrawn Iowa 1st and 2nd, and depending on how New Jersey gets redrawn, they'll probably prioritize the south Jersey areas which Jeff Van Drew currently represents. They'll fall for candidates in places like the current Michigan 3rd and 6th, places with some characteristics of the places coming our way but not quite enough, and they'll fall for some Hillary +12, Biden +1 Cuban district in Miami that we have no chance in. The seeds of a potential Democratic failure already exist, because they'll go coalition shopping, trying to extend the gains in Forsyth and Southlake but also trying to wind the clock back in Youngstown and south Texas. Will it work? Of course not.
"Interesting argument, but I kinda think it overestimates the impact of the realignment," should probably go on my tombstone at this point, but I think everyone is understating it. Those words - respectfully said to me on Twitter by Nathaniel Rakich, in the context of my contention that the Midterm Penalty is dead - ring in my head, because I feel like the only person properly calibrating the realignment. And this is what the realignment is, at its core - people realigning along a cultural axis, around a cultural question.
The reason the realignment is global is that I'd feel much more secure showing that sort of affection in London's Putney constituency than I would in Sedgefield, in the red wall. I'd feel more comfortable showing affection for a man in Melbourne's wealthy seat of Kooyong than I would in northern Queensland's Longman. I'd feel more comfortable doing so in Milton in outer Toronto than I ever would in Wascana, Saskatchewan, lost by the Liberals in 2019 despite holding it even in the 2011 massacre. This isn't the only issue of cultural comfort, obviously, but it is one that clarified for me why I cannot see the realignment reversing itself.
Center the discussion of the 2022 midterms around a fundamental question - how do the GOP turn a D+4.5 national environment into a D+1 or a R-leaning year - and you see the GOP's huge looming crisis. They're going to lose some ground when low propensity, Trumpian whites and Hispanics don't turn out again (like they didn't in Virginia and Kentucky and Georgia and Louisiana and the 2018 midterms), and the vaunted "maybe this is the cycle the GOP get 15% of the Black vote" won't happen, so your answer is college educated, socially liberal whites need to swing, and swing hard. That's literally the only way the math adds up for the GOP.
When these voters are thought of as abstractions, as data points in a spreadsheet, sure, a 10% reversion - just back to 2016 levels of support - doesn't seem crazy. But when you actually think about who these voters are, you get to a point where it is kind of crazy to believe that the realignment - at either end - can be put back in the bottle. It can't, because the realignment is about cultural comfort, about people who genuinely do not care about the presence of gay people shifting left and those who just wish that was a thing that happened in other places, around other people, shifting right. Until either social attitudes rapidly change, or the GOP fully ditches their social conservatism, this sorting will continue. And Democrats who want to win the House in 2022 should focus on the places they can win, and not try and wind back the clock. They fucked around in 2020 with bad spending and planning decisions, and this time, we don't have the luxury of fucking it up again.