Sunday Strategy: Dems Need To Keep A Tight 2022 Map

Have Things Changed In A Permanent Way

"Take me away, see I've got to explain

Things they have changed in such a permanent way"

In the good old days - also known as those halcyon days of *checks notes* 2016 - your incentives as a political party were to play a very wide board when it came to the House of Representatives. With higher ticket splits and lower polarization, there was a real argument that candidate quality was more important, and that campaigns could make or break politics. It was in many ways a Democratic failure to play a wide map that meant they did so mediocre in the House in 2016, as the party didn't even bother to run a candidate in the Texas 32nd, which Hillary ended up winning. This sort of failure led to 23 Hillary-House GOP seats popping up in 2016, part of the 35 seats that split their tickets. In 2020? That number was 16, and that's a large part of why Democratic gains in the House didn't materialize.

Yes, a lot of ink has been spilled on the Biden districts that went with a GOP member, but the more interesting story is how Democrats were genuinely interested in trying to play a very wide map in districts that ended up voting for Trump and then a House Republican. They were trying to win comfortably Trump districts like Indiana 5th and Minnesota 1st, trending blue districts like Texas 22nd and 24th, and even stretch targets like Virginia 5th and Pennsylvania 1st. Put more bluntly, Democrats - through House Majority PAC - put at least a million dollar investments in 15 seats in the final week of the 2020 campaign. 5 seats were Democratic holds, 8 were offensive targets, and the final two were the California 25th and New Jersey 2nd, seats won by Democrats in 2018 but represented by a Republican incumbent. These were the targets, the key seats that needed investments.

They lost 14 of those 15 seats, and plenty of the races weren't even close.

…

Now, some of those races were genuinely close, but I'm really glad that we spent almost double on beating Brian Fitzpatrick in suburban Philly as we did defending Joe Cunningham, only to lose by 13%. We spent over 3x the Cunningham total in the final week on beating Bob Goode and Lauren Boebert combined, neither of which got within 5%. Democrats got so excited about the prospects of playing a wide map that they didn't focus their resources on the more narrow band of targets they could actually win, instead of wasting their time on unwinnable nonsense.

The obvious counterpoint to all of this is that the Democrats were looking at the same map as everyone else was, which was one where there was a broad consensus the House GOP would lose a dozen seats, give or take. I get that, but even within that, it was still idiotic to spend more to shore up trying to beat Boebert than shoring up the Iowa 2nd, which we lost by 6 votes. Were we ever going to win the Michigan 3rd, or knock on John Katko, both of which got more money than D-held seats in southern New Mexico or any of the Iowa seats? Given we couldn't get within 6% in either seat, clearly not.

The case for a wide map made a lot of sense in the past, but things have changed in a permanent way - or, at least, for the foreseeable future. The number of competitive districts - because of gerrymandering, self-sorting, and polarization - are ever decreasing, and even in Canada, where polarization isn't as high and boundaries are drawn independently, the number of truly competitive districts is substantially lower now than before the 2019 Canadian election. Democrats just won't be able to win any meaningful number of substantially Trumpy, majority white working class areas, just as Republicans won't be making great advances into the territory currently held by the aforementioned Colin Allred or Jennifer Wexton in Virginia 10th. The ability to win wide swathes of opposition territory just isn't possible anymore, and it won't be for a while.

2022 will be won or lost on a dozen competitive seats, probably, between the nature of partisanship and the way maps are going to be redrawn. Democrats will need to avoid the 2020 trap again, because if they do not realize their errors from 2020, they'll make them again. No matter how good Twitter thinks a candidate is, the ability for candidates to outrun partisanship just isn't there anymore. It can be done, but even the sorts of results we find earth shattering - Fitzpatrick's 19% overrun, namely - were par for the course in the mid 00s. Even in 2016, Collin Peterson won his wildly Trumpian Western Minnesota district, while the same district tossed him by double digits this year. Nothing made Peterson a worse candidate between now and then, the tide just went out on him.

Pretending that political gravity doesn't exist - that there aren't ceilings on how well you can do compared to district partisanship, especially in terms of winning areas trending against you - will only end in tears for Democrats in 2022, and end the portion of the Biden term where he can actually do anything. If Democrats play a wide map, they risk losing the majority by their own stupidity. After all, things they have changed in a permanent way.