US Reset: New York 19 And Democratic Surges

Is Reversion To The GOP Inevitable?

If you asked me on the day the US Supreme Court found Dobbs to be constitutional – and therefore overthrowing Roe – whether or not Democrats would get a bump from it, I would have said yes. I wrote for TheLines that Monday that Democrats were Senate favourites for a reason – a call that was mocked by some then and looks downright prescient now. The next week, I tipped Democrats to win the special election in New York 19, which came through on Tuesday. (I also tipped Liz Truss, so my betting tips this summer have been solid, if you’re not following those.)

The thing about all of this is that there is a risk for Democrats and Democratic-aligned thinkers – of thinking that this trend will continue evermore, and there is a real risk that the optimism gets out of whack with the data. It’s certainly the case that at all times you need to build in safeguards to your optimism, especially in a country where polling is so fundamentally unserious as America, but even with a historical polling miss correction in a Senate model, it’s still really hard to see how the GOP win.

The thing I worry about with my projections is that I’m fucking this up again, a perfectly reasonable fear based on my track record of calling American elections – and even though I’ve seen the Dobbs bounce coming pretty clearly, I’m still utterly terrified that I’m somehow missing something and that actually the usual American patterns – of polls overstating Democrats and of the out party winning in the midterms – will reassert themselves between now and polling day.

I’m confident that an election held today would go really, really well for Democrats – 52 or 53 Senate seats and the House is a pure coinflip. The thing is, the election isn’t today and there are still 10 weeks to go before this cycle ends, which could be incredible for Democrats or horrible.

The thing that keeps me optimistic, however, is the thing I’m (mostly) very good at, which is Canadian elections – and the lesson that Erin O’Toole shows for anyone who thinks that the GOP will be able to pivot out of their crisis.

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In 2017, Erin O’Toole ran for the Conservative leadership in Canada on a platform of moderation and a unity ticket/second preference swap with Lisa Raitt.

In 2020, Erin O’Toole outflanked Peter MacKay for being, essentially, not conservative enough on route to winning the leadership.

In the 2021 election, he tried to straddle the line between his (anti-vaccine, anti-mandate, anti-lockdown) right flank and his (suburban, well-off, socially liberal) left flank and lost seats in the process.

O’Toole’s problem was, once he got to the 2021 election with the positions he had previously taken, he had no viable strategy. When he tacked to his left, he pissed off the People’s Party and shredded his credibility. When he failed to answer questions about vaccine policy in a yes or no way, he was called a fraud. When he had no answer for days on a Liberal gun control measure, he left everyone unhappy. And in the process, he was fucked.

Whether or not O’Toole had a good campaign is entirely dependent on the baseline you use – if you compared to 2019, it was a bad night – they lost seats, they lost votes, and they did so to a government that had another ethical scandal and had lost their Finance Minister to it – and did so at an election where the NDP was stronger, and their leader (at least in theory) was better equipped for the job.

If you compared it to the comically big leads the Liberals had in July 2021, then sure, it was a great job, because they would have won ~90 seats if the election was August 1st and they ended up at 119.

If this sounds like Blake Masters, then it should – he is in an O’Toole-esque knot, because if he moderates, he fucks over his credibility and shreds his integrity, but sticking with his deeply unpopular stance on abortion is completely unacceptable in a pro-choice state. The problem for Masters isn’t that a pivot is necessarily bad (although I wouldn’t have done it), it’s that the GOP’s real problems aren’t going to go away any time soon with one well timed pivot or campaign shakeup – and you can make the case they’ve been fucked from the moment Dobbs came down.

Masters faced two unenviable decisions, given that he had forcefully endorsed the idea of fetal personhood – basically making abortion murder – at a federal level. He either had to stick with his deeply, deeply unpopular views, or make an ass out of himself and hope people liked the outcome of the flip flop more than the fact it was a flip flop. He chose the latter, claiming to now support abortion up to 15 weeks, and trying to argue that the Democrats are the real extremists on abortion.

The problem is, it ain’t working. Democrats aren’t the ones who are telling 16 year old parentless children that they have to carry a baby. They aren’t the ones forcing 10 year olds to have to cross state lines because they didn’t want to carry their rapist’s child. They aren’t the ones nomination fucking psychopaths like Tudor Dixon in Michigan, who opposes rape and incest exemptions because the child can sometimes help heal the rape victim’s trauma.

Every single week is a new drip drip drip of horrific policies that are the direct consequence of the GOP being the dog that caught the car. They overturned Roe, they won – and now Blake Masters is having the Senate Leadership Fund cut $8M out of the state because a GOP pollster in Arizona found him down 10%. They’re having to spend $28M in Ohio because of this shit. The abortion rights referendum in Michigan is up 43%, according to today’s poll.

The problem for the GOP is that they’re running fucking horrible candidates everywhere and they can’t find a new message, because their last one was “hIgH gAs PrIcEs” and now gas prices in the US have fallen for two straight months and July saw no further price increases on a month to month level. Now, they have nothing, because they’re scrambling for one quick fix to solve all their problem. Their problem is, it would be inventing a time machine and not filling the RBG seat, and letting Roberts’ 15 week compromise become the new law of the land.

Now that the GOP have given Democrats this potent weapon, there’s not a hell of a lot of reasons why they’ll actually come back – they have history on their sides, but if the argument is that thermostatic public opinion hurts the party deemed responsible for seismic changes, then it ain’t gonna be Democrats who are losing from that. In the past Republicans have argued Democrats care too much about social issues and not enough about economics, but the GOP voted against cheaper insulin and cheaper prescriptions for seniors. The one poll we have which asked about the Student Loan decision suggested that only a third thought the decision gave too much money away, and the GOP are tying themselves into knots to argue it’s some political anchor for Democrats when it be a huge motivator for young, Democratic voters. You don’t believe me? Ted Cruz made the same fucking argument.

The GOP are not one quick fix away from a red wave. Are they still House favourites? Sure, but not hugely so, and there’s probably a fairly hard ceiling on the size of their majority at around 225 right now. But at the end of the day, all the talk of the GOP getting back to the position of June 2022 is a bunch of bullshit wrapped up as pseudo-science. Is that what the history says? Sure, but when was the last time the out party took away a constitutional right 4.5 months from an election.

Wait, never – so maybe, just maybe, this isn’t just 2014 redux.