Now that we know pretty much where the election last week will end, I want to revisit the policy/behavioral economic stuff I wrote about leading up to the election. And, since I’ve gotten a few messages asking for takes on the results, I’ll include a hot takes section at the bottom.
Here was my measurement going into the election:
Maybe this will be one of the biggest landslide elections in history.
But, maybe it’s not.
Maybe pollsters are trying to figure out how to incorporate all the first time things into polls, and trying to correct for short-counting Republican votes in 2020 at the same time, and they aren’t quite hitting the mark. I honestly have no idea!
Republicans seem likely to win tonight, but with all the firsts the pollsters have to deal with, I wouldn’t call that a sure thing.
I have to admit that election night was one of those nights that made me feel a whole lot smarter than I actually am IRL. Some of the expert’s predictions just didn’t jive with real world data. I can’t tell you how many polls I saw where the pundits were saying “this looks like a total evisceration of the Democratic Party”, and then I read the actual data in the polls and thought, “this doesn’t really look all that bad.” My expectations were a slightly worse than normal showing for Republicans. Something along the line of keeping a 50-50 Senate and winning 18 or 20 seats in the house. But some of the first time issues pollsters were dealing with turned out to underplay the strength of Democrats in the election.
There is no way to candy coat this, last Tuesday was what I think to be the worst election result for Republicans in my entire life.
On election morning I wrote this to prime people for election night results:
What ‘normal’ would be here is if Democrats get about 44% of the total House vote, and lose somewhere in the 22-28 seat range. If, at the end of the night, Democrats win 48% of the vote, and lose 15 House seats that would be a pretty dang good night for Democrats. If Republicans win 53% of the vote and gain 35 House seats, that would be a pretty dang good night for Republicans…
For my money, that is where I would put the mark. The last time this set of states was on the ballot Republicans won 52 seats with only 42% of the total vote. Given that this year is expected to be a good year for Republicans (a Democratic President’s first midterm), if they don’t win 52 seats this it will be a bad night, even if they win the Senate.
In the House, Republicans are looking at gaining single digit seats (maybe they crack 10 or 11), and there is even a small chance they don’t get a majority at all. When the wave was predicting 35 seats, and normal would be 25, to get less than half of normal is a disastrous result as a party.
Republicans have now lost a Senate seat, and nearly lost Wisconsin too (more on that when I get to my hot takes). With Republican control of the Senate out of the question, and Brian Kemp not in a runoff to bring non-Maga Republicans to the polls, I would have a hard time being convinced that Georgia isn’t already wrapped up for Warnock. Meaning, in a year that 52 Senate seats would have been a normal outcome for Republicans, they will likely get just 49. That’s a terrible result.
So, before I get too cocky about the red wave not building, let’s move on to an evaluation of my pre election issues, because I was dead wrong about some stuff too.
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Issue 1
Basically, I argue that most people don’t pay enough attention to the small details in politics to know just how much of a threat Trump and his allies were to the governing fabric of the Constitution. And people shouldn’t have to. I do this stuff because I’m the dork who actually thinks it’s fun, but I know that makes me the weird one. Here was my explanation:
My general rule for politics applies here: Because people internalize losses as larger than they internalize equal gains, an argument for a change has to be at least twice as good as the argument against it. Democrats want to introduce change in order to keep a system that isn’t working. No argument could be less persuasive than this. It is an argument that both introduces risk of loss when it talks about changes, and attempts to sell the changes by saying things will stay in a state of mediocre-at-best. Far from twice as good as the argument against the changes, it is almost a self defeating argument.
I still think all of this is right because we have seen this play out across both history and the current global order. Where I was wrong was in underestimating how far along the thought process most Americans were.
If someone honestly believes that a person like Donald Trump fights for them, and the current system doesn’t, scrapping democracy in favor of Trump is a rational preference.
At least in the short term…
Any brief study of history shows us that the Neros and Caligulas will always follow the Octavians. But, if voters aren’t paying enough attention to the details of the plot to dismiss popular sovereignty, why would they steep themselves in the details of dictatorial succession? Ordinary folks just want to work their jobs, and come home to enjoy their families, friends, and hobbies. And that is the way life should be! People shouldn’t have to spend a big chunk of their free time digesting political news just to keep their livelihoods.
Turns out I wasn’t giving Americans enough credit for thinking down the road past Octavian. They did, and they did so spectacularly. Every single election denying democracy hater in competitive states got beaten last week. It was excellent, and I’ve never been so happy to be wrong in my life.
Exit poll data shows that the pocket book issues were indeed the most important things to influence votes, but there were enough who cared about democracy to make all the difference. Thank you, America.
Issue 2
Chalk up another L for me. Here is what I wrote:
All of this adds up to an economic agenda that is most beneficial to the very people who hate Biden the most. It’s an irony that has been lost on almost everyone in the political arena as they discuss the upcoming midterms. Biden really deserves more credit for this, but he won’t get it because of social issues dominating the headlines.
Part of the trend that bashed Republicans so hard was that Democrats did much better in rural areas than in the last few elections. A big part of the reason was the economy. This wasn’t a large swing, but it was a broad swing, and it was enough to get John Fetterman elected in Pennsylvania, bring Democrats within breathing distance of beating JD Vance and Lauren Boebert, and send what many Republicans viewed as their best rising star as for a growing hispanic electorate—Maya Flores—packing with only a months long special term in Congress. Democrats were supposed to be cooked in the Rio Grande valley. But they won both toss up races on Texas’ southern border.
Exit polls, which are useful but not perfect, showed that 47% of voters thought the economy and jobs were the most important issues facing the country. Republicans did win 2/3 of these votes, but when only 18% of people describe the economy positively, and Biden personally is 15 points underwater on his economic navigation—and 28 points with independents—winning a third of voters who say the economy was the most important thing seems like a good result for Democrats. This, overlayed with the gains in rural areas, as a good signal that some rural voters did give credit for the pace of improvement in their neck of the woods.
Issue 3
Not much to say here. Republicans tried to hang wokeness around Democrats’ necks, but unlike past elections Democrats kept messaging discipline. They didn’t get distracted with their tendency to aahkshewallllly away their wokeness by trying to explain how things like defund the police didn’t really mean defunding the police. They kept hammering home abortion rights every time to conversation got brought back to social issues. And it worked.
So, I'm giving myself two wins here because I wrote about the psychology of loss when it comes to abortion back in September. It was a buttfumble for Republicans then, and they never recovered from it. Exit polls showed the most important issue for 31% of voters was inflation, abortion was a close second at 27%. Democrats won over 3/4 of the abortion vote—a higher share than Republicans won on inflation. That is astonishing given how heavily abortion has been an evangelical issue for the last…lifetime.
Issue 4
I can’t tell you how many times I heard that crime was gonna sink Democrats just as much as inflation was. Inflation did turn out to be a bludgeon, but crime was just…not a big deal at all.
The truth is that crime isn’t an issue that can be placed at the feet of one party. An astute lefty could look at the two full picture graphs and say the following: “Crime was at its peak in the Reagan and Bush 41 years, then fell drastically in the Clinton years. Bush 43 didn’t see any decrease in crime, and Obama lowered crime for the first 6 years he was president, before it went back up, but not as high as Bush levels. Then Trump became president and crime exploded.” Guess what, that lefty would be 100% correct about all of that. These graphs do actually look like Democrats are far better at reducing crime.
But I say ‘look like’ because crime isn’t an issue that can be easily fit into a partisan bucket, and attempts to do so are usually clubfooted…
Yes, crime matters. Any increase in crime is a concern—I’m not downplaying that. But the data is clear that Joe Biden and Democrats are not the cause of the current crime increase, and voting for Republicans won’t fix it. A cynical person might even argue that a Republican controlled Congress would want more crime to further weaken Biden’s/Democrat’s position for the 2024 presidential election.
Crime might be getting worse, but we’re far from armageddon. Don’t buy any argument that says otherwise.
Crime turned out to be the top issue for only 11% of voters, and it wasn’t even an issue that Republicans dominated, like inflation. Republicans won the issue 57 to 41, but this is really only half the crime story. An equal 11% said gun policy was their top issue, and Democrats won this group 60 to 37. So, an argument can be made the Democrats actually beat Republicans on the crime issue, since most of the increase in crime Republicans told us to be so scared about was gun crime.
The reality is that the increase in crime wasn’t large enough for many people—especially suburban people—to really notice a difference in their lives. Think about your social life, has there been a huge increase of “OMG I got mugged!” or “Someone broke into my house!” or “A kid I went to school with got murdered!” stories at your get togethers? Almost every honest person would have to say there hasn’t been, because the crime wave was never a wave—it took us back to basically Great Recession levels of violent crime, and society wasn’t falling apart then either; at least, not from a violent crime perspective. So, it turns out, most people sort of already intuitively knew what I was writing about anyway. The result was crime not being a BFD in the election, and Democrats doing pretty well—perhaps winning—on the issue for the people who did really care.
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Time for Some Hot Takes
That heading will probably seem a bit like clickbait, because this isn’t a politics newsletter, so my takes aren’t gonna be all that hot. I think the two biggest takeaways are pretty much confirmation of conventional wisdom.
1) Candidate quality matters. In every state that was competitive, the nutjobs got hammered by voters. Even in Ohio, where JD Vance ended up winning, he was still miles behind the high-candidate-quality-normal-type-Republican-dude, Mike DeWine, who won another term as Ohio Governor. Brian Kemp ran WAY ahead of Herschel Walker; Dr Oz, flawed as he was, ran WAY ahead of Doug Mastriano; Chris Sununu ran WAY ahead of Don Bolduc; and Tony Evers ran WAY ahead of Mandela Barnes.
In all of these instances, the candidate on the far right or far left fringe did way worse than the centrist candidate—because Americans just want the government to function.
Democrats should be kicking themselves for not winning the Wisconsin Senate seat. Q-a-Ron Johnson was one of the least popular senators in the country, and he was a terrible candidate. The only thing that saved him was Democrats nominating one of the most outspoken police defunders in the country—and even then it was a razor thin win. If Wisconsin Democrats had nominated any one—literally anyone—who didn’t have a defund the police ball and chain on their electoral resume, Democrats would probably be looking at 52 Senate seats.
2) Democrats shouldn’t think of this as a big win for them as much as it was a big loss for Republicans. If Democrats want to build on this success they need to focus on results for the next two years, and forget about wokeness. This was not a collective request from voters to move the country further to the left. The latest inflation numbers look really good—the kind of report I was expecting to get back in the spring—and the overall economic picture is still pretty great other than inflation. This is where Democrats should keep their focus if they want 2024 to be another good night.
3) Trump was not the biggest loser of the night, Mitch McConnell was. This is an idea I want to discuss in more detail, so I’ll leave it at that until later this week.
4) Reports of Trump’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Just like the party came crawling back after January 6th, they will come crawling back over the next few weeks. In 2018, 2020, and now 2022 Trump has been a HUGE anchor around the neck of Republicans. Why is this election suddenly the one that means they should cut the rope? Most people will say because Ron DeSantis won by such a big margin that he is the new hope for the party. I don’t buy this for two reasons.
First, the 2024 Republican Presidential candidate still has to win the party nomination, and that requires winning primaries. Ya know who mostly votes in primaries? The most extreme voters. I haven’t seen anything that suggest DeSantis has replaced Trump as the cult leader. On top of this, the Proud Boy-Oath Keeper types all worship Trump, and many of them just didn’t ever show up to vote before Trump. To win a primary DeSantis has to make big gains in the far right fringes, and bring enough centrist Republicans to primaries (where they aren’t as likely to show up) to render the paramilitary bros irrelevant. I don’t see it happening, mostly because…
Second, Ron DeSantis isn’t all that good a politician. Watch this clip here:
What do you think Trump will do to a guy like that? If the human down pillow that is Charlie Crist can make DeSantis freeze on stage by politely asking him a reasonable question, how does this guy hold up on stage against the greatest poo flinger of all time? I think, not well.
Once Republicans realize these two things, they will come crawling back to Mar-a-Lago with dump trucks full of valentine Starburst to get back into Trump’s good graces.
5) The Republican Party is Atlantic City now. I was holding this idea in my back pocket in case Trump won the 2024 presidential election. The headline was that we, collectively as a nation, were all Atlantic City now if Trump won the election. He would have no restraints, no guardrails, and no sensible people to quell his worst instincts. We would all end up like Atlantic City—left high and dry by Trump, and our livelihoods completely devastated the moment we couldn’t benefit and enrich him the way he wanted. Now, this scorched earth, bleed the carcass dry, then cut and run, and leave everyone else holding the bill approach that has characterized Trump’s career will be turned on a Republican Party that thinks it wants to move on to DeSantis.
Trump knows that if he ran as a third party or independent in 2024, he’d pull tens of millions of votes away from DeSantis, and the Democrat might end up winning 40 or more states. It won’t be long before the party realizes this too. Trump will burn everything down if he can’t get what he wants, because that is who he is. The Republicans best hope in 2024 is that Big Macs and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches get Trump before he can get DeSantis.
6) I’m really glad more Republicans are crying fraud. Trump isn’t the only Republican crying about a stolen election. There were a handful of other high profile statewide losers who also claimed they lost because of fraud—without providing any evidence. I’m actually really encouraged by this. Maybe my instincts are wrong here, but in my mind, the more Republicans who don’t have a cult following try to play the fraud card, the more people will get used to dismissing it. Then if Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, people will have a been-there-done-that feeling when he tries again to claim there was fraud. Other Republicans crying fraud (I hope will) immauculate the system against Trump’s inevitable cries if he runs again. If this claim loses its potency, Trump will have nothing but Truth Social left.
7) Liz Cheney is the best Republican for 2024. People clearly don’t like the crazy. Cheney is really far right on policy—much further right than even Trump, Romney, or Bush. But now she has a lot of bonafides for also having integrity and caring about democracy. Her pragmatism on Trump will make her far right views less threatening to Americans because they will feel like they can trust her. Plus, they could stick it to the libs by putting the first woman in the Oval Office. I don’t think she has any chance of actually winning a primary in the Republican Party, but if they could somehow manufacture it, she would be their best bet for 2024.
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