The Case For Democrats Doing Nothing
Maybe Democrats shouldn't change a thing after Tuesday's election.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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On Monday afternoon, I tweeted out a nagging thought I’ve had about the 2024 presidential election.
What if Democrats lost the presidential election because of an historic and global wave of anti-incumbency and the most effective strategy for them is to wait for the GOP and Trump to overreach and reap the political benefits (just as they did in 2018 and 2020)?
I purposely posed this as a question because truth be told, I’m not sure that it’s correct, but I thought it might be worth teasing the idea out.
This is a long post … but there’s a lot of stuff to chew over.
It’s The Incumbency, Stupid
Let’s start with the most compelling argument for why Democrats fared poorly in the presidential election.
Get used to seeing this chart.
Incumbent parties in every country — on the left and the right — lost vote share this year. America might think of itself as an exceptional nation, but when it comes to anti-incumbency, it seems we are not.
Also, Joe Biden is super unpopular, and it’s tough for an incumbent party to win in that kind of situation. This is a chart that the political scientist John Sides put together in March. It suggests that if Biden’s approval rating remained stagnant (it did), Democrats could expect to win around 48 percent of the two-party vote (that’s around where Harris currently stands).
Down ballot, however, we saw something a little different — Democrats didn’t fare nearly as badly.
In the Senate, Democrats lost three seats in states that are right-leaning — Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia. Only one Democratic incumbent lost in a state that leans blue — Bob Casey in Pennsylvania (though that race still hasn’t officially been called).
However, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada (all states that Trump won), Democratic Senate candidates prevailed — and two of those senators were incumbents who won reelection. According to Paul Kane in the Washington Post, there were 70 senate races in 2016 and 2020, and in only one did a Senate candidate win in a state where the opposing party’s presidential candidate prevailed (Susan Collins in Maine).
It happened four times last Tuesday, and all in favor of Democrats.
We still don’t know the final makeup of the House of Representatives, but the fact that House control is still an open issue one week out is a pretty good indication that Republicans didn’t come close to matching Trump’s national performance. They are, at best, likely to pick a handful of seats and might even lose ground.
Digging in the numbers, we have some other oddly discordant results.
In New York, Harris got 56 percent of the popular vote — one of the worst performances by a Democratic candidate in years. And yet, Democrats flipped three New York House seats.
Harris lost by two points to Trump in Pennsylvania, and two Democratic House members lost their seats, but Democrats maintained their majority in the state House.
In Michigan, Democrats lost their state House majority (though that was largely expected) but flipped a seat on the state Supreme Court to keep their majority.
In North Carolina, Democrats had a shockingly good night. They won a host of statewide races, including governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, held the one competitive house seat, and broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state legislature. But Harris lost the presidential race by 3.5 points.
In Nevada, Trump narrowly beat Harris — the first time a Republican has won the state since George W. Bush in 2004. However, as noted above, incumbent Jacky Rosen held on for a victory, and Nevada’s House Democrats held their seats.
Even in ruby-red Montana, Democrats picked up two seats in the State Senate and nine in the State House while maintaining control of the state Supreme Court. In Kentucky, Democrats flipped the Supreme Court in their favor.
To be clear, it's not a great night when a political party loses the White House and the Senate and misses a golden opportunity to take control of the House (probably). But considering there was close to a 6-point shift in the presidential vote, you’d expect Democrats to have done worse down-ballot — and quite simply, they didn’t.
The bottom line is that it’s difficult to find evidence that the electorate, as a whole, moved in a rightward direction and embraced the GOP’s policy preferences.
Why?
There are several possible explanations for the disparity between Harris’s performance and down-ballot results.
The first is that many of the Senate Democrats ran more moderate campaigns than Harris and thus were able to win over moderate voters in a way that Harris could not do. Maybe this is where the Trump campaign’s anti-trans ads — that singled out Harris’s comments about surgery for trans prisoners — really hurt her. Of course, it could also be that the anti-incumbent fervor that saw a nearly 6-point swing in the national vote didn’t extend to down-ballot races. It’s not necessarily unusual for the presidential race to go in a different direction than down-ballot races, particularly if the incumbent is unpopular.
The other problem with this explanation is that Harris overperformed in swing states (the move toward Trump in these states was smaller than it was nationally). This would suggest that in the places where voters saw more of Harris’s campaign, they responded positively.
The second explanation is that voters punished Harris because she is a woman. That might seem like a discordant view, considering that three of the Senate candidates who outperformed her in swing states were women (Baldwin, Rosen, and Slotkin). However, voters don’t necessarily view a woman senator and a woman president in the same light.
The third and, frankly, most compelling explanation is that Republican voters were more loyal to Trump, and occasional Trump voters weren’t as interested in down-ballot races. The data strongly backs up this point.
In Nevada, Harris got 3,000 more votes than Jacky Rosen, but Rosen’s GOP opponent, Sam Brown, got around 70,000 fewer votes than Trump.
In Michigan, Harris received 16,000 more votes than Elissa Slotkin, but Trump got 117,000 more votes than the GOP Senate candidate, Mike Rogers.
In Wisconsin, Harris got 5,000 fewer votes than Tammy Baldwin, but Trump got 54,000 more votes than the GOP Senate candidate, Eric Hovde.
Arizona is a bit of an outlier — Harris received 90,000 fewer votes than Ruben Gallego. But Kari Lake got 165,000 fewer voters than Trump.
Even in Pennsylvania, Harris got 37,000 more votes than Bob Casey — and Trump received 143,000 more than GOP candidate Dave McCormick (though the presence of a libertarian candidate who got 88,000 votes explains some of that disparity).
Still, the pattern is the same: Trump did better than GOP Senate candidates. It’s painful to consider, but it’s entirely possible, even likely, that Republicans won the White House precisely because Trump was on the ticket — and might have done worse if he wasn’t.
What Next?
So, what’s the major takeaway from all this data?
Democrats lost because of a wave of anti-incumbency and anger over inflation that hit every country in the world in 2024, and Donald Trump has a cult-like hold over the Republican Party that doesn’t extend to down-ballot Republicans (to the latter point, also see the election results in 2018 and 2022).
If this view is correct, Democrats lost the White House because of issues largely outside their control. And to the extent they could affect electoral outcomes, like in swing states where Harris campaigned aggressively or in Senate and House races, they held their own.
So maybe the best path forward for Democrats is not to change at all. In 2018, 2020, and 2022, there was a significant backlash to Trump, and Democrats benefited. They won the House in 2018, the White House and Senate in 2020 and minimized their losses in 2022. Perhaps the best response to 2024 is to chalk it up to anti-incumbency, a surprisingly pro-Trump vote, and focus on the future.
To that point, here’s something I wrote a few days ago about our current political moment:
In the last four presidential elections, the country has gone Democratic-Republican-Democratic-Republican. In the most recent three elections, the winning party also won both houses of Congress. The first Democratic win in 2012 was Obama’s reelection. In the presidential election before that (in 2008), Democrats also won both the House of Congress and the presidency.
Remember that we have not seen four presidential cycles unfold this way since the 1890s.
To put a finer point on this, Democrats won the White House in 2012, which produced back-to-back backlash elections in 2014 and 2016. In 2016, Republicans won the White House, producing back-to-back backlash elections in 2018 and 2020. In 2020, Democrats won the White House, and we had a slight backlash election in 2022 (Republicans won the House) and 2024 (Republicans won the White House and Senate).
Based on that recent track record, what’s the most likely outcome for Democrats in 2026 and 2028?
If Trump overreaches and interprets his victory as a mandate for policies like mass deportation, raising tariffs, or prosecuting his political enemies, it will likely produce a political backlash. After all, mass deportation and raising tariffs will most likely have a negative economic impact — and the former, in particular, is not very popular with the larger electorate. But then again, there’s always a political backlash in the first midterm of a new presidency (2002 and, to a lesser extent, 2022 are the exceptions). And in our current political environment of back-to-back one-term incumbents — and crucially with Trump constitutionally barred from running again — it’s realistic to expect another reversal of fortune for Republicans in 2028.
I know this seems counterintuitive after what happened on Tuesday, and I do not doubt that plenty of political pundits will suggest that the Democrats change their political strategy to reflect that pundit’s ideological priors. Nonetheless, maybe the best path for Democrats is to sit back, wait for Trump to screw up and reap the political benefits.
Musical Interlude
Trump is poised to slash Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that help poor and disabled Americans. They may let Obama subsidies expire next year, which would increase the number of uninsured people.
Our best hope at stopping them? Public protests can lead to their demise, as it happened with their efforts to repeal Obamacare. My Resister Sisters and I spent many hours visiting our Congressmen, marching, making phone calls. The voices of the people stopped them, and we won a decisive victory. Many thanks to John McCain as well.
Another sliver of hope is the potential infighting of the Old Guard and MAGA Republicans. The Magas are of course more favorable to tariffs, immigration restriction and cutting off aid to Ukraine. The Old Guard includes business-friendly Republicans who are committed to free trade, more legal immigration and a foreign policy that stands up to Russia. However, we are in unchartered waters with a miscreant, purely transactional mendacious dictator at the helm. As Bette Davis said, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy time."
I agree almost entirely with you, Michael. I had a historian friend who always used to say that campaigns have almost no effect on presidential election outcomes. They're determined by larger forces, such as anti-incumbency, inflation, sexism, cosmic rays, and so on. I think if you'd put a gun to his head he'd have conceded that very close races might be affected by campaigns, but not in general. If that's true--and I think there's a lot of merit to the idea--then the Dems don't need to change anything. I don't think they did much wrong, anyway, even if campaigns did matter. Although I would like to see them spend time and energy trying to understand how to combat the right-wing disinformation machine. That seems like a very asymmetric problem to me.