What Happened In The House?

Democrats have lost at least a dozen seats in the House, and multiple GOP senators survived what should have been fatal blows, and how Biden won despite this is something WaPo columnist Greg Sargent and Cook Political Report House guru Dave Wasserman discuss.

Greg Sargent: Why did these losses happen?

David Wasserman: Republicans did a complete 180 on recruitment. This year all 12 Republicans who picked up Democratic seats so far were women or minorities. Republicans nominated candidates who looked like their districts, and didn’t necessarily sound like [President] Trump.

Sargent: Wasn’t it in some respects inevitable that turnout would be higher on the Republican side, relative to 2018? In 2018 Democratic turnout was lopsidedly high. And in 2020 it wasn’t, because Republicans also turned out. Right?

Wasserman: That’s true. Trump helped Republicans down-ballot in two ways. He drove out millions of low-propensity conservatives who would never vote for their average Republican Joe in a midterm. But he also allowed Republican candidates to pick up voters who could not stomach Trump.

In 2018, when he wasn’t on the ballot, the only opportunity for independent voters, especially suburban women, to vent their anger at Trump was by voting against a Republican congressional candidate. This time around, those voters could do so directly, but vote for a more conventional Republican down-ballot.

Sargent: The big story that everybody missed was the amount of low-propensity Trump base turnout that Trump would inspire, and how that would impact House races?

Wasserman: Right — even in highly college-educated suburbs.

Sargent: The whole explanation then becomes a lot more structural. The big story is that incredibly juiced-up Trump-base turnout allowed down-ballot Republicans to get lifted by that tide, and pocket all those votes, and then just add Republican-leaning swing voters who voted against Trump but for their Republican congressional candidate.

Wasserman: I couldn’t have said it better.

Sargent: Another narrative is that Democratic down-ballot losses reflect the idea that the non-college White vote spread got even worse for Democrats, as David Shor said to Eric Levitz.

I have trouble squaring that with some data we’re seeing. The New York Times county-by-county analysis showed that Biden added 11 percent to 2016 totals in counties with a lot of non-college Whites, while Trump added 15 percent in those counties relative to 2016. The story I take from that is Biden added blue-collar Whites to the Democratic column, but Trump added some more.

It’s not simply Democrats losing more ground with them; it’s Democrats gaining ground but not as much Trump did. Your thoughts?

Wasserman: I’m in the camp that it’s amazing Biden held the line in those places and didn’t lose vote share relative to Hillary Clinton. Democrats’ trajectory has been downward in these places for quite a while now. The fact that Biden held on to what remains of support for Democrats is a testament to his biography, and the comfort level those voters have with him.

Sargent: It’s not just bio, right? Biden tried to articulate a somewhat more populist line than one would have expected from someone with his centrist past, talking about reshoring jobs and industrial policy, and even moving toward Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren populism in some respects. That had to have played some role.

Wasserman: Definitely. Instead of running a campaign entirely about Trump and his temperament, Biden ran a campaign focused on populist themes. That is marginally more effective in blue-collar America.

Sargent: How does this translate back to the down-ballot losses? The voters we’re talking about that cost Democrats House seats — slightly Republican-leaning, couldn’t stomach Trump, wanted to vote for a conventional Republican down-ballot — those are likely not in the main blue-collar Whites, are they?

Wasserman: I think they’re predominantly suburban. Remember when Trump settled on the message that Biden is a Trojan Horse for the radical left? In retrospect, the message those voters might have taken away was that Biden doesn’t sound that bad, but congressional Democrats are about to drive the country off a socialist cliff.

It’s possible that voters priced that into their choice for Congress.

It could have been that they weren’t hearing enough from Democratic candidates on why they weren’t radical leftists.

A lot of voters have no idea where Democratic candidates stand on police funding. Because Democrats never mentioned it in their ads.

Both Biden and Democratic congressional candidates failed to highlight support from law enforcement.

Sargent: It sounds like the key distinction here is between blaming the losses on the existence of the left and “defund the police” on the one hand, and not rebutting Republican attacks on the other. The first is less of an explanation, and the second is more of one.

Wasserman: This is not a situation where “the Squad” bears responsibility. It’s that Democrats in swing districts didn’t do enough to communicate where they actually stood. And I would put Biden in that category. 

 

So the takeaway is this:

1. Suburban Republicans, particularly college-educated white suburban women, felt much better about splitting their ticket by voting for Biden and then voting for Republican candidates that were not white men.
2. Record turnout helped Joe Biden, but it helped congressional Republicans too.
3. The college/non-college split is real, especially with white voters overall, and Democrats better figure out how to fix it in a way that doesn't give Republicans an immediate opening to attack on.
   
4. Trump's racist messages attacking Black Lives Matter and "rioters" and running on "law and order" didn't save him, but the Congressional Republican message that "We're the only thing between you and Biden's Socialism!" absolutely worked.
5. It worked because Dems didn't want to attack cops and especially police unions.
6. We'll see if all this holds true in Georgia's Senate runoffs in six weeks.

 

And guys, Republican redistricting in 2022 may cost the Democrats the House no matter what the Democrats actually do, so House Dems need to go for broke.