Trump: The Democrats’ not-so-secret weapon
GOP losses among moderate voters and independents doomed several candidates.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, the 30-second ad that Sen. Raphael Warnock began airing Thursday on Atlanta television contains an essay.
The spot — the kickoff of Warnock’s campaign in Georgia’s Dec. 6 Senate runoff election — consists of video showing one very recognizable man standing on a podium earlier in the week. Remarkably for a Warnock ad, the man is heartily endorsing Warnock’s opponent.
“We must all work very hard for a gentleman and a great person named Herschel Walker,” the familiar voice of the former president of the United States says. “Get out and vote for Herschel, and he deserves it.”
Then, as the image shifts to a photo of Walker shaking hands with his endorser, two lines appear on screen, distilling the message of Warnock’s campaign: “Stop Donald Trump. Stop Herschel Walker.”
A weird symbiosis with ex-president
Trump craves center stage; Democrats eagerly want to keep him there.
That weirdly symbiotic relationship was key to this year’s midterm elections; it’s shaping the Georgia runoff, and it probably will continue to shape the presidential campaign that kicked off last week with Trump’s announcement of his plans to run again.
In Georgia, nearly 6 in 10 voters in the midterm election said Trump factored into their decision about which candidate to support for the Senate, according to the VoteCast exit poll conducted for the Associated Press by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Warnock won those voters 57%-41%, the poll found. That’s a big reason why he beat Walker, albeit not by enough to avoid the runoff Georgia requires if no candidate gets over 50% of the vote.
Warnock and his strategists have placed a clear bet that keeping the focus on the former president offers their simplest path to victory.
If the last few weeks are any guide, their odds are good: Across the country, Trump’s embrace proved toxic to Republican candidates. He played a central role in Democrats’ ability to
beat the historical odds, keep control of the Senate, flip several state legislative chambers, pick up additional governorships and limit their loss of seats in the House to a handful.
Here’s how Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky summed up his party’s problem:
“We underperformed among independents and moderates because their impression of many of the people in our party and leadership roles is that they are involved in chaos, negativity, excessive attacks, and it frightened independent and
moderate Republican voters,” he told reporters.
None of that means Democrats can count on smooth sailing ahead.
They did lose control of the House, after all, and in aggregate, when all votes are counted, Republican House candidates probably will end up winning the total vote nationwide by about 3 percentage points.
In at least some parts of the country, notably Florida, Republicans continued to make gains among Latino voters. Turnout lagged in several areas with large percentages of Black or Latino voters. Whether that’s a sign of continued erosion of Democratic support or just a result of a lot of noncompetitive races is hard to know, at least until states finish releasing data about who voted — a process that generally takes a few months.
Moreover, the abortion issue, which played a major role in boosting Democratic fortunes, clearly didn’t work everywhere or in all races. Republican governors who signed antiabortion bills
into law, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, easily won reelection.
Where the issue did prove effective, it fit into a larger effort to portray Republicans as out of the mainstream, Democratic strategists said.
Successful Democratic campaigns combined concern over abortion with other issues, including election denialism, the memories of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s personality.
“All of these things served to create a big contrast” with the opposition, said Democratic strategist Aileen Cardona-Arroyo, vice president at Hart Research, who worked for Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, among other candidates.
Trump “supported all these candidates who were extreme at many levels,” Cardona-Arroyo said. “It gave Democrats an opportunity to talk about how ‘I’m different from this crazy person,’ ” she said. It also provided them an opening to ask voters who were unhappy about the state of the country: “Is the Republican alternative the type of change you want?” she said.
Independents and young voters emerge
For a lot of voters — especially younger voters and independents, two groups that overlap a lot — the answer was no.
In Nevada, voters younger than 30 made up a larger share of the electorate than they had in 2018, according to data compiled by Tom Bonier of the Democratic vote targeting firm TargetSmart.
The AP VoteCast exit poll shows that Cortez Masto won almost 6 in 10 of those young voters.
Elsewhere in the country, turnout of young voters wasn’t as large. Overall, it appears to have been significantly lower than four years ago, when youth turnout broke records, but still big enough to boost Democrats to victory in close races.
Young women, in particular, were central to Democratic fortunes, said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College poll, which correctly forecast Democratic wins in Senate races including Pennsylvania and Arizona. Young women backed Democrats by about 3 to 1, Miringoff said.
That’s just one of the pressing problems Republicans face.
Nationally, voters who identify as independent sided with Democrats — by 2 points in the AP VoteCast exit poll (49%-47%) or 4 points (42%-38%), according to the exit poll conducted for television networks by Edison Research.
Either number would be striking at a time when independents strongly disapprove of President Biden and hold pessimistic views of the nation’s direction.
The GOP losses among independents — and among political moderates — were worst in swing states. In several of those places, GOP candidates were “crushed by independent voters,” McConnell said, pointing specifically to Arizona and New Hampshire.
In the latter of those two states, the losing Republican Senate candidate, Don Bolduc, embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and got just 43% of the independent vote, according to the network exit poll. By comparison, incumbent Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, a public critic of Trump, won 59% of the state’s independents.
Similar numbers punctuated returns in states such as Pennsylvania, where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, won 71% of moderates, 64% of independents and 16% of Republicans en route to his victory, and Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won two-thirds of moderates.
That poses a big challenge for the new Republican majority in the House. Most House Republicans come from districts where Trump remains popular, and they appear determined to focus on the issues and causes Trump brought to the fore during his 2016 campaign and his four years in the White House — opposition to immigration, support for abortion bans, investigations into a host of alleged Democratic misdeeds, many of which have little traction among voters outside of the GOP media bubble, and fealty to the former president personally.
That path may please Republican partisans, but it shows little promise of improving the GOP’s image among key groups in the electorate, either next month in Georgia or nationwide in 2024.
Look for Trump to figure in a lot more ads in the next couple of years — mostly for Democrats.