Our View: What went wrong for down-ballot Democrats
In this year’s elections, Democrats won the presidency but little else.
Their dreams of a Senate majority appear to have vanished. Rather than picking up three to five seats on election night as many had predicted, they netted but one and now pin their hopes of a wafer-thin majority on two runoffs to be held in Georgia in January.
In the House of Representatives, it looks like Democrats will lose roughly seven to 11 seats when they had been banking on a gain of roughly that amount to pad their majority. Their efforts to flip state legislative assemblies were a bust.
Much of the analysis of what went wrong for Democrats needs to wait for the millions of votes still to be counted in multiple states. Leading theories include poorer-than-expected showings with Latinos and Asian Americans, and voters wanting to put a check on former Vice President Joe Biden.
But an overarching theme seems to be Democrats’ unique talent for pigeonholing themselves as too far to the left on social and economic policies. Say what you will about their candidates’ actual proposals, many voters heard only “defund the police” and “Democratic socialism.”
The argument that Democratic policies were radically anti-business seemed, to Democrats, absurd. After all, the 477 counties Biden won nationwide are responsible for 70% of America’s economic output. What’s more, quite a few Democratic economic policies are popular. Even as Biden was going down to defeat in Florida, for example, the state was passing a $15-anhour minimum wage.
Yet the Democratic message on business — that cultivating a skilled workforce, rather than slashing taxes, is what drives growth — gets lost when people like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., propose massive increases in entitlement spending, widespread debt forgiveness for students, and impractical energy policies that involve bans on fracking and nuclear energy.
In an era of grossly misleading social media, Democrats need to think how their policies will look as a tweet or a 30-second attack ad. As the saying goes, in politics if you are explaining, you are losing.
On social matters, Democrats are more actively to blame. Racial injustice is real and needs to be addressed. But the party too often leaves the impression that America is a biracial nation, not the multiracial, multiethnic country it really is. Many immigrants are religious and social traditionalists who are less interested in being part of a movement than they are in prospering, buying a house in a nice neighborhood and raising a family. Harsh anti-police rhetoric is more likely to turn them away than to win them over.
The Democrats need a message that’s more than anti-Trumpism and less than Big Government. The message ought to incorporate their most important values while not being seen as too quick to throw money at preferred groups or too quick to pass judgment on others.
If the Democratic Party can’t manage that, it will face more elections like this one and more presidents with short coattails.