The party and its base were despondent. Early in the term of a new president they disliked more and more with each passing day, a president whose election the previous November they had not expected, a result that had shaken their sense of who America was, they had lost the latest of several special elections to fill congressional seats left vacant by the new president’s appointees.
On this particular night they had lost one they thought was particularly winnable. It was a district in a state the president had handily carried, but one where they thought they had an edge. They cast the election as a referendum on the president and his controversial program. It got national attention. Yet in the morning the votes were all counted and they’d … lost. Again.
It was close, and the party tried to point to how much it had made the other party work to keep that seat. The pundits weren’t buying any of that. "[This] is precisely the kind [of district] the [party] will have to win if it wants to regain a majority,” said one prominent national newspaper known to be sympathetic to it.
Meanwhile, the party faithful, who distrusted the party establishment for (they believed) screwing up a sure win the previous November and for intervening so heavily in this election, sank deeper and deeper into despair. That year, they would go on to lose all five of the congressional special elections they contested. With prelims like this their chances of winning the main bout next November looked worse and worse ...
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OK. Have I made myself clear? If not, click on the links if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t do that while they’re reading.
For, as much as we play them up on both sides of the aisle, the outcomes of congressional special elections in the off-years have really not meant much as far as predicting. You’d never guess from just my account above that the GOP would go on to win the House behind the Tea Party the year after that.
On the other side of the equation, some of you who’ve been here a while might remember that we were all happy back in early 2004 when Ben Chandler won the KY-6 district vacated by Ernie Fletcher, who’d beaten him in the governor’s race the year before. Surely this might mean we could limit Bush to one term, and retake Congress in the fall, right? But that didn’t happen (well, in the latter instance, not that fall).
I tend to see this election as reminiscent of the OH-2 special in August 2005, the one where Paul Hackett ran a very close race in a strongly Republican district but ultimately failed to prevent Jean Schmidt from filling Rob Portman’s vacated seat, a race that also got a lot of national attention. Some of the comments made on that race can be instructive in the present context:
It's definitely worth it to the Democrats to put in the effort if only to keep the party energized. Even if Paul Hackett loses, it is very important for the party for him to do well. It could be seen as a sign of opportunities for Democrats in other GOP strongholds.
[...]
It is so overwhelmingly Republican that Democrats typically don't make a real effort as a party. A candidate puts himself up, but generally it's somebody who has no political strengths and gets no financial contributions or volunteer help to speak of. The campaign gets little attention. And the prophecy gets fulfilled.
Sound familiar? Competing closely in that election no doubt actually did help the party win Congress back the following year.
This diary comes to similar conclusions about last night’s election. It was always going to be an uphill battle in that district. It would have been great to win, great to take the district that had once been Newt Gingrich’s, but no one with any sense of realism was counting on it.
Because frankly, a performance like this would have translated into a Democratic pickup in the many GOP-held seats where Hillary won outright. If I were Rodney Frelinghuysen, Darrell Issa, Will Hurd or John Faso, I’d be at the very least privately concerned about this this morning. I’d be especially concerned if I were my mother’s congressman, Leonard Lance, in NJ-8 (She told me that last year, unlike some previous years, she didn’t even know who the Democrat in the race was until some literature from him came in the mail the day before the election. Nevertheless, he still polled 42% of the vote). I was reading some back-of-the-envelope calculation that if Democrats were able to get this performance across the board in all potentially vulnerable GOP districts next year, they could take 45 seats, which is way more than enough.
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It should also be noted, too, that this year’s spate of special elections has largely played out the way it has because, with the exception of CA-34 (a race that captured no national attention because the district in question is so Democratic that no Republican came anywhere near the runoff), all the vacancies were created by presidential appointments. Trump, or more likely someone on his transition team, was shrewd enough to make sure all his sitting congressional appointees came from seats unlikely to be flipped in the ensuing special elections (that so many of them have not turned out to be such cakewalks has to bother them). As was Obama, eight years ago. The counterexample is Bush, who elevated about five of his fellow Republican governors to Cabinet positions; by the beginning of 2003 all of them had been replaced by Democrats, to the quiet consternation of some of the state parties in question (which, by the way, should focus us on the biggest prize, and biggest vulnerability for Republicans next year—the much greater amount of governorships they have to defend. The sooner you start putting your mind to that and stop obsessing about this year’s special elections, the better for the Democratic Party).
And finally, I am writing this because once again in the wake of an election loss that was not entirely unforeseeable I read far too many people on this website talking about how depressed and demoralized they are.
I know it’s not pleasant to read all the usual Republican crowing (so I don’t; if you want to read a more level-headed conservative response to this, Jennifer Rubin of all people—or maybe not “of all people”; she’s never wavered in her antipathy to Trump—has it). But remember this is not going to be the last election ever (whatever some people think, or it seems to me want to think, which means that at some level this is something they are subconsciously hoping for). Conservatives always understood this, that you will lose a lot of elections before you win those that matter, and never went into Island of Misfit Toys mode over things like this (And really, this sort of behavior pattern doesn’t do Democrats any favors with the electorate, regardless of whether it plays into the right’s plan or not, because while it’s OK to be perhaps unrealistically optimistic about these things in the hope that that attitude will spur you to do what is necessary to win by the same token you can’t go into some sort of deep blue funk when you don’t. You come across like that kid nobody really wants to have on their team, much less have in government).
And as this commenter points out, you can’t pine for a 50-state strategy and then whine about losing races …
I know some of you are still stuck with the taste of 11/9 in your mouth. So pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start thinking about how you’re going to help get Democrats elected in your area to local office this November. If you get involved now, you might actually be able to do more to make that possible than you would in a higher-level campaign. You’ll learn a lot, win or lose, that will likely be helpful in making 11/6/18 a day you’ll want to remember.