Toro
Diamond Member
The progressives think that going even more woke is the key to winning in 2022. This would be a disaster. There are nearly 20 Democrats in tight races versus 2 for the Republicans. And that's before redistricting. Historically, the House has swung by on average 26 seats after the President has one his first term. Finally, driving out your base drives out the other side's base even more.
Except that the base of the Democratic Party is not woke left. It's center to moderate left. That's why Biden won the nomination and the election, and why moderates have kept winning this year.
But I'm sure the Democratic leadership won't listen. The Left is uniquely bad at politics.
The political reality facing Democrats is stark. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) “Frontline” districts for protecting the majority include 6 seats that Donald Trump won in 2020, and 13 seats that Joe Biden won by less than 5 points. Data presented to Roll Call from the DCCC also shows that 18 frontline Democrats won their own elections by less than 5 points. And the results of reapportionment and redistricting will likely make things even worse for Democrats.
As election gurus Larry Sabato and Kyle Kondik showed in May, Republicans are currently defending only 2 real toss-up seats compared to 19 for Democrats — prior to any redistricting chaos.
For Democrats to have any chance at succeeding in 2022 then, they must recognize the headwinds facing the party—plus the limited opportunities for their own gains—and adopt a coherent strategy that both appeals to core Democratic voters and potential converts in moderate-to-conservative districts. ...
Indeed, the general result of polarizing election contests to achieve higher base turnout is more likely to hurt than help Democrats. Advocates of a base mobilization/high turnout strategy generally assume that only “their” nonvoters will show up at the polls, but none of the nonvoters from the other side will. That view is contradicted by many political science studies. Stanford political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, for example, studied House races between 2006 and 2014 and found that highly ideological candidates who beat moderates for a party nomination indeed increased turnout in their own party in the general election — but they increased the opposition turnout even more. (The difference was between three and eight percentage points.)
Apparently, their extreme political stances did more to turn out the other side to vote against them than to turn out their own side to vote for them. That is a sobering reminder that turnout of the base is no guarantee of electoral success.
The Base Mobilization Fallacy
Just mobilizing the base won’t do the trick. Persuasion of moderates and Independents in swing districts will be critical in 2022.
theliberalpatriot.substack.com
Except that the base of the Democratic Party is not woke left. It's center to moderate left. That's why Biden won the nomination and the election, and why moderates have kept winning this year.
But I'm sure the Democratic leadership won't listen. The Left is uniquely bad at politics.