In some places, progressives pushed their agenda forward, in others, conservatives wrested control
The sky is not falling. No more than it was the day before yesterday.
Tuesday’s elections offer a clear message for the center-left majority of Americans who elected Joe Biden in 2020: if you want to change the direction of the country, voting isn’t enough. You have to get, and stay, organized.
In places where Democratic candidates and organizations worked in tandem, real gains were made this week. Likewise for Republicans. In places where candidates or organizations overreached and failed to build a broad base, they faltered.
National political observers, sitting at their desks far from the ground reality of elections all over the country, always try to create a simple narrative to describe a complex picture. It makes it easy for them to go on cable television and talk in grand terms. The reality of politics is America right now is more complex.
For example, on the hot-button issue of police reform, you’re probably hearing a lot about the failure of a Minneapolis referendum that would have replaced the city’s troubled police department with a new department of public safety. It went down 56–43%. Supposedly, this proves that centrist Democrats who back the police like New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams are the wave of the future. Well, In Austin, Texas, voters rejected by 2–1 a proposition backed by the local police union that would have forced this city to hire hundreds of new police officers. This despite the fact that homicides are up there and police response times are down. In Cleveland, voters supported a ballot measure creating a new civilian police review board, taking police oversight out of the hands of an internal police division. Also complicating the news coming out of the Twin Cities: Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul also voted to embrace rent control; the vote in Minneapolis giving the city council the power to regulate rents on private residential property passed by almost same margin that the police reform question failed by.
The emerging narrative that ascribes the Republican success in places like Virginia to their ability to channel parental frustration with pandemic school closures and progressive pedagogy is only partly accurate. Republicans pummeled school boards in some places (here and here in Iowa, for example) and failed in others (here and here in Iowa). A heavily-funded rightwing recall effort outside of Milwaukee failed to unseat any incumbent board members. Critics of Covid-19 face mask requirements lost their bid to unseat the incumbent school board of Centerville, Ohio.
If centrism is what wins elections for Democrats now, what explains the victory of Michelle Wu, an Elizabeth Warren protégé who talked constantly about the “racial wealth gap”, as Mayor of Boston? Or the victory of Black progressive Ed Gainey as the first mayor of color of Pittsburgh? Or the success of the progressive Working Families Party slate in New London, Connecticut, where they swept the election? Or Tuscon, Arizona’s second largest city, voting 60–32% to approve an increase in the hourly minimum wage to $15?
Wait, you must be saying, then why did upstart leftist India Walton, who defeated incumbent Buffalo Mayor Bryon Brown in the Democratic primary last June, fall to his write-in campaign in the general? I think the reason is because she tried to short-cut her way to power. Primary night, she made a beginner’s mistake, and claimed her surprising upset proved that socialism was on the march in Buffalo, instead of appealing to some of Brown’s base of support.
And what about the failure of three statewide ballot measures in my home state of New York, that Democrats had pushed through the legislature to reform redistricting, enact same-day voter registration and allow for no-excuse absentee ballots? Aren’t these all part of the larger package of voting rights improvements that national Democrats have been pushing? Well, it appears they lost because New York’s state Democratic party, long a cats-paw of our now disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, was asleep at the wheel and forgot that it needed to spend money advertising the benefits of these measures. The NY state GOP was not asleep, and spent heavily to promote a no vote, and they won. One party was organized; one was not.
There’s no question that Tuesday’s elections contain warnings for Democrats, who are very likely going to lose control of the US House of Representatives next year. We knew that already. The thermostatic tendency of voters to reduce the power of the White House incumbent, especially when his party also holds all of Congress, is a well-known phenomenon. And Republicans, who have no qualms about lying about and exaggerating the ways that public schools have tried to become more inclusive of racial and sexual minorities, have figured out a potent way to harness the simmering rage of suburban parents whose previously settled lives have been disrupted by the pandemic, as Zachary Carter describes in a smart piece in The Atlantic.
But the answer isn’t just better “messaging” that relates to people’s real-life frustrations about things like jobs, housing, wages and health care, and explicitly challenges GOP dog-whistling to white fears. Republicans in America have a massive media ecosystem that propagandizes daily for its nostrums. Democrats do not. What they do have is the capacity to organize. And organizing isn’t something you do for just a few weeks every two years just before an election. Most of the fundraising appeals that Democrats get from their party, its committees and its candidates, manage to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from grassroots donors that just go into a leaky bucket. Far better to support independent networks like the Movement Voter Project that do organizing year-round. And wherever you live, find a group that is doing local community organizing and join in. Politics is not a spectator sport; participation matters.