What Do the 2023 Elections Tell Us About 2024?
The results are in from this year’s mid-mid-term elections, and the big news is that Democrats had a very good night. Steve Berman had a good rundown of the election results yesterday, but the question in many minds is what these results mean for the presidential and congressional elections that are looming for next year. The answer is that it probably doesn’t mean a lot, but there are some lessons that can be learned.
To recap, key races included:
- Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment protecting abortion access by 56-43 percent
- Kentucky’s Democrat Governor Andy Beshear defeated a Trump-endorsed challenger by 53-48 percent
- Mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves won re-election by 52-47 percent
- Democrats won control of both houses of the Virginia legislature
I think that we can learn at least two lessons from these results. The first and most obvious lesson is that abortion is an albatross around the necks of Republicans. Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, abortion referendums have been on the ballot in seven states. The current tally, if you’re keeping score at home, is Pro-Abortion – 7 and Anti-Abortion – 0. That’s not good news for the elements of the GOP that are endorsing a national abortion ban.
The losses extended to Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin was considered to be a model moderate semi-MAGA governor (try saying that three times fast!). The Virginia results can be viewed as something of a referendum on Youngkin’s overall governance, but a lot of the Democratic message here centered on abortion as well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that voters handed the legislature to Democrats after Youngkin advocated a 15-week abortion ban.
Youngkin remains personally popular with a 51 percent approval rating as of August, but Virginia’s legislative results indicate that a lot of Virginians aren’t sold on the Republican agenda. That’s particularly true when it comes to abortion.
Further, abortion also played a role in the Kentucky gubernatorial race in which incumbent Democrat Beshear won 29 of 120 counties. In 2020, Trump won 27 of the counties that Beshear carried this week. A key issue in the race was an ad that featured a woman who was raped by her stepfather. Beshear used the woman’s story to rally abortion proponents while his Republican challenger, Daniel Cameron, expressed sympathy but was criticized for the fact that he would not allow rape victims access to abortion.
Personally, I share Cameron’s position that the baby is not responsible for the circumstances of its conception, but popular opinion clearly supports abortion access in cases of rape. Whatever personal opinions of the morality of abortion are, this is a reality that Republicans ignore at their peril.
The good news on the issue for Republicans is that Ohio had its abortion ballot measure this year rather than next year. Ohio has seemingly moved from a swing state to reliably Republican, but an abortion measure on the ballot might well have put Democrats over the top.
The other key lesson to learn is that Joe Biden’s low approval ratings won’t necessarily sink Democrats. If Republicans think that they can tarnish Democrats with association to the Biden Administration, nominate extreme candidates, and then cruise their way to victory based on Biden’s unpopularity, they are likely to be surprised. In fact, that strategy was tried and also failed in 2022.
Will the string of losses persuade Republicans to change course? I’m skeptical. On the platform formerly known as Twitter, Noah Rothman of National Review called this week’s losses an “absolute triumph of pure resolve.”
“Yes, there were a lot of losses,” Rothman adds, “But consider the sheer will necessary to stay the course and keep losing, over and over and over, for the sake of The Fight!”
Or, as I wrote earlier this week, “I won’t be surprised if the same cycle repeats in 2024 and beyond until GOP voters learn that America does not like MAGA.”
If I was the Republican Party as we head into 2024, I’d be looking to keep the crazy in check. The party should do its best to lock MAGA in the closet and keep abortion bans out of the discussion. Pointing fingers at Joe Biden won’t be enough to win so the GOP needs to develop a positive agenda that can reach beyond the party’s base and win over moderates.
If I was a Democrat, my recommendations would be similar. The party needs to talk up the economy, which is actually pretty good (so says the Wall Street Journal), and point out that the Fed has successfully reined in inflation. Progressive radicals should be muzzled, just as MAGA should be.
Overall, I think Democrats have a slight advantage. Even though polling is not good for Joe Biden, it also shows that a generic Democrat beats Donald Trump. My message to Democrats would be to be generic, not radical.
I think a lot of the bad polling for Biden is discontent from progressives, but I expect these voters to come home after the primary. After all, the pro-Palestine Democrats aren’t going to vote for Trump, the author of the Muslim ban. Neither will progressives who should remember what happened when they failed to support the party nominee in 2016. Likewise, every cycle there is polling that shows black voters are considering Republicans, and every cycle, like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, Republicans are disappointed. The most that Republicans can hope for is depressed turnout among unenthusiastic Democrats, but no one excites the Democratic base like Donald Trump.
The basic advice that I’d give both parties is just don’t be crazy. As my favorite conservative talk show host, Michael Medved, used to point out, voters typically reject the scarier candidate in favor of the more moderate, saner-sounding candidate. That axiom is bad news for the party that’s poised to renominate Donald Trump.
Looking at Joe Biden’s actual record, I find nothing radical and very little Progressive about it. The closest thing you ight collide with is his continued support for the LGBTQ+ community, which the GOP clearly disdains. Even his claim of being the most union president in history is suspect given his failure to support railroad unions in the run up to their strike. Walking a UAW picket line for an hour doesn’t make him a leftist whacko either. Heck, Democrats voted to censure the lone Palestinian American in the House for having the audacity to speak up for her people of origin, while refusing to throw Bob Menendez out for being indicted A SECOND TIME for corruption.
So a great follow-up would be a specific list of actual policies and laws that Republicans see as leftist and radical.Report
There was a tweet thread I saw this week.
Some guy whose name I can’t remember wrote something along the lines of thinking Biden is slightly better than Trump is just going to get Americans or the left or whatever stuck with Biden or Trump kind of candidates.
Former OTer Jamelle Bouie responded that Republicans thinking Trump might be odious but always better than any Democratic candidate is how they have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court and can dominate the District Courts and Courts of Appeals in other areas.
Consequentialism is a thing and it matters but there is a certain kind of person on the left (not you necessarily) that gets very huffy puffy upset when you point out that consequentialism is a thing and actions have consequences.
Biden is not a Eugene Victor Debs socialist but he is easily the most pro-union Democratic President in a long time and his nominations to the the National Labor Relations Board have been net positives for workers and led to real improvements or changes. Grumpy socialist-labor historian Erik Loomis can recognize this. Chronically online radicals in social media can seemingly not recognize this or refuse to.
Bernie Sanders did not and could not win the Democratic nomination for President. He did not know how to interact with middle-aged and older Black-American voters that make the base of the Democratic Party in many states. He still did not get the youth to come out in significant numbers despite the youth allegedly swooning over the crumpled Brooklyn transplant.Report
Biden’s NLRB nominees have drug it back to the center left. They are not going to drag it further left, not even close. That they are making improvements doesn’t mean we are becoming a socialist nation.
As to consequentialism, one of my constant themes here has been how the GOP is where they are because of over 4 decades of singular focus on obtaining, defending and consolidating power. rump is simply the next logical step in that march. Democrats have no such discipline, which is why in part they have moved as far to the right as they are.
Bemire made a lot of mistakes, but from a policy perspective he was not and is not still wrong on a good many issues. His positions, however are not becoming Democratic Party cannon. And Biden – as good as he is – is no leftist. The party is not moving that way. And to repeatedly state that it is is to engage in the same derisive wish casting that Republicans do about anyone with an ounce of common sense.Report
I think they moved it further than center-left and center-left is 999 trillion times better than reactionary right.Report
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/07/sick-leave-for-rail-workersReport
I disagree with Philip H. I think Biden is possibly the most progressive and labor friendly President of my lifetime but I am not a purity pony type.
Dobbs is having the opposite effect that the reactionaries wanted. Moms for “Liberty” types can win initial elections but get busted quickly.Report
Biden has done a very solid, demand side job of dealing with the economy. No question there. But he’s still an economic neoliberal, albeit one who actually acknowledges labor as the generator of profits in the private sector. His centerist approaches to things only seem progressive because both the GOP and the Democrats have moved so far right in the last 40 years.Report
There will always be a bunch of very loud Further Leftists who will never ever be satisfied and can never give proper thanks to a President. This is possibly part of politics because you always have gadflies pushing for more but it can be rather annoying at times.Report
I’m very impressed with AOC in showing how to be a vocal leftist who nonetheless has a productive working relationship with the party structure.
I know that a lot of pundits were relishing witnessing or even ginning up a catfight between her and Speaker Pelosi but AOC wisely just hunkered down and got to work without Sinema style dramaReport
AOC wants to do things and also have a career in politics. This requires her not to be a gadfly. Ambition is moderating the gadfly tendency.Report
I do not agree with AOC a lot but I think the party is lucky to have her.Report
There was a good article in Salon about “Apocalypticism” that informs us of what to expect from MAGAs in the coming years.
Basically, that they are more committed to their cultural worldview than they are to liberal democracy.
What they see is a society adrift from where they think it ought to be. That explains the reactionary language about “taking America back” and “(Re)Awakening America.” It’s basically a narrative of loss and decline. Trump repeats those themes of decline and American carnage and how he is the only person who can save America.
This view doesn’t allow for compromise or shared power or any sort of reconciliation. They can only double down and retrench more firmly.
More importantly, it doesn’t allow for the “Benedict Option” where they simply disengage and live their lives as they wish because for them, controlling how other people behave even in their most intimate moments, IS their worldview and being stripped of that power is apocalyptic.Report
The cure for this, of course, is doubling down on basic liberal democratic process, and dumping the kind of crazed deconstruction type rhetoric. It’s no coincidence in my mind that the biggest barrier to Trump doing what he wanted to do was a combination of an independent judiciary where you have to show up with evidence, and boring ol’ state level offices doing their boring ol’ duties as normal.Report
The short term cure is to convince enough Americans of the danger of losing our democracy so as to allow the electoral defeat of the reactionaries.
The longer term will require a sort of drawing of boundaries of acceptable viewpoints, where the Flight 93 rhetoric is condemned as being every bit as out of bounds as “From the river to the sea”.Report
What the elections of 2023 show us is that the Republicans might be not on as firm grounds as they think. Pro-abortion measures win handily when on the ballot, culture warriors of the Right lose when the try to run for school boards, and that Republicans are true believers and can’t change course despite this.Report
It also shows us that the big divide is urban vs. rural with the suburbs leaning towards urban heavily. If there is a civil conflict, it would be a census tract one like the Balkan Wars.Report
There will not be a civil conflict.Report
Divorce or War, my man.Report
That was tried. One side refused to allow the other to leave.Report
It isn’t a great look to defend the war of treason in defense of slavery.Report
You’re right, people who try to emigrate to Canada should be forcibly returned.Report
Slaveowners would have loved that idea.Report
One side committed treason and was dealt with appropriately. Then we all decided to overlook the treason in the name of heritage or something, and here we are.Report
Please square ‘leaving a voluntary union” as being treason. Surely if you voluntarily agreed to join, you have the right to voluntarily leave. Or are you telling me you can voluntarily join but never leave voluntarily? Kinda like a marriage you can never leave?Report
The language of the Constitution they all agreed to had no leaving clause. All the initial officers and politicians leading the Confederacy had sworn oaths to that Constitution. So breaking away, forming a new country and then attacking the old one were all acts of treason.Report
Did the slaves ask to leave the union?Report
There used to be marriages you couldn’t leave — Jane Eyre, anyone? — and there are people out there now who would like to bring that back. Contracts for long-term relationships usually have a provision for getting out of them. The Constitution could have had a procedure for leaving the union, and maybe it should have, but it doesn’t. Nobody entering into the deal reserved the right to leave over the objection of the other parties either. I suspect that if, say, Florida wanted out and the rest of us were willing to let it go, we could cobble together something for a mutually-agreed upon separation. But unilateral separation can be achieved only by a part of the union making war on the rest.Report
Well, given the definition of treason, the first thing that pops up is “the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.”
Joining a voluntary union (that you’re prevented from leaving) and then choosing to leave, doesn’t seem to fit that definition of treason. The rest is about trying to kill the sovereign.Report
I would think that taking an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution and then taking up arms against your own country as a number of Confederate Officers did would count as betraying one’s own country.
ETA – the Treason clause of the starts off “Article III, Section 3, Clause 1:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them
Which the Confederates clearly did.Report
I believe it’s still an open question as to whether 38 state legislatures can agree to break things up.Report
I guess the idea of peacefully allowing women and queer people to live as they wish is just, I don’t know, crazy talk.Report
Monomania strikes Jaybird againReport
Maybe we should just ignore it each time it comes up until we get something substantive enough to engage with.Report
1) That won’t stop it. 2) we won’t ever really get there.Report
Yeah. I guess only crazy people will ruminate on potential civil conflicts in the US. Just ignore it, just ignore it, just ignore it.Report
No, just ignore the crazy people or the empty slogans. If somebody puts something substantive up, there will be plenty of opportunities to deal with it.Report
There are certainly citizens who expect it, but they are also delusional about whether the standing army (much less professional police) will be on their side. A conflict could erupt along the rural urban divide but it would last days to weeks. So no, there’s little to worry about.Report
My suspicion is that there will be a non-zero amount in major metro areas.
It, sadly, won’t be limited to areas where drones could easily take out the folks who aren’t yet room temperature on the heat map.
But I’m one of the crazy people who can be ignored.Report
As long as we’re all in agreement…..Report
The main thing that you have to worry about is people who aren’t crazy like me starting to ruminate on this sort of thing.
You don’t want it leaking out to the normies.
If that happens, the whole “you’re agreeing with bad people!” thing will have stopped working a few steps back.Report
We’re not ruminating on it.
We’re already putting the Jan 6 insurrectionists away for lengthy prison terms and prosecuting the architect of it;
A good start, don’t you think?Report
A decade ago, if you suggested some sort of partition of the states at LG&M, you were laughed out of the thread or called a f*cking idiot in terms that blunt. (Trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of that a time or two.) Today, if you suggest the break-up of the US for any of several reasons is probable/certain, possibly including rather short time frames, it’s generally accepted as a not unreasonable position.Report
I don’t think its crazy, just unlikely due to there not being any sort of constituency for it beyond loose talk.
First, as I mention below, even the most reactionary conservatives (or maybe especially the more reactionary conservatives) don’t want to go their own way so as to live as they wish; Their burning desire is to make people in Los Angeles and New York live as the conservatives wish.
Second, even the reddest state is just a bunch of blue cities surrounded by red rural areas. Even if say, the Texas state government managed to pass a vote to secede and even if the federal government were to allow it, they would find themselves with a virtually ungovernable mess. Remember that the rule of thumb for counterinsurgency is that it takes roughly a ten to one ratio of government to insurgent forces to quell a rebellion.
In this case, the seceding states would be economically crippled by dissension and violence. They would resemble 1970s era Beirut.Report
Chip, I have a dumb question:
In the last few years, have you and your neighbors found yourself seriously discussing whether violence was immanent and whether or not you were going to high-tail it out of there if some showed up?Report
No, not even during the George Floyd protests.
Have you, and if so, what sort of violence did you discuss, and where were you thinking of high tailing it?Report
Same here, though I think the concern was whether violence was imminent, i.e., about to happen, rather than immanent, i.e., inherent. That’s two urban hellholes heard from.Report
Weird.
I remember you saying:
This was after I stood guard in the shattered window of the drugstore at the base of our building, and uneasily faced the mob of people milling around before the cops came back and swept us all from the street.
As I and the other guard stood there we talked quietly and agreed that if push came to shove we would retreat since “it was only property.”
We had a handful of enthusiastic protests in Colorado Springs but since Colorado College sent damn near everybody who could go home home, the students most likely to participate in protests were not here in town.
The cops used tear gas at one protest but, quite honestly, that seemed like it was merely a courtesy.Report
As I mentioned, one of several reasons. I’m one of the commenters there that think the break-up factor is climate change (and in my case, keeping the lights on in the face of climate change). Urban and rural Alabama will have to be in it together. Current marriages of convenience will fall apart: the Deep South and the upper Mississippi/Ohio river basin will have very different opinions. If/when things start to split, I expect that some states are going to split internally: NW Kansas with 15 inches of precipitation per year will have a different range of coping options compared to SE Kansas with 45 inches. NW Kansas would almost certainly be better off dealing with Denver than with Topeka.Report
Or couples therapy. Or just dealing.Report
The can will be kicked down the road a ways, that’s for sure.Report
What is “the can” here?Report
The whole question of whether there actually is uncertainty that needs to be resolved.
Of course there isn’t! We’re not going to be experiencing “serious unrest”! Define “serious”! You can’t!
Therefore we don’t even need to address the question.Report
I put my nickel on option C: just muddle along. Divorce is too expensive- neither side wants it, and the only side that’d consider war is too old and decrepit to really make a go of it.Report
If you widen your definition of “war” a bit, you might see signs of a lively subset of people who are enthusiastic about the idea. Certainly enough to have people start demanding definitions of various words.Report
I think if we widen the definition of “war” very much at all it rapidly stops becoming war at all and you should probably pick a different, and probably less scary, word.Report
I don’t think we’ll ever see a Napoleonic situation where there are two sides standing on a battlefield until one of them yells “RETREAT!”
Not on US soil.
It’ll mostly be stuff like people disappearing and then some of them being found, bloated, two weeks later. Contusions. Holes about the size of a drill bit.Report
Or stuff like people attacking Congress to try and overthrow an election, or blowing up Federal buildings with Ryder trucks, or planting bombs at an Olympic venue, or just engaging in shootouts with federal officers.Report
Yeah. Sure.
Stuff like that.
Also stuff like killing people at protests.Report
In which case we have to ask how much this has always been with us versus whether it is increasing.
The Salon article I referenced has some alarming numbers about how many Americans see violence as justified.
On the other hand, I am old enough to remember when just ordinary college students were walking around saying “Off The Pigs” and chanting Marxist slogans about revolution.
Without handwaving our current troubles away, I would question how many people are actually committed to their cause versus willing to give lip service.
Like, in the Irish Troubles, for every IRA gunman, there was a vast support network of friends and family and colleagues who were willing to offer safety and refuge, to help conceal and obfuscate the truth.
As we saw with Jan 6, very few of those people had any such network and in fact most were turned in by their family and friends.Report
…You don’t think it’s increasing?
Fair enough.
It’s not like you’ve had to worry about violence in your neighborhood, I guess.Report
I didn’t say it wasn’t increasing.
I’m saying we need to assess whether it is or not.
I can see your confusion, if you confuse occasional riots with insurrection.Report
What I see coming isn’t insurrection. To be honest, I don’t think we’ll ever see such a protest like that ever again.
But, then again, “insurrection” is not where I see this going when I game things out in my head.Report
If you mean random murdering that’s been happening forever. If you mean some kind of “Troubles” style widespread irregular civil conflict then I would refer back to my original objection.Report
some kind of “Troubles” style widespread irregular civil conflict
Yeah, something like this.
“The people who are destroying the world have addresses!”, and that sort of thing.Report
It’s hard to go abduct a political opponent when you’re all pushing your walkers and have an appointment at Old Country Buffet.
Alternatively it’s undesirable to try and terrorize when you’re middle aged and have a lot of money and property to lose in the civil trial while you’re rotting in jail from the criminal conviction. That covers most of the participants of one side in our two side conflict.
Vast civil conflicts are a young persons’ game and the youngs are mostly on one side and it’s the side that’s not interested in vast civil conflict. It’s easier to just talk big on the internets.Report
In addition you’ve got to look at recent historical precedent. We had a series of vaguely political armed confrontations between federal law enforcement and right wing extremists in the 90s, to which the Oklahoma City bombing was arguably related. Ultimately it did not inspire any kind of uprising. We also have survived periodic race riots, and some other leftist disorder along the lines of the WTO protests in Seattle, all of which have been more or less defused. None of those are guarantees of future outcomes but I would say any one making prognostications of something more serious should have some pretty specific reasons this time will be different. The country itself is older and fatter and overall with more to lose.Report
No fair bringing reality into this.Report
As usual you and I see pretty eye to eye on this.Report
Older people are, yes. Continue the wealth accumulation the way it is going and eventually we run into the reality that almost all revolutions are done by well-educated but no-future-economic-prospects young people, who do not, in fact, have anything to lose.
We are not at that point, and I suspect something else will snap before that point, but that is where that ends up if something doesn’t.Report
I think that’s a bit of a dated take. The Boomers aren’t going to be with us forever and the accumulated wealth is going to go somewhere. A big cohort got a raw deal and a slow start into adult milestones due to the financial crisis and a lost decade after. That sucks. But we’ve finally gotten away from austerity, so much so that we probably will need a bit of a correction in the other direction soon.
In any case we shouldn’t mistake the teens for the present. We’ve been hovering near full employment for a few years now with some of the biggest gains going to the working class. Millenials are finally hitting some of those critical milestones, which is better late than never. What’s sucking the good vibes out of that is inflation and interest rates, not the massive downturn and failure of the government to respond sufficiently we had before. Anyway if things continue this way college will actually become a more clear cut good deal again as fewer people going to pursue opportunities elsewhere kicks the scarcity premium back up some. My prediction is that we are passed peak elite over production, at least in the near term.Report
I’m talking about Millennials and even Gen Z.
They aren’t inheriting anything from the Boomers…Gen X are. Gen X notable has not actually been able to save anything either, but they at least will get money from the Boomers, enough to live off of in retirement.
It’s the _next_ generation that is screwed, because their parents, Gen X, will end up paying all that Boomer money to live in some retirement community. And even if they _did_ get some money, they can’t wait until Gen X die off!
I don’t think Millennials will actually revolt. But if things don’t change…Gen Z will…and the Millennials will join them. (Hell, a chunk of Gen X might join them too. That generation has been cosplaying as disaffected revolutionaries from the start.)Report
What’s interesting is that no one, anywhere, wants the Divorce option..
Look at the reactions to Tuesday’s elections- The side that spent years chanting “let each state choose” is now screaming for a national abortion ban.
The idea that a woman somewhere, anywhere, is getting an abortion, or that a family, somewhere, anywhere, is lovingly accepting their trans child fills them with fury and a burning desire to seek them out and stop them with violence if need be.
Reasons for optimism are A) these people are already a shrinking minority and B) unable to mount a persuasive argument for their cause.
Not that they can’t do a lot of damage- but the fight is clearly one that the forces of liberal democracy an win.Report
Manchin decided not to take a pounding in 2024 and is not seeking reelectioReport
We won’t miss Manchin but we’ll miss his seat.Report