It is an appalling, and predictable, spectacle to sit through after every election season that isn’t a complete Democratic victory.
It is an appalling, and predictable, spectacle to sit through after every election season that isn’t a complete Democratic victory.
S ore losers are not hard to find in every party and faction in American politics, and some losers are sorer than others. But if you have followed American elections over the past two decades, you have no doubt noticed that progressives and liberals in the media, as well as many Democrats, are almost entirely incapable of ever treating the election of a Republican as the result of legitimate democratic choices by voters.
This has been going on for a long time, and those with memories of the 1980, 1988, and 1994 elections can cite chapter and verse. Peter Jennings of ABC News, for example, famously ranted about the 1994 election:
“It’s clear that anger controls the child and not the other way around,” said the Canadian-born Jennings in a radio commentary. “The voters had a temper tantrum. . . . The nation can’t be run by an angry 2-year-old.”
Jennings and his ilk were the ones having a tantrum by refusing to acknowledge that maybe voters in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy had a reason to vote out the people who controlled the House for 40 uninterrupted years. But we were treated to endless rounds of this sort of talk, as summarized at the time by Charles Krauthammer:
The Angry White Male, suitably capitalized to indicate that the menace has become a media-certified trend, stalks the land, or at least the land of the media. In the 10 years before the November election, there were 59 (Nexis) references to angry white men. There have been 1,400 since. A post-election front-page headline in USA Today was typical: “Angry White Men: Their votes turned the tide for the GOP.”
In 2004, Ken Layne circulated a much-discussed map clumping the states that voted for George W. Bush (including Virginia and Colorado) into a hopelessly backward “Jesusland.”
Today, progressive and liberal media reactions to election losses play out on TV news, in major newspapers, in opinion magazines, and of course on Twitter. The themes remain the same as they were then. They tend to have four main go-to rhetorical moves.
The first rhetorical move is “the election was stolen.” As I have detailed at length, even in such odd contexts as the 2015 elections, stolen-election theories are a hardy perennial on the left side of the political spectrum, and they have been popular in those precincts since well before Donald Trump stepped down as host of The Apprentice. “Selected, not elected!” Voter suppression! Purges of the voter rolls! Russian collusion! Hacking the voting machines! Russians hacking the voting machines! The theories come in a lot of different packages, but they resurface time and time again to explain away Republicans’ getting votes. We have mercifully been spared much of that excuse in 2021, in good part because the Virginia governor’s race was not that close and was held in a state dominated by Democrats for a decade.
Still, it wasn’t completely absent this week. India Walton, Buffalo’s socialist candidate for mayor, has yet to concede her defeat by the incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, who ran as a write-in after losing to Walton in the primary. Her statement on the election argued that she lost because her opposition did not “play fair,” including “Republican poll inspectors pre-stamping ballots.”
The second move is “the system is rigged.” It’s the Electoral College that’s unfair. Or the equal suffrage of states in the Senate. Or gerrymandering. Or “dark money.” Or low voter turnout. Or not letting convicted felons vote. One of my favorite examples of this arose during the Obama years, when a significant number of his voters were only interested in Obama personally and would not show up when he was not on the ballot. This led to a moral panic among progressives and liberals about how midterm elections were bad and the president should be able to just ignore Congress because only the higher-turnout presidential election conferred legitimacy. Some of them even called for abolishing midterm elections.
Example: David Schanzer, a professor of public policy at Duke, with Jay Sullivan in the New York Times on the Sunday before Election Day 2014 (which by then was already expected to be a Republican rout): “Cancel the Midterms”:
There was a time when midterm elections made sense. . . . But especially at a time when Americans’ confidence in the ability of their government to address pressing concerns is at a record low, two-year House terms no longer make any sense. We should get rid of federal midterm elections entirely. . . . The main impact of the midterm election in the modern era has been to weaken the president, the only government official (other than the powerless vice president) elected by the entire nation. . . . Eliminating the midterm elections would be one small step to fixing our broken system.
That same day, Dylan Matthews of Vox — there’s always a Vox column — wrote on “Why the French got rid of midterm elections”:
So far the theory behind the reform — that joint elections would decrease the chance of divided government — has been vindicated. . . . Until very recently, divided government was, while a problem, at least tolerable — but that was because the two political parties weren’t anything like today’s political parties.
Of course, no progressive argument against American democracy would be complete without this hardy perennial, from Erik Loomis at the Lawyers, Guns, & Money blog in November 2014: “The Neo-Confederate Roots of Off-Year Governor Elections.”
As with the 1994 “angry white male” panic, Jonathan Chait was already complaining after the 2010 midterms about who the voters were:
In today’s election, senior citizens constituted more than twice as high a share of the electorate compared to voters under 30. . . . A huge portion of what happened in this election, then, reflects the fact that Obama won with a coalition unusually dependent upon the young, and that he failed to turn these sporadic voters into regular voters. Democrats’ strength among the young bodes well for them in the long run, but . . . Democrats will probably continue to struggle disproportionately in midterm elections.
On November 5, 2014, Chait added his own version of why midterms were standing in the way of the inevitable leftward march of History embodied in “the Democratic presidential majority,” which was assumed to be a long-term asset obstructed by midterm-elected Republicans using Congress to create “stalemate”:
A cardinal fact of American politics that has emerged during the Obama years is that demographic forces are slowly and inexorably driving the electorate leftward. . . . The Democratic presidential majority is a fragile asset, and its value as a driver of positive change is presently exhausted. In the near term of American politics, the enervating stalemate of the last four years is the best possible outcome.
Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos was pushing abolition of midterms again in March 2016, when it was widely expected that Donald Trump’s nomination would lead to a down-ballot disaster for Republicans:
Our flawed electoral system is the root cause of much of our country’s political dysfunction and it is systematically biased against Democrats. 39 of the nation’s governors . . . aren’t elected in presidential years. In midterms and especially odd-numbered years, turnout falls precipitously and disproportionately among young people, the working class, and minorities, all of whom lean more towards Democrats. Even in midterms when the national environment favors Democrats such as 2006, turnout disparities still hurt Democrats and were likely important enough to cost them some close governor’s races. . . .
Imagine for a minute that every single governor were up for election this year instead of waiting until 2017, 2018, and 2019. The impact of such a change would be nothing short of a political earthquake given how many states Republicans hold after their 2014 midterm wave. . . . Fortunately, there is a way Democrats could help mitigate this problem in the future. All of the states pictured above elect their governors in non-presidential years, but also allow citizen-initiated ballot initiatives to amend their state constitutions. . . . Even though Democrats won’t always win every presidential election and Republicans won’t always do well in every midterm, moving gubernatorial elections to coincide with the presidential cycle should be a no-brainer because Democrats will do much better on average with presidential-year turnout.
It’s always a “flawed system” when progressives don’t get to sweep all the Republicans out of office or pass whatever they want. That September, Wolf argued for abolishing Congressional midterms as well:
Midterm-hating went away mysteriously in 2017–18 — I wonder why! — but if Republicans retake Congress in 2022, expect a replay of this particular tune.
The third go-to rhetorical move, much on display this week, is to blame the voters. They’re racists! Sexists! Morons! Jesus freaks! For years now, we’ve been told that the 1988 election was won by George H. W. Bush’s running a “Willie Horton” TV ad, never mind that the outside group that ran the ad aired it in only one state (South Carolina) that Michael Dukakis lost by 24 points.
For this week’s elections, Alexandra DeSanctis has rounded up quite a few examples of media commentators claiming that people voted for Glenn Youngkin because of racism, and it really is just the tip of the iceberg. This video compilation captures the ubiquity of this theme:
SUPERCUT!
Liberals: We only lost Tuesday b/c Americans are racist pic.twitter.com/Cjod4aH4Jx
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 4, 2021
There is far more where that came from. Democratic activists Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson, writing in Thursday’s New York Times under a black-and-white banner photo array of Youngkin designed to make him look like a character from the 1950s, argue this line:
The Virginia election results should shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics. . . . Crucially, the Republican nominee, Glenn Youngkin, was able to use racially coded attacks to motivate sky-high white turnout without paying a penalty among minority voters. . . . This should terrify Democrats. With our democracy on the line, we have to forge an effective counterattack on race. . . .
Gavito and Jentleson frame this as if Democrats are reluctant to talk about race, which is a little bit like saying that Cookie Monster is hesitant to eat cookies. In fact, they quickly add that, of course, Democrats should not abandon “our (accurate and necessary) analysis of structural racism.” But then, in order to explain away Republican gains among Hispanic voters, Gavito and Jentleson have to argue that Hispanics are racists, too:
As Mr. Trump showed — and Mr. Youngkin confirmed — racially coded attacks do not necessarily repel Latino voters. They may even attract them. One of us, Ms. Gavito, was among the first to flag this disturbing trend. In focus groups in battleground states during the lead-up to the 2020 election, pollsters with Lake Research tested a message that denounced “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.” Both whites and Latinos found this message persuasive, but Latinos found it appealing at significantly higher rates than whites.
I wonder if it ever occurred to Gavito and Jentleson that people who came to America to get away from drug gangs might not want the drug gangs following them here. It does not enter into their analysis that this might be a legitimate concern that these Americans might wish to express at the ballot box.
The need to ascribe voter behavior to white supremacy reaches ever more insane depths when attacking not only non-white voters, but also non-white Republican candidates such as Winsome Sears and Jason Miyares, Virginia’s newly elected lieutenant governor and attorney general. Witness MSNBC’s Joy Reid nodding along as a guest, Professor Michael Eric Dyson, called Sears “a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white-supremacist practices.”
Then there were media voices treating any mention of education as some sort of racial code word rather than a legitimate thing that people care about because they care about their children:
It's been interesting how much "education" and schools as a focus of right-wing grievance has been consistent even as the particular grievance keeps shifting. A year ago it was going to be all about how schools were still closed! Then they opened and it was both masks and crt.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 2, 2021
“Education” is used as a proxy for conversations really about racism and American history. In tonight’s short story, we connected what happened in VA to what we’ve been reporting on for months out of Southlake, Texas. https://t.co/saoMqrX0T1
— Antonia Hylton (@ahylton26) November 4, 2021
If progressives and liberals can’t call the voters racist, they can call them mouth-breathing morons. Paul Krugman’s autopsy on the 2014 midterms, titled with the Nazi allusion “Triumph of the Wrong,” ranted:
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet midterms to men of understanding. . . . Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.
His colleague Charles Blow, weaving together a variety of sore-loser themes, groused about the Republicans’ 2014 candidates that “The nearly dimwitted, Goober-esque affectations came together with an ocean of dark money in a midterm where the map and the math already favored them to give Democrats a drubbing.”
Finally, we come to the fourth rhetorical move, the last refuge of the anti-Republican scoundrel who has run out of stolen-election theories and race cards: complaining that the national political press just isn’t biased enough against Republicans. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post argued on Election Day not only that Youngkin profited from “a campaign built heavily around stoking white grievance with attacks on phantom critical race theory in schools and torquing up the base by feeding Donald Trump’s lies about our election system,” but that the real problem was “a right-wing media network that has no rival on the Democratic side:”
This race highlights this lopsided communications imbalance with unique clarity. . . . Youngkin and his allies have transmitted some of their most visceral and hallucinogenic versions of the anti-CRT demagoguery straight to the base via right-wing media. . . . “One of the strategic advantages that Republicans have is they’re able to feed their base propaganda and misinformation directly through their news outlets,” David Turner, senior strategist at the Democratic Governors Association, told me. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out ways to more actively court its base voters on a regular basis,” Turner continued.
One must wonder if Sargent actually read the relentless negative coverage of Youngkin’s campaign in his own newspaper (which serves the Virginia market), let alone in the Times, or on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, etc. Recall that Sargent’s open Democratic activism was supposed to be balanced out by the Post also employing . . . Jennifer Rubin.
Dan Pfeiffer, the former Obama adviser and Pod Save America co-host, offered a similar whine about the unfairness of the media not being exclusively on the Democrats’ side:
The way the race played out in Virginia is yet more evidence Republicans have a massive communications advantage. . . . The Right-Wing is able to create an alternative reality and then offer solutions to fake problems that people believe are Democrats’ fault. . . . Because the GOP has created a powerful, self-serving media infrastructure, Youngkin used the Right-Wing media to communicate his MAGA credentials to the base without offending the Independents and Trump-skeptical Republicans who gave Biden a ten-point victory last year.
Youngkin can be a fleece-wearing suburban dad/political outsider on local TV and a fully indoctrinated soldier in Trump’s army when he appears on Right Wing media. Democrats are still primarily relying on the traditional press to get our message out and we lack the firepower to make Youngkin pay a price for this duplicity.
Tying Youngkin to Trump was the centerpiece of McAuliffe’s campaign message. It was such a relentless drumbeat on CNN and MSNBC, for example, that viewers might be forgiven for not noticing that Trump was not Youngkin’s running mate. In mid-October, Trip Gabriel opened a New York Times profile of the race thus:
Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat running for governor of Virginia, distilled the election into a single sentence. “It all adds up to the same thing here: Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump,” he said the other day. . . . For Republicans [Youngkin] represent[s] a proof of concept that a G.O.P. candidate can unite the party’s moderates and hard-liners without going all in on Trumpism.
What if voters were actually quite aware of this argument and just didn’t buy it or didn’t think it was the most important question in the race?
Eric Boehlert complains that “it’s Dems vs GOP [and] Dems vs press.” He goes on:
The monumental challenge facing Democrats is how to counter a party and a movement that lies about everything, and a press corps that’s not willing to try to stop it. Or worse, a press corps that gladly helps spread the lies during a heated campaign season. . . . For weeks, it was clear the press viewed the Virginia race as a way to confirm its preferred narrative about a stumbling White House. . . . [Democrats are] battling a GOP that long ago walked away from governing, and they’re facing off against an openly antagonistic press corps.
In Boehlert’s world, the only problem with the serial, running disaster of Joe Biden’s presidency and his plunging approval ratings with the public is that the press has noticed and isn’t working hard enough to spin it in Biden’s favor.
With the election over, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS posed the most pressing question to the president:
“What should Democrats possibly do differently to avoid similar losses in November, especially as Republicans are now running on culture war issues and false claims about critical race theory?” . . . Biden side-stepped the issue in his response to Alcindor. “I think we should produce for the American people,” he said, before talking about issues including prescription drug prices and daycare. . . . Persisting, Alcindor repeated the question — and said Republicans were “lying” about the issue, saying, “What’s your message, though, to Democratic voters, especially black voters who see Republicans running on race and education, lying about critical race theory, and they’re worried that Democrats do not have an effective way to push back on that?”
A publicly funded representative of the press asking the president to help her discredit Republicans? All that’s missing is a Democratic taxpayer bailout to help the media help Democrats more.
It is, in the long run, helpful to Republicans that their election victories tend to produce these sorts of public tantrums and blame-casting at the democratic system, the voters, and the press rather than introspection about the Democrats’ message. Republicans who are tempted to take the Trumpist path of imitating this behavior instead of rising above it should remember that. Even so, it is an appalling spectacle to sit through after every election season that isn’t a complete Democratic victory.
The virtue of accepting defeat is an important one in a democracy. More progressive and liberal commentators would do well to recall the advice of Christy Mathewson, one of baseball’s winningest pitchers and an icon of good sportsmanship who took home a loss 188 times:
You can’t afford to admit that any opponent is better than you are. So, if you lose to him there must be a reason — a bad break. You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven’t one, you must fake one. Your self-confidence must be maintained . . . But keep it to yourself. That’s where it belongs. Don’t spread it around. Lose gracefully in the open. To yourself, lose bitterly — but learn. You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat.