Democrats are in trouble next Tuesday, and the only question to be determined is exactly how much trouble. Which has center-left pundits considering where it all went wrong after Joe Biden won a national majority in 2020, Democrats took the Senate, and Biden held a strong position in the polls until the fall of Afghanistan. Matt Yglesias argues that polls have painted an unrealistic picture of how popular the Democrats and some of their agenda was, and this led them to abjure more moderate stances and positioning that might have worked against weak Republican candidates in battleground states:
The professionals know what it means to appeal to a right-of-center electorate. The problem is that Democrats keep miscalibrating their actual appeals because they are repeatedly over-optimistic about the nature of the actual electorates that they are facing. People sometimes construe polling bias as a question of biased pollsters loading the dice in favor of Democrats. But that’s not at all what’s happening. Instead, the propensity to respond to polls has become correlated with certain other psychological dispositions that influence political behavior. It means that the answers-polls electorate is to the left of the votes-in-elections electorate, so Democrats keep getting a skewed read of the landscape and miscalibrating their own races. The actual country is simply less-educated, lower in social trust and openness to experience, and more right-wing than the country that shows up in surveys. Democrats can win those voters; they just need to realize the practical necessity of doing it . . .
There is a remarkable mismatch between how progressives portray the stakes and what progressives are actually willing to do. The MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid says “literal fascism” and “female serfdom” among other things are on the table, which seems pretty bad….to tempt voters away from literal fascism, have they been given candidates in the purple districts (D+4/R+4) who disagree with progressives about gun control? Who support banning late-term abortions? Who have qualms about trans women competing against cis women in college sports? Who favor changing asylum law to try to cut off the flow of migrants arriving at the southern border? Who think it’s a problem that college admissions offices discriminate against Asian applicants and low-income whites? I’m not saying every candidate in every swing district should dissent from party leaders on all those subjects, but how many dissent on any of them? For that matter, given that everyone agrees gasoline prices are politically significant, how much effort did Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden put into thinking about how how to spur an oil production recovery back when they were planning the transition?
Josh Barro responds that the real problem was already baked in the cake in 2021 by the Democrats’ policy choices:
They are being punished less for extreme positions they’re taking now than for policy mistakes they made in the first half of 2021 — really, in the first few months of the Biden administration. Those policy mistakes have caused inflation to be more elevated than it otherwise would be, and gasoline prices specifically to be more elevated than they otherwise would be. Better messaging, or even better current policy positioning, wouldn’t do a lot to reduce the political penalty associated with those high prices. The key is to make prices lower, but it’s not possible to go back and un-make the mistakes that fueled the price hikes in the first place: Biden entered office pursuing a fossil fuel agenda animated by the idea that additional North American production should be discouraged . . . Biden overstimulated the US economy with a much-too-large final round of COVID relief . . . Supply factors have been an even bigger driver of excess inflation than demand factors. Much of that supply-driven inflation was due to the huge spike in energy prices from the war, which is unfortunate luck for Biden. Democrats are right when they point out that more oil and gas land leases today won’t produce more oil products and lower prices tomorrow, but if Biden had started from day one of his administration with a posture of seeking to promote North American energy production — proceeding with Keystone XL, auctioning oil and gas leases at a normal pace, and generally signaling (as the administration is now coming around to doing) that capital investments in US oil production will be rewarded rather than stranded — we might have greater North American production today and a less extreme spike in energy prices. Plus, if Biden had been trying to promote North American energy production all along, he’d have more credibility now when he talks about the issue: Republicans have long been advocates of drilling, pipelines and refining, while Democrats have waffled, and that hurts when voters are concerned about energy prices.
Both have a point. Parties need to moderate more when they are already unpopular due to their policies failing. Those of us on the right have been pointing out a lot of these things for the past two years. It will be interesting to see how many of them actually penetrate the thinking of the Democrats after they encounter the voters on November 8.