Jim puts his finger on one of the most interesting contrasts in this year’s Senate races:
The outlook could change, but at least for now, a bunch of blah, not-so-high-profile Democratic incumbents who once looked potentially vulnerable look like relatively comfortable favorites. In other words, the boring Democrats are doing just fine.
You know who’s flopping? A lot of the well-known, well-funded superstar challengers on the Democratic side.
The power of boring is something that Harry Reid’s Democratic Party understood much better than Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Party. As I wrote after Reid’s death last year:
Under Reid, it would have been unthinkable to let a sure loser like Amy McGrath suck up national media attention and $80 million in fundraising challenging Mitch McConnell. A weak and scandal-tinged candidate like Cal Cunningham wouldn’t have been the nominee in a competitive state. A nationwide slogan as obviously self-destructive as “defund the police” would have been disavowed immediately and explicitly by every candidate. Senate Democrats rarely made mistakes like those under Reid’s leadership.
They nominated boring, inoffensive candidates — such as Mark Begich, Joe Donnelly, Bill Nelson, Heidi Heitkamp, Mark Pryor, Mark Udall, and Jeanne Shaheen — and let them run campaigns suited to their strengths in their states. They turned out their base and won independents (Politics 101). And it’s not like they were a bunch of moderates, either. They voted in lockstep with President Obama when they arrived in Washington.
Virginia is a great example. It’s a state with a Republican governor and a very competitive state legislature that sends two Democrats, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, to the Senate. One of their biggest selling points is that Virginia voters know they will never turn on the news or read the paper and find a headline about Warner or Kaine. They’re two of the most boring politicians on earth. And they’re not moderates, either; they consistently vote in lockstep with Democrats on everything from abortion to spending.
It has become commonplace for progressives to complain that the Senate is inherently unfair to Democrats, even though they had filibuster-proof majorities under Reid not that long ago. Instead of complaining, they should recruit better candidates — and understand that better often means boring.
There’s a lesson there for Republicans, too.