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What’s happening right now, within the offices and on the phone and computer screens of Democratic campaign strategists literally from coast to coast, is familiar to anyone who has worked on or deeply covered a big-time political campaign.
To deploy the traditional metaphor, the tsunami is now close enough to shore that, even through the senses-blinding haze caused by the rain, wind, thunder, and lightening associated with the approaching storm, these Democrats can at least roughly see the massive size of the wave.
And the leading-edge water has started to seep into Blue homes, the initial foreboding destruction foreshadowing to rough weather-tested veterans all too familiar with this dark, sensory experience that something even more destructive than what just a week ago was their worst-case scenario may well crash all over their tribal village with the kind of inexorable force that will change…everything.
From the private polling to the analytics to the unpersuasive persuasion telephone calls to the door knocking to the fingertip feel — all the sensory experiences Democratic campaign strategists are having now are a living nightmare.
The jobs, careers, and lives of many of their clients (more than a few of whom are also their friends and/or meal tickets) are about to be harshly wiped away, and, in a very large number of cases (really, in almost all of them), there is nothing they can do about it now.
Sure, they can switch up the final TV ad traffic, or throw a Hail Mary in a debate (if there are any left on the schedule). They can go way over the line with a desperate digital ad, radio spot, an opposition research dump, fliers, or robocalls. They can ask the candidates who are millionaires (lots are) to write one last massive self-funding check.
They can do any or all of those things, but they will do them knowing that, if the tsunami ends up crashing ashore at anything like the size it now appears to be, these closing acts of self-defense and self-preservation are the equivalent of putting masking tape around the frame of the front door to try to save the house from flooding. Not necessarily too late — but way, way too little.
From Rhode Island to Seattle, the Blue problems are all pretty much the same: inflation, crime, and Joe Biden.
The cries of “Abortion!,” “Democracy!,” and “Trump!” no longer seem capable of reducing the size of the wave or protecting many of their clients’ homes.
So what’s happening on those consultants’ iPhones and MacBooks?
— second-guessing about a failure to start driving a unified, winning economic message months ago
— cursing the advocates of “defund the police” and the unwillingness to fully Sister Soulja them long ago
— moving what resources can still be moved to try to save as many incumbent-held seats/homes as possible
— praying that somehow, by luck and the grace of God, that it won’t be quite as bad as it now seems, that there will be more survivors than currently seem possible, that clients and candidates who today look imperiled (or even like full-on goners) will somehow make it out alive, winning by the narrowest of margins, knowing that a win is still a win, even if it comes after a near-death experience, and even as tribal members all over the neighborhood are being wiped out all around them at the same time
— contacting trusted political reporters, unbidden, to tell them about what they now see of the dimensions of the encroaching tidal wave, the reasons for it, the new, unexpected homes and lives it threatens, the motions they are going through to save as much blood and treasure as they can, and, ultimately, the predictable futility of the whole endgame enterprise
Not everything and everyone will necessarily be lost. But Democrats now expect a lot will be.
They laugh ruefully when their Red counterparts talk publicly about the pro-Democratic bias of media polls, because their own private polls actually paint a more pessimistic picture in many cases than the public surveys.
Hope no longer springs eternal, if it springs at all.
This is true at the White House, at the DCCC, at the DGA, and in the campaign and consultant offices of veteran and newbie strategists everywhere. Those toiling on Senate races are slightly less effected, although if they are working on defending Patty Murray, Maggie Hassan, or Michael Bennet, the concern has grown deeper.
The most grizzled veterans — the ones who lived through 1994 and 2010 — are relying partly on data to see the handwriting on the tsunami (got this far without mixing a metaphor!), but they have enough experience to process the anecdotal as if it’s proof. In their war-torn minds, the qualitative is, with cold efficiency, turned into a quantitative understanding of what’s happening.
The field director reports at the end of the day that the door knockers are being given the finger, literally and figuratively, in households where the data suggested votes could be found. Instead it’s “Let’s go, Brandon” — or the earthier equivalent. It’s furious spewing about the cost of everything, about rampant crime, about the loss of a sense of safety, for which they blame exactly one party.
Or the Black pastor, who has reliably turned out busloads of votes in the past, says the lack of enthusiasm is palpable.
Or the moderate, pro-choice, virulently anti-Trump Republican woman who lives next door says she’s voting for Kari Lake (or Tudor Dixon….or Lee Zeldin), and the Democratic consultant doesn’t even need to ask why. He knows why.
And they know that no one is coming to the rescue now, no benevolent Mikkos Cassadine who can change the course or severity of the storm. Not Barack or Michelle Obama or Bill or Hillary Clinton or Mike Donilon or Nancy Pelosi or some Rahm-to-Klain campaign-gambit-disguised-as-government-policy gimmick. Not Andy Spahn or Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not Bon Jovi or Bruce (neither Springsteen or Hornsby). Not Rachel or the New York Times or the FBI or Sheryl Sandberg. Not the AFL-CIO, not Steve Elmendorf, not either McMahon brother, not Jill Alper, not Debbie Dingell, not Joe or Jill or Kamala.
Not even Oprah.
Not even Michael Whouley.
And the fact that a massive Red wave will lead to a Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a gloating Rick Scott, election deniers installed in high offices in the most important presidential battlegrounds, and (most painfully of all to them, by far) a triumphal Donald J. Trump — well, that fact makes watching the storm build for another week and a half, in nonstop brace for it to hit, the very epitome of a professional and personal hellscape rolled into one.
There will be Blue bodies and Blue homes saved (Josh Shapiro will be the governor of Pennsylvania), but there will now almost certainly be some unexpected donkey souls washed away, too.
And the exit polls and precinct results on and after Election Day are likely to tell a chilling story about the turnout and allegiances of young voters, old voters, working-class voters, suburban voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, and Black voters.
On the Republican side, as you can imagine, it’s the opposite. Eye-popping polling surges, money being wired in from lobbyists and fat cat donors who know which way the wind blows (and how hard), a jaunty sense of confidence and momentum that is binding the whole of Team Red (minus Liz Cheney) together. Mitt is psyched; Bossie is psyched; Mitch is psyched (although it’s not entirely effortless to tell); Sean is psyched; Susan is psyched; the entire Schlapp household is too.
Here are key excerpts from the uber essential reading Washington Post version of what I just wrote:
Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, Democrats have moved into a defensive crouch, scrambling to shore up the party’s candidates as Republicans charge deeper into their terrain. The scope of their challenge has come into sharper focus in the past 48 hours, when much of the attention in the party has been on protecting swaths of the country where Democrats have long enjoyed more support.
Late-summer Democratic talk of going on offense by running on abortion rights while Biden’s approval rating ticked up has run headlong into the harsh reality that Republicans are well-positioned to make potentially large gains on Nov. 8, some Democratic strategists said, by hammering them over crime and inflation — and seizing on fatigue over Democratic leadership in government.
“Some of what is going on is a reversion to the norm. After all the sound and fury, elections go back to their basics,” said Craig Varoga, a Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential, gubernatorial and Senate races.
Like other Democratic strategists, Varoga said he worried his party put too much emphasis on abortion over the summer and should have more aggressively made it part of a broader argument that Republicans oppose personal freedom. “Politics is hard work. It’s like personal wellness — you can’t rely on one thing to fix everything,” he said.
Multiple Democratic strategists said that fear of losing the right to abortion is proving to be a less motivating factor in blue states because voters believe their access to the procedure will be protected by current laws and Democratic control of state government.
That has been compounded by other factors, some said. One Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid, described a “blue-state depression” for House races, pointing specifically to New York, Oregon and California where a handful of races are “closer than normal….”
Some Democrats pointed to fatigue in blue areas over pandemic restrictions, one-party dominance, and concerns about violent crime and quality of life in large cities such as Portland, Ore., New York City and San Francisco.
“Crime, in many ways, is the thread that is holding those together,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Here’s some from the Politico version:
Despite public displays of confidence, anxiety is growing within the White House and allied Democrats that Republicans will capture at least one chamber of Congress and possibly both.
But even with those fears, President Joe Biden plans to remain largely on the sidelines during the race’s final fortnight….
[Biden aides] have begun expressing deep private concern about several races pointing to the campaign’s late-breaking focus on the economy and crime….
Party officials privately note that retaining the House is unlikely and point to the economy, redistricting and historic headwinds as reasons for defeat….
In 2020, Biden won the Great Lakes trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, reclaiming the former Democratic strongholds from Trump. But in the last month, he has avoided both Michigan and Wisconsin, despite them holding competitive governor and Senate races. He also has not traveled to Georgia, which has tight statehouse and Senate races and was the decisive state to give Democrats control of the upper chamber two years ago.
A stop in Georgia could be added in the race’s final fortnight, officials said. But there are no visits planned for Michigan or Wisconsin.
And in the Wall Street Journal’s version, an OMG story about how Democrats are STILL publicly and privately bickering NOW about what their economic message should be for an election in which EARLY VOTING IS ALREADY UNDERWAY, a veteran GOP operative gets it right:
Scott Reed, a Republican strategist, called [some Democratic infighting] “the first volley of the blame game that is coming on hard.”
“The Democrats missed the messaging this cycle. It didn’t help that Biden and the White House were all over the place. But they overplayed abortion and they missed that everyone is getting their 401(k) retirement reports and they’re all getting crushed,” Mr. Reed said. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has declined about 12% in 2022.
I would bet that Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and a lot of aides who helped get them elected president would agree with the conclusion of the Wall Street Journal lead editorial offering an explanation for the wave:
The Trump Presidency caused many people to lose their minds, Democrats and the media most of all. The normal party checks on radical policies vanished as opposition to Trump became the party’s self-defining political mission. Perhaps a drubbing on Nov. 8 will jolt the party back to reality.
Along the same lines, with the same amount of truthiness: the closing paragraph of Dan Henninger’s column:
The Democrats’ decision to load up so much of this election on “Trump” has been a mistake. Voters are looking forward. Mr. Trump’s greatest contribution to the Republican Party could lie in doing just enough to keep the Democrats’ bulls charging toward his cape unto exhaustion, while Republican candidates go about winning on their own merits.
The tsunami may end up being not as big as it now appears to Democrats who are running the campaigns that matter.
But right now, to them, it appears very big.
****
ESSENTIAL READING/VIEWING
* This pre-dawn White House press release might seem to some sensitive eyes like more of a political document than a governmental one; imagine if a Republican administration did this, right before an election…
A woman came forward Wednesday to accuse Herschel Walker, the anti-abortion Republican running for U.S. Senate in Georgia, of encouraging and paying for her 1993 abortion — an accusation that came just weeks after a former girlfriend said he did the same for her in 2009.
Walker dismissed the newest allegation as “foolishness” and “a lie,” similar to his vehement denials earlier this month of the abortion alleged to have happened 13 years ago.
“I’m done with all this foolishness. This is all a lie, and I will not entertain any of it. I also did not kill JFK,” Walker said in a statement later Wednesday.
The second accuser, identified only as “Jane Doe,” spoke to reporters via an audio Zoom call arranged by her lawyer, Gloria Allred. The woman alleged that Walker, a former college and professional football star making his first bid for public office, pressured her into an abortion and paid for one after she became pregnant during their six-year relationship while he was married to his first wife.
* And/but David Byler says the data suggests Walker’s political standing has fully recovered from the first round of abortion accusations.
* Politico on some sort of typically complex, still-developing Trump-DeSantis kerfuffle:
* I have no idea what to make of this New York Post story but my spideysense tells me it is indeed essential:
In the latest sign of trouble for the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, President Biden called a prominent Hudson Valley rabbi to urge that he back the re-election of embattled Democrat incumbent Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney.
Maloney, who is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pal of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is locked in what has turned into a toss-up race with Republican challenger Mike Lawler, a state assemblyman.
“You will have an open door to my administration,” Biden reportedly told Rabbi David Twersky in the 15-minute phone call, according to Rocklanddaily.com and confirmed by Jacob Kornbluh of the Forward.
