The Daily - How Democrats Defied the Odds

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

This week’s elections have been startlingly close. Control of both chambers of Congress remain up in the air.Historically, the president’s party is blown away in midterms. And the Democrats were further hampered this time round by President Biden’s unpopularity.Considering the headwinds, how did they do so well?Guest: Nate Cohn, chief political analyst for The New York Times.Background reading: President Biden appears to have had the best midterms of any president in 20 years.Election denial didn’t play as well as Republicans hoped. And former President Donald Trump has faced unusual public attacks from across his party following a string of losses.As the results continue to come in, here are the latest updates.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in this week's midterm elections, the Republican playbook backfired across the country and allowed Democrats to defy decades of political history. to defy decades of political history. My colleague, Nate Cohn, has been analyzing the results to understand why. It's Thursday, November 10th.

You feeling good? I am. I think I... Do you want me to get you a cup of coffee? Would that be psychologically useful? Or should we just start? I think we should just start. Okay. Nate?

Michael. Welcome back to your once every few year post-election medical checkup. Thanks for having me. Where we review how you did. No, this is about my sleep schedule. How we did. No, this is about polling. And just to start, before we get into why, what happened, No, this is about my sleep schedule. 525 p.m. on the East Coast on Wednesday. And when Astead and I left the studio about 12 and a half hours ago at 4 a.m., we told listeners that control of the House and the

Senate was uncertain and that that represented a major disappointment for Republicans in these midterm elections. How uncertain does control of both chambers remain at this moment? It remains very uncertain. Let's start with the Senate because that's the easy one. There are three races that remain to be decided, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. The Democrats need to win two of those seats to keep the chamber. So we have learned a little bit since you've woke up. And unfortunately, most of what we've learned has reduced the chance that we'll have a quick resolution in the Senate. We've learned that Georgia will go to a runoff, which will occur in December.

This is the Herschel Walker versus the Raphael Warnock Senate race. That's right. That's now been projected to go to a runoff with no candidate receiving 50% of the vote. And so for there to be any resolution to the Senate anytime soon, the Democrats will now need to win both of Nevada and Arizona in order for that Georgia runoff in December to no longer factor into the Senate math. Okay, that's messy. It is, and unfortunately the count in Nevada and Arizona is messy as well. We have no new information on those states, and in Nevada in particular, it is very difficult to see how there could be a call anytime soon. democracy's gotten messy okay the house the house is even messier the house is always hard there are 435 races

and the race is so close right now that it just becomes very difficult to game out exactly who will come out in the end but it's particularly messy this year because there are still dozens of races where there is not yet a projection and And it will take days, if not weeks, to make calls in those races because mail ballots still are yet to be counted, especially out West. Got it. The main thing that I would say about the House, I'm not sure people fully understand, is that it is very close. I mean, maybe the Republicans have a tiny edge if you ended the election today. Right. But it is not a meaningful one. And I think it is very easy to imagine many of the races that are in one side's column ending up in the other. Got it. OK, so neither chamber has been declared.

What are your best guesses for what it will look like when this is all over? In the Senate, the Democrats have more paths to win at this point. They seem clearly favored in Arizona. And if that's true, they only need one of Nevada or Georgia. Got it. The House, as I said, is a mess. It would not surprise me if the race is not called in weeks or in a month. And if there's a scenario, it could come down to a single seat.

Wow. I'm not saying that's going to happen. But at this stage, we have no reason to be sure it won't. So this was a genuinely and startlingly close midterm election. It was. And it's worth putting it in historical context. You know, the president's party almost always gets crushed in midterm elections. And historically, they have always been crushed when the president has an approval rating, you know, in the low 40s like Joe Biden does today. I don't know if you want to go on a history trip here.

Please, please, please. But just think about some recent elections. Trump's approval rating, same as Joe Biden, they lost 40 seats. Barack Obama, same approval rating as Joe Biden, lost 63 seats. Bush lost the House. Clinton lost the House. By huge margins. Huge margins. Decisive defeats in the national popular vote as well. And to be clear, there's not a precedent for the party in power to have done this well. Even though Democrats haven't won either chamber, on a relative basis, they have done quite well. Absolutely. I'll make one extra condition on your precedent thing, though, and that's that there's no precedent for it when the president is unpopular. Got it. That's very helpful. Okay. So on to the main event here, which is now that you've had 24 hours or so to sift through and analyze the results of these elections across the country, how do you account for this historical anomaly that you just

described for why Republicans failed to make the kind of gains they expected and we expected, given these historical patterns, and why Democrats, conversely, performed so well, given historical patterns. I might reframe your question, I guess, as why was this time different? And so, why aren't you hosting? I guess I'd come back to what we talked about when I was on the show last with you a few weeks ago. We talked about the various kinds of issues that were facing the electorate, democracy, the economy, abortion, crime. And what I said when I was last on the show was that our national poll showed that voters were caring a little bit less about abortion or democracy as the most important problem facing the country.

The issues seen as favorable. The issues that were seen as favorable to the Democrats, while voters said that the biggest problem facing the country was the economy or inflation. Right, which were issues good for Republicans. And what you told us, Nate, back then was that the shifting of prominence for these issues, things like abortion being replaced by crime, things like January 6th and democracy being replaced by inflation,

meant that Republicans had a very good chance of having a very good midterms. That didn't happen. It didn't. And I think that when you pour over the results by state by state, a really interesting pattern emerges, and one that I don't think we've seen in our era of deeply polarized national politics. And what's that? The pattern is that the Democrats do very well in states where abortion and democracy really was

on the ballot. And the Republicans do pretty well when it's not. And it all happens to cancel out and add up to a pretty even race overall. That's fascinating. What you're describing are

regional variations in this midterm, state variations in this midterm, in an era where we have come to anticipate that politics is national. I thought what happens in one place generally happens almost everywhere. Exactly. Okay. So give us specific examples that illustrate this pattern, this thesis that you're describing of the regionalization of these midterms. Well, let's start with, would you like to start with abortion or democracy?

Alex, I'll take abortion for 200. I'd like to start with abortion because, as you told us, and as I intuited, it is a hugely potent issue that seemed to recede for Democrats. Well, in some states it didn't. Let's take the very easiest example, Michigan. Abortion was literally on the ballot. They had a referendum over abortion rights in the state. And Democrats did fantastic in Michigan. Not only did Gretchen Whitmer win reelection by a wide margin, but the Democrats won every contested House race. seen as under threat in a direct, understandable way to a lot of voters, you're saying the Democrats show up in huge numbers, perhaps so do independents who are worried about abortion, and they outperformed all of our expectations. Right.

Okay. So let's look at a different example now where abortion, I think we can all agree, was not at risk. New York State. Where we are right now state where we are right now where we are right now okay and it's not under threat you'd argue because democratic governor legislature yep democrats did terribly really bad they appear poised to lose most and potentially all of the competitive battleground house districts in the state and there are a lot of them

in district after district the democrats fared way worse than Joe Biden. Exact opposite in Michigan, where Democrats in every district are running way ahead of how Joe Biden did in the last election. And how can you know for sure that abortion plays a role in this? Well, I think that if we just zoom out and start comparing state by state, you get a broader pattern where the more that either democracy or abortion is under threat the better the democrats do and when you move out of the cases where those things aren't under threat things tend to look not always but tend to look better for the republicans and we can keep going if you want you know i think if we just keep going state by state the pattern sort of starts to

jump out let's take penn Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania borders New York, right? So you can... In a very large stretch. In a very large stretch. And I don't know about you, but I've driven across this border many times. When you cross the border, everything looks the same. You're not entering a new country or something. But the results for House and Senate and governor are very different. On the Pennsylvania side of the border, the Democrats are generally doing much better than Joe Biden against Donald Trump. And on the New York side of the border, it's this democratic collapse. And how do you explain that as we think about the issue of abortion and the future of democracy?

Well, I think that the future of democracy in Pennsylvania was a huge issue in this election because the Republicans nominated a stop-the-steal candidate for governor. Doug Mastriano. Doug Mastriano. And I appreciate you saying that for me after all of these hours being up. And, you know, if you just put yourself in the shoes of a Democratic voter in Pennsylvania for a second, imagine the urgency that you would feel to turn out and vote in that race when you believe that there's a distinct chance that someone who would have potentially overturned the presidential result in your state and send American constitutional governance into chaos could potentially win that election.

And now imagine if you put yourself in the shoes of a Democrat in New York. Not as worried. I wouldn't think so. So tell me about how the congressional races played out in Pennsylvania once this threat to democracy was absorbed by the electorate. Democrats appear to have swept all of the competitive House races in Pennsylvania, running way ahead of Joe Biden. And of course, the Democrats won this very competitive Senate race. Yes. John Fetterman wound up winning the Senate race by six percentage points. Again, much better than Joe Biden against Donald Trump. The governor's race

was a landslide. For the Democrats. For the Democrats. And the thing that's interesting to me about this, you know, we could debate about why these differences exist in some level, but the fact that they're so clearly by state is what is so telling to me. Whenever you look at a block of house districts in a state, they all seem to be doing better or worse than Joe Biden across all of them. Right. And that tells me that the thing that's happening is happening in a state. Right. And literally not even across the border to the next state, even when that border

is like a couple miles away. Exactly. Okay. So very clearly, your thesis, this is praise, is being borne out here when it comes to the issue

of democracy and abortion and the regionalization of these midterms. In the interest of attempting to further establish this idea or poke holes in it, where else do we see this regionalization of the midterms based on these perceived threats or lack of these threats? Okay, this is my favorite one, I think, and that's Virginia.

You know, to this point, we've been talking about the way that races across the state, like a governor's race or a referendum, could affect all the dynamics across the state. But Virginia is such a fun case because there is no governor's race. You may recall that they have their state elections in off years. So the main reason to show up and vote in Virginia this year is just whether you're going to vote in races for U.S. House. So then when you zoom out again to the national picture, a state like Virginia sort of acts like a control in this grand experiment. Here's this place where nothing is affecting the dynamics. No threats against democracy or abortion. Where none of these other issues are affecting the way that voters might decide whether to vote. And we get something that looks kind of normal. The president's party doing poorly in a midterm election.

president's party doing poorly in a midterm election. One of the key battleground races that we entered tonight thinking we need to look at was Virginia's second district in Virginia Beach. And the Republicans won by 10 percentage points. In Northern Virginia, a district that voted for Biden by a wide double-digit margin in 2020 wound up being very close. wide double-digit margin in 2020 wound up being very close. So Virginia helps us understand just how powerful and regional these threats of abortion and democracy can be because they're utterly absent. And in their absence, we see normal patterns of voting emerge in these midterms, which is Republicans doing very well against Democrats when the Democratic president is not all that popular. Exactly. We'll be right back. So, Nate, how does Florida, where Republicans did very well in Tuesday's election,

how does that fit into this thesis of yours? And I ask because Florida is a hugely important state in almost every election, and because Republican success in Florida 24 hours ago made everyone think that this might be a Republican wave election, which it turned out it wasn't. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say that everything perfectly fits this pattern, but Florida, I think, does happen to fit this pattern pretty well. I know that there are many Democrats who might be listening who think Governor Ron DeSantis is a real extremist and a very conservative Republican, which he is. But by the measure of does he pose a threat to democracy or is abortion under threat, I don't think he quite fits those characteristics.

I think abortion is a really interesting example. He refused to go any further than a 15-week ban on abortion, which comes pretty close to something that a majority of Americans support. And on democracy, you know, while Ron DeSantis has done the common Republican thing of, you know, saying there are questions and so on, Ron DeSantis was not at the Capitol with a pitchfork or something. He has not been a leader on stop the steal. There's no indication that he'll, you know, overturn election results or anything like that. And he was on the ballot this year. And he was on the ballot this year. And so what is the result of that? The result appears to be a Republican landslide.

It turns out that, at least in Florida, that a very conservative ticket that avoided these two issues could fare extremely well. DeSantis cruised to re-election, and Republican House candidates posted really strong performances. And DeSantis isn't the only Republican who fared well by avoiding the baggage of democracy or abortion. And just to the north, Brian Kemp in Georgia is another good example. Brian Kemp established his credibility

as a sort of normal Republican on these sort of issues by refusing to go along with Trump's stop-the-steal efforts in the aftermath of the 2020 election. And he won by a comfortable margin. Reelected governor by a wide margin. And that race was never competitive. Brian Kemp led the whole time against Stacey Abrams, who's a very strong candidate in her own right. But here

we have a mainstream Republican and you end up with a normal midterm result. Similarly to what we saw in Virginia when those issues were not on the ballot. Exactly. Nate, are there exceptions to this thesis you've outlined here? see what the final results are there. Many of the states where the results aren't in could ultimately prove to be inconsistent with this theory, and we just don't know that yet. And there is one kind of exception that in some way proves the rule, and these are individual house districts that deviate from the pattern elsewhere in their state. There are states where abortion and democracy are not under threat, but we see a specific congressional district where a Republican nominee appears to pose a threat to democracy and voters respond to it just as they would if it were at the state level, perhaps even more so. What do you mean? Take Ohio.

Ohio is a state where neither abortion nor democracy were on the ballot, and the Republicans did pretty well. Then you look at this one district, Ohio 9, and we see something very different. Which is? In Ohio 9, the Democrat Marcy Kaptur defeats a Republican named J.R. Majewski by a 13-point margin in a district Trump won by three. That's really interesting. So this just totally stands out from everything else in the state. And Majewski is a stop-the-steal candidate. And he's not just someone stop-the-steal candidate. And he's not just someone who denies the election result. This is someone who raised money for the January 6th event.

So in a case like that, you're saying a single congressional district can operate the way an entire state can when voters feel something like democracy is under threat. The regionalization literally becomes the tiny region of a congressional district. That's really fascinating. And there are other examples of it. Cases where the Republicans nominate stop-the-steal type candidates, and virtually all of those Republicans fared poorly.

Nate, everything that you're describing here seems to return to the idea that Donald Trump made these midterm elections harder for his own party than they needed to be by making them more regionalized by, for example, elevating candidates who support Stop the Steal or elevating candidates who oppose abortion or actually just getting Roe v. Wade overturned, which he did through his judicial appointments to the Supreme Court. And if Trump hadn't done those things, then the issues favorable to Republicans, like inflation or crime,

might have become nationalized and helped Republicans do very, very well, much better than they did in these midterms. I think so. I mean, you know, I started with saying, why is this time different? And isn't it very different that the last president is still around and dominating our national politics in our everyday life? Yes. The normal theory for why the president's party does poorly is that it's a referendum in some way on the president. And we have a lot of cases where it wasn't really that, was it? Right.

In fact, it felt like this campaign was a referendum as much on the last president as the current president. In some states, it was explicitly a referendum on the last presidential election. Mm-hmm. I have to think, Nate, that Republicans are having the same conversation we are right now. I would sure think so. And they are wondering if the easiest path to elections

where the issues they like are nationalized is a race where the last president just isn't as prominent, where Trump essentially recedes and where he's definitely not the presumed nominee

for the party's presidential nomination in 2024. Yeah, I mean, look, I haven't been reporting and talking to Republicans today, but how couldn't they be having that conversation? The results show over and over again that Trump-backed candidates fared systematically worse. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have an electorally effective model for a very conservative politician ron dos santos who himself happens to be considering running right and i would think that model looks awfully palatable today and it's worth remembering of course that donald trump lost the last election

and republicans did not get the result that they ought to have had and that they believed they were going to get two nights ago and therefore it would be a little bit risky to try and run the same thing over again and think you'll get a better result. In 2024. In 2024. And it could happen. You know, Joe Biden's not popular. You never know.

But clearly, there are real risks associated with this brand of politics right now. So I want to end on the question of the nature of polling itself. It has become a bit of a national fixation since 2016 to wonder whether we have properly polled Americans when it comes to these kinds of elections, whether we have made people anticipate the results that actually come. Do you feel like you and our colleagues in the world of polling anticipated the Democratic strength that we have just witnessed in this midterm and the relative Republican weakness? This answer may surprise you,

but I think we actually had a really good year in terms of the poll numbers themselves. These results come very close to our final poll numbers. The catch, though, is that we're in the show talking about an unusual pattern where some states were very good for Democrats and others weren't. Right. And issues became regionalized. Exactly. And that made it very hard for us to trust and understand our polling ahead of the election. Let me give

you an example. Kansas three. We did a poll of Kansas two weeks before the election there, and we found a Democrat up 14 points in a district that Biden won by just four. That seems weird. It did seem weird. And after the last few years of polling error, how couldn't we look at that and think that this was probably a polling error happening yet again? It decreased my confidence in our polling. But in the end, the Democrat won Kansas three by 12 points.

Which is pretty close to the polled number of 14. Yeah, it was a great result. And it was part of the national pattern we're talking about. Kansas was a state where abortion was in the air this cycle. They had that referendum on abortion. And in fact, that's the reason we chose to poll Kansas three was because we thought we could measure how abortion was affecting the race. So our polling actually did show this strange, uneven map where in some places Democrats would do very well and others it would look pretty normal and others potentially bad for Democrats. But in a lot of cases, we didn't entirely trust our numbers because it just didn't fit everything else. Right. Which is the story of historical anomalies. Exactly.

They are anomalous. But, that's what happened. Nate, thanks for knowing this would happen, but not trusting it. Thanks for explaining it, now that you do trust it, because it happened. We appreciate your time. Thank you for having me.

In a speech on Wednesday, President Biden declared that voters had sent a, quote, clear and unmistakable message that they wanted to preserve democracy and protect abortion. At the same time, there was growing evidence that Republican leaders are rejecting Donald Trump. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania

said that Trump was to blame for his party's poor performance in the midterms and said that to succeed in future elections, Republicans must make a clean break from the former president. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know about the midterm elections. In closely watched state-level races, Democrats fended off efforts by Republicans to win legislative supermajorities in North Carolina and Wisconsin.

That's seen as a crucial achievement for Democrats because supermajorities in those states would have allowed a Republican-controlled legislature to override a Democratic governor. In Wisconsin, Republicans had hoped to use a supermajority to try to take over the state's entire system of voting, something that Democrats have thwarted for now. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan and Jessica Chung. It was edited by MJ Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Rowan Nemisto,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday after the holiday.