The Daily - How the Democrats Flipped the House

Episode Date: November 9, 2018

In this year’s midterm elections, Democrats were battling for House seats in a range of districts. We look at how the party’s leaders came up with a winning strategy to use across vastly different places. Guest: Kate Zernike and Jonathan Martin, political reporters for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. In this year's midterms, dozens of Democrats were battling for House seats in dozens of districts across the country. How the party's leaders came up with a winning strategy that applied to all of them. It's Friday, November 9th. Kate Zernike, what was the situation with this seat in Virginia before the midterms? This was kind of a famous district.

America is at a critical crossroads, and the route we take will determine the kind of country we want to be. It was held for a long time, for about a decade, by Eric Cantor, who was the House Majority Leader when the Republicans controlled the House and Paul Ryan was Speaker. And Eric Cantor is one of what were called the young guns. They were young Republican leaders, and their whole focus was fiscal conservatism. Washington has a spending problem, and both Democrats and Republicans bear some responsibility. Government shouldn't be big. Government shouldn't be intruding in people's lives. They didn't talk a lot about social conservatism. So that made them aligned with the Tea Party, which emerged in 2010, mostly fighting health care.

And Eric Cantor seemed the voice of this new Republican Party. And that's what makes it so interesting what happens in 2014. And what happens in 2014? Eric Cantor has a primary challenge. And he doesn't take it seriously because he's never had to take it seriously. He thinks he's pretty aligned with the Republicans and he's got the pulse of the country. But it turns out he did have to worry. I'm running for Congress because Washington is broken. Obamacare is raising insurance costs and lowering the quality of your health care. A guy named Dave Brat was running against him. And Dave Brat was an economics professor and he was running against Obamacare.

And his feeling was that Eric Cantor, as much as he'd been opposed to Obamacare, hadn't done enough to push the Republicans to repeal it. 250,000 Virginians will lose their health insurance policies right after the election because of Obamacare. And he kept arguing, if Eric Cantor really wanted to get rid of Obamacare, he wouldn't keep voting on these budgets

that funded Obamacare. But the reality was Cantor, as a party leader, knew that this was going to mean shutting down the government. There probably weren't the votes to entirely repeal Obamacare. And it was kind of the dilemma that faced Tea Party candidates once the Republicans took the House was that a lot of the things the Tea Party had been advocating weren't really possible once it came to governing. So Bratt was running a campaign that was about ideological purity, not necessarily practical governance. Cantor, an elected official in Republican leadership in the House, was about governing. Right. So, Bratt became the darling of the Tea Party nationally, and so he was getting a lot of attention. but really, nobody saw this coming, oddly enough. I mean, I think if you were in the Tea Party bubble,

you might have seen it. But Eric Cantor just didn't think he had to take this seriously. And so what actually happens? We begin, though, with the major political upset for one of the most powerful Republicans in the country, Eric Cantor, the number two GOP lawmaker in the House, beaten in the primary by a Tea Party candidate. So Brat wins. Yep, that's right. Cantor lost to David Brat, a political unknown. Cantor was widely thought to be the next Speaker of the House. He spoke to disappointed supporters last night.

Obviously, we came up short. The idea that Eric Cantor, this fiscal conservative, couldn't survive made the Republicans think, oh, you know what, we have to tend to the social conservatism. It's not about Dave Brat winning tonight. It's about returning the country to constitutional principles. It's about returning the country to Judeo-Christian principles. And on health care, it makes Republicans say that that's the issue they need to tend to. They need to do anything and everything they can to repeal Obamacare, even though a lot of them aren't necessarily on board with that. They feel this is what they need to give their voters.

So it moves the entire party, this one election, to the right. Exactly. And it comes to be sort of disproportionately important. And there's one more detail of this story that's kind of incredible. Right. One of Bratt's biggest boosters is a guy named Steve Bannon, who at the time is at Breitbart News.

Right. So Bannon comes along and sees the potency of Obamacare, and then he sees another candidate who's running for president and thinks... Should I read you the statement? Oh, this guy could be just like my first day in office. I'm going to ask Congress to put a bill on my desk, getting rid of this disastrous law and replacing it with reforms that expand choice, freedom, affordability.

You're going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it's going to be so easy. So given all that, what would you expect Democrats to think about this seed heading into this year's midterm elections, four years later, especially with Trump now as president? This is a district that Trump wins by six points. So the Democrats are looking at it thinking, this is crazy. But the area has started to change. So as a place like Washington becomes more expensive, people start to move out to Chesterfield and Henrico counties, which are the areas that make up the 7th District in Virginia. And there are a lot of college-educated women in this district, and they're freaked out by Trump.

They don't like his language. They don't like the way he talks about women. And they're also starting to like health care. What's starting to happen is what happens with all of these entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare. They start out unpopular, and then people get used to them and they start to see the benefits. And they don't like the Republicans now saying, I'm going to take this away. And Brat, of course, is the quintessential opponent of the Affordable Care Act. Right. So these women start showing up at Brat events. The problem is Obamacare has just collapsed. And they're saying, like, you are the problem.

Dave Brat, care more! Dave Brat, care more! Dave Brat! What's interesting is Eric Cantor didn't see Dave Brat coming, but Dave Brat sees these women coming, and he's freaked out. And he's at a meeting with Republicans and he complains, they're following me around, they show up wherever I am. That's town hall. And believe me, it's not to give positive input. And he's captured on tape with a quote that I think will ultimately come to define the midterms of 2018. Since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill. So tell us about one of the women in particular who decides to protest Bratt and his position on the Affordable Care Act. Ever since I was a little kid, I always knew I wanted to join the CIA. I would write my diary in coded language. I would play cops and robbers with my

sisters. I always wanted to be one of the good guys. There's a woman named Abigail Spanberger who has worked for the CIA. She grew up in Virginia, has moved back there with her husband and three daughters. I've been considering running for Congress, but it was the day of the House healthcare vote that I definitively decided that I would run. She has a conversation with a friend who has a sick child. This woman, this friend of hers, is really fearful that she's going to lose her healthcare coverage. Knowing how this vote would have impacted my friends,

people I know, and millions of Americans, they need a voice and they need someone who's going to represent them with integrity. And Abigail Spanberger calls her husband at work that day and she says, this is it. I'm definitely running. Mason was only 10 years old when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. She's specifically appealing to swing voters, women in particular, who might have voted for Dave Brat. I feel betrayed by Dave Brat. He voted against protections for pre-existing conditions for families like mine. I voted for Dave Brat once. I will not make that mistake again.

I'm voting for Abigail Spanberger. What Spanberger also has is a career as a CIA operative. And there are other women like her who are running across the country. And they become known as service candidates. So they've served in the military or they've served in the CIA. service candidates. So they've served in the military or they've served in the CIA. And I think the appeal to people who might not be willing to vote for a more traditional woman or what we thought as a traditional woman, but it kind of gives people this reassurance of, oh, she's tough. She is honest. She is a centrist. She's going to bring the sides of Congress

together. And we're excited because we think this is great for us and our business because we think that we're going to be able to continue to have affordable health care. I hope this changes the dynamic that we've been seeing in politics, in the divisiveness, and just is a voice of reason and starts a movement. And she's a moderate. She's really running in health care. And she's dodging Brat's efforts to paint her as a liberal, to paint her as Nancy Pelosi.

There's this famous moment in their debate. A vote for my opponent will be a vote for the Nancy Pelosi liberal agenda. Bratz starts saying, you know, a vote for her is a vote for Nancy Pelosi. She's Nancy Pelosi. She's Nancy Pelosi. Spamberger says, no. Because I am not the Democrat who supported single-payer in the primary. I am not Nancy Pelosi. And I am not President Barack Obama. I want to serve this community. It's the community that made me who I am. And I ask for your vote on November the 6th. Abigail Spanberger is my name.

And what ends up happening on Tuesday? So they're running kind of neck and neck all night. It's the last race to be called in Virginia. And I'm emailing with someone I know who's a Republican woman who nonetheless was supporting Spanberger in that district. And she says to me, wait for Chesterfield County, which is where all of these moderate women who have moved into the district are living. And sure enough, the votes start coming in from Chesterfield and Spanberger pulls ahead.

And it's still really close in the end, but in the end, Spanberger wins. We did it! Wow. So four years after a conservative takes the seat from a more moderate Republican, in part by railing against Obamacare, a Democrat takes it from him by fighting for Obamacare. Absolutely. Kate, thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Jonathan Martin, is the Abigail Spanberger victory over David Bratt in Virginia emblematic of how the Democrats ended up taking control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday? It sure is. And how so? How did it work? So Democrats were stunned by President Trump's victory in 2016. I think at the outset of his administration, there was this extraordinary

opposition that became known as the resistance to President Trump's administration. I think the instinct of a lot of people, especially on the left, was this is an outrage and we've got to do everything we can to steadfastly oppose this president. I think once the professional operatives in the party looked under the hood, so to speak, they realized that if we want to take the House back next year, we can't just do it by demonizing President Trump to win, we have to go into these purple suburban districts with Republican DNA and have a message for them that's not just Donald Trump's a buffoon, which obviously was the instinct and the true feeling of much of their own base. So Democratic Party leaders looked at all this angry animated resistance that was triggered by President Trump's election and said,

we can harness this, but it can't be our message. That's exactly right. And the assumption being that the people who are fired up about Trump were going to crawl on glass to the polls. He didn't have to give them much motivation. Those people are ready to vote yesterday. But what do we do to get that other segment of voters in the middle out? And who led this Democratic strategy?

Who most forcefully embraced it and gave voice to it? Nancy Pelosi. The day after the election two years ago, we didn't agonize. We organized. You know, the irony about Nancy Pelosi is that in the eyes of the right, she is this sort of radical San Francisco left winger. Folks in Washington and cover politics kind of know it's a more complicated story. Nancy Pelosi is a pragmatist when it comes to politics. She wants to win.

That's her bottom line, winning. This is the issue that is on the ballot. This election is about health care. And look, she's a progressive, but she also realizes that you have to make certain accommodations to win. Whatever our point of view on other issues, we understood that we had to work together to save the Affordable Care Act. And so she wholeheartedly embraced this strategy of a health care campaign and that that was going to be much more potent than just sort of anti-Trump rhetoric. Why? It was the most universal issue in the Democratic arsenal. What I mean by

that is that you could wield the health care issue in the most high-income purple suburbs around Philadelphia or Chicago, but you could also use the issue in much more conservative-leaning parts of the country. I'm thinking about like rural Maine, for example. So the strategy was, how do we find an issue that we can sort of use broadly that you don't have to kind of tailor depending upon a district or the part of the country that you're in?

And healthcare was clearly their best bet. So how do the Democrats actually deploy this strategy as the midterms approach? Well, this was the challenge that they were so determined not to chase rabbits, as they say, that they had to stay eyes on the prize, and the prize was health care. And that was tough because there were plenty of moments where the president would do something that was so incendiary that their conscience and their base certainly demanded that they speak out. Whether it was standing with Putin in Helsinki, the crisis at the border of migrant children being taken from their parents. These Democrats faced a choice.

How do we address this latest provocation, this latest eruption, but not then get sucked into, you know, litigating the president's behavior week after week. And I think what they're trying to do is, if it was so egregious in their eyes and in the eyes of their voters, they would put out a tough statement, but they would always quickly pivot back to the health care issue. All right, I want to start with something that Nancy Pelosi had to say in a joint statement with Chuck Schumer. She said this, the president is desperate to change the subject from healthcare to immigration because he knows that healthcare is the number one issue Americans care about. Lisa, your response? Well, I would say that Democrats are desperate to not talk about immigration. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, put out a memo to Democrats and competitive races saying to avoid immigration.

And what does this Democratic strategy tell us about the assumptions that people like Nancy Pelosi were making about how the Republican Party would be running in this midterm? that this would squeeze the Republican Party between its sort of hard right base and its pragmatist, that the Republican Party, after promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act for eight years, was going to have a hard time just simply walking away from that because of the promises that they made to their base. At the same time, they knew that pulling out the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act and saying that the Republicans were trying to repeal those elements was political gold. 2.5 million Missourians have pre-existing conditions. Their Attorney General, Josh Hawley, went to court to rip away health care. We cannot go back to a time when people couldn't get coverage when they had pre-existing health conditions.

The reality is that we took the vote. And during the vote, Martha voted to repeal these protections. Mike Braun supports a lawsuit today, today, that would take away pre-existing conditions coverage. Jonathan, I want to come back to the race in Virginia for just a second. What does it tell us about the success by Democrats in reclaiming the House? That a seat that was won in 2014 by a prototypical Tea Party candidate, David Brat, a kind of precursor to Donald Trump, just four years later was taken back by a prototypical 2018 Democratic candidate. a prototypical 2018 Democratic candidate. Yeah, it does capture the symmetry of this era where you've got a Republican base that exacted demands on its establishment

that pushed it further to the right to a more sort of grievance-oriented politics that gets a David Brat-type candidate elected in a primary, and then that two years later gets Donald Trump to the presidency. That kind of politics has an equal and opposite impact that when you embrace that kind of politics, you're going to motivate the opposition and you're going to turn some moderate Republicans into at least temporary Democrats. That was basically the trade-off.

By bowing to the most hardline elements of their party base and electing a Dave Brat and a Donald Trump, you're making it tougher eventually to win the broader middle of the country and even the broader middle in these districts that historically were pretty Republican. In other words, you're saying moments where the parties gravitate towards their more extreme edges, it kind of fuels the pendulum to swing in the other direction very soon afterwards.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And nowhere was that more vivid than in this district that went from being reliable Republican every two years to all of a sudden a battleground. It was only a battleground because the voters there could not stomach the kind of politics represented by President Trump. If Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or John Kasich, maybe even Ted Cruz, had been elected president, I don't think that that would have been a competitive district. I think it would have been not quite as safe for the Republicans. I think it would have been somewhat more competitive.

But I can't imagine the Democrats would have put the money into there like they did this time around and that they would have won the seat. Jonathan, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. Very much. Thanks, Michael. In hindsight, do you think it was a mistake for Democrats to stay silent on all the heated rhetoric from the president and some Republican senators? I mean, the Republicans kept control of the Senate and some of them ran on this anti-immigrant rhetoric. So are you in hindsight, you know, maybe thinking that that was a mistake for Democrats to stay silent? No, I do not. I urge our colleagues not to take the bait on what the president was putting out there. You don't win a fight by fighting that same fight.

You win by sticking with the program. I have no regret. Here's what else you need to know today. You're at the bar, you know, having fun, dancing. And then all of a sudden you hear like the bang bang of the gunshots. And it just started going crazy. On Thursday, police identified the suspect in the mass shooting at a dance hall in Thousand Oaks, California,

that killed 12 people, including a security guard and a sheriff's deputy. We didn't take it seriously at first. It's kind of like you freeze, because it sounded like firecrackers. So then our friends got the barstools, and they started slamming it against the window so we could get out.

The suspect was a 28-year-old former Marine, Ian David Long, who had served in Afghanistan and was known to local police. We've had several contacts with Mr. Long over the years. In April of this year, deputies were called to his house. He was somewhat irate, acting a little irrationally. They called out our crisis intervention team, our mental health specialist, who met with him, talked to him, and cleared him.

After a recent visit to his home, police determined that Long was not an immediate danger and that under state law, he could not be involuntarily taken into custody. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison,

Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Three's Camaracha, Claire Tennesketter, Michael Simon-Johnson, Jessica Chung, Alexandra Lee Young,

and Nina Potok, and edited by Paige Cowan, Larissa Anderson, and Wendy Doerr. Thank you. music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. Special thanks to Sam Dolman, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, and the many reporters who helped us on election night. Alan Blinder, Patty Mazzei, Kate Zernike, Nick Fandos, Mitch Smith, Manny Fernandez, Katie Edmondson, Jose Del Real, Jenny Medina, and Lisa Lair. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.