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Highlights from The Downballot: How turnout decided critical races for Democrats [1]
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Date: 2022-12-02
With the midterms starting to recede in the rear view, more and better data is now available to analyze exactly what happened — resulting in some interesting analysis about turnout.
In particular, Beard noted, one of the relatively surprising aspects of 2022 was the diversity of results within states and congressional districts:
We saw really a Democratic bloodbath in Florida, we saw some pretty bad losses in New York, and we saw some surprisingly good results for Democrats in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, really up and down the ballot. You expect in a typical midterm or any election across the country to be a little bit more straightforward where one party does well or one party does poorly or it's very narrow across the board. And that wasn't really what we got. And so the question there is why did that happen? And there's a few different explanations. Obviously, campaigns matter a lot, candidates matter a lot. But one factor that we can see now is that there was a big case of differential turnout across the country, among particularly Democrats. And Republicans seem to have turned out good across the board pretty much. And a big difference was in some places Democrats did not turn out very highly and in other places Democrats turned out really, really well. And that definitely made the difference in some places.
“Many recalled 2010 and 2012, when Democratic turnout wasn't that great because of Obama's unpopularity and the Affordable Care Act, and thought, ‘Oh, that's bad news for 2012,’” Beard explained. “But turnout for the incumbent president's party rebounded in 2012 and turnout was again really good when the president was on the ballot.”
Beard thinks that it is fair to expect, in the places where Democratic turnout was bad in 2022, for that to rebound in 2024 with a presidential election — with a likely repeat of the Biden - Trump matchup again. “That seems like a situation where you would expect Democratic turnout in places that it was bad in these heavily blue districts to rebound. And that can go to the presidential candidates' benefit, that can also go to senate candidates' benefits. If the Wisconsin Senate race, which was lost by a very narrow margin where Milwaukee turnout was not great, had been done under presidential turnout where Milwaukee had turnout closer to 2020, that could have been a race that Democrats won instead of lost,” he said, offering his analysis.
Nir turned to the topic of the House, which Republicans recaptured by a few seats last month. What we now know for certain, based on data calculated by Daily Kos Elections, is that there will be 18 Republicans who will sit in districts that Joe Biden would've won when the 118th Congress convenes on January 3rd. By contrast, there will only be five Democrats in districts that Trump would have won. “This spells really, really bad things for the GOP majority,” Nir asserted, laying out the scenario that faces a House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “Now, even assuming that Kevin McCarthy can actually cobble together 218 votes to become the next speaker of the House, he is going to be dependent on quite a large number of members who are in pretty solidly blue districts.”
If asked to pick a favorite for the House in 2024, Beard said he would probably pick Democrats at this point — given the narrow margin, given the problems, given how Democratic the 218 seat is right now. However, he added, one thing to look out for is if states do redistricting in the middle of the decade. One of the prime states to keep an eye on is North Carolina, which saw their Supreme Court majority flip from Democratic to Republican. The Supreme Court had been the backstop preventing a lot of aggressive Republican gerrymandering from the state legislature, and with conservatives holding the majority on the Court, it is possible that that map turns into Republican gerrymandering — obviously affects those calculations when those seats change.
They then touched briefly on what has happened in Arizona’s 6th District, where Republican Juan Ciscomani received more votes than Democrat Kirsten Engel — but the results of the election have yet to be certified.
One of the counties that makes up the 6th district is Cochise County in Southeastern Arizona — a relatively Republican county with a three person board of supervisors that runs the county, two Republicans, one Democrat. The two Republican county supervisors, Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, peddle the Big Lie, and are all in on election conspiracies that have taken root within the GOP. Thus, they decided not to certify the election results of their very Republican county by the statutory deadline of this past Monday.
About 47,000 votes were cast in the county for the midterm election — and if they are not certified by the supervisors, they do not get counted and are not sent to the Secretary of State's office. If the elections are certified without them, two races would change. One of them is the Arizona 6th District that we already talked about. It could also flip the state superintendent's race, which was narrowly won by Republican Tom Horne over Democrat Kathy Hoffman.
“So both of those races in theory would flip if these 47,000 mostly Republican votes aren't counted because of the Republican County supervisors paranoia about election machines and conspiracy theories,” Beard said. “It's really the ultimate case of shooting yourself in the foot to prove an election conspiracy that no one really believes, that there is no evidence of, that doesn't get you anywhere, but you're just going to do it anyway because you believe so much in this conspiracy theory. It's really wild.”
The hosts then welcomed Wolf, a longtime democratic strategist and partner at AL Media, onto the show. Wolf has worked on some of the most critical races around the country, especially this election cycle.
Nir opened by asking Wolf for his thoughts on what happened in the midterms that led to Democrats outperforming expectations across the board: “Obviously we were going into a midterm where the White House is controlled by Democrats. That has almost always meant bad results for the party in power, difficult economy and other issues that were nipping at Democrats' heels, and then holy hell, we just had an amazing midterm. I just want to know, what is your take on what the hell just happened?”
Wolf believes it was “a confluence of things,” and that first and foremost, many Democratic campaigns did a really very job:
If you live and work in the Democratic world, one thing that you get used to is a lot of critique, and it's fine and it's healthy and it's high stake stuff, and we all benefit from and deserve a little bit of scrutiny. But if you are going to work on a campaign or you're going to advise a campaign everywhere you go, people will have opinions about what you do and how you do it and how well you did it and what was great and what was bad. Sometimes that conventional wisdom and even group think can be really far off, and sometimes it can be well deserved. But our campaigns largely did a really good job. They litigated the case. They held Republicans feet to the fire. They raised money, they spent it efficiently. This was not obviously a natural wave because the natural dynamics historically would've told you, would've got against us, as you just said. But I really do think hats off to the campaign staff, to the candidates, candidates that are taking on bigger risks than they've ever had to in recent American political history. It truly is a big part of what made a difference. It has to be said that overturning Roe v. Wade was a really big part of this, didn't manifest in the same way in every race or every region of the country, or with every demographic. But without a doubt this woke up parts of our base. It helped crystallize the stakes in a lot of races, and it really helped clarify the argument that a lot of these Republican candidates were just wildly extreme way out of the mainstream. That along with so many of their other views, were going to be very, very detrimental for the people they were seeking to represent or were already representing in some cases. Then third, I would say that part of what we're seeing, and this is maybe not quite as optimistic a take leading into the 2024 election cycle. But part of what we're seeing is something that we have a significant downside for as well, which is that our party has become more dependent on a heavily college-educated coalition, and we've spent a lot of time talking about and assessing what we're doing wrong. That has led to us losing more rural voters, non-college voters. But in a midterm cycle, non-college voters are going to be a little bit less likely to turn out.
“I do think that part of what we saw was that the turnout environment just happened to help us in a way that we're not used to because for so many election cycles, midterms have hurt us a little bit because there's a realignment happening and our coalition has evolved in both good ways and bad. I think that is something we should be aware of because, yes, this election was a rebuke of Donald Trump's brand of "conservatism." It was a rebuke of MAGA, of extreme election denying candidates, candidates that want government control of healthcare decisions,” Wolf added.
Continuing in his line of questioning, Nir followed up with this question: “What in your mind makes for a good campaign? What specifically did Democrats do, right?”
Wolf thought that it was extremely effective for Democrats to be willing to define Republicans right out of the gate:
Across the country, you saw candidates like Doug Mastriano, the day after the primary. He's being defined as an extremist. You saw Kari Lake, which we were involved in just an extremist right out of the gate. We really did not give them a chance through our paid media strategy to control the narrative, and a lot of campaigns take risks when they do that. Part of that is a financial risk. They start spending not knowing if they're going to be able to fill a gap later, and they just say, ‘Well, this is a pivotal window. We have to win the next couple of weeks to be alive for the rest of the campaign.’ They take the calculated risk that they're going to control a conversation right away. So I think that sort of just relentless discipline definition of your opponent is just a must when you're running against these candidates, because there is a risk with these sort of MAGA Republican candidates that as crazy as their stances are, as crazy as their presentation of their ideas are, they do sometimes convince voters that they're the change candidate. We live in a time where voters are incredibly cynical and they're very unhappy with the state of government. They're unhappy with both parties, and a critical fact of the state of democracy right now is that competitive elections are largely decided by people that hate both parties. So when you understand that you are largely going to win your race by talking to voters that are cynical and that are rightfully off about the state of things, then you realize, ‘Okay, we have to make sure the fingers pointed at our opponent right away.’ You saw a lot of campaigns across the country do that in effective, hard-hitting, sort of, ‘No one beat around the bush, let's just call some of these candidates what they are, which is extremely dangerous for the country states and districts that they were seeking to represent.’
Wolf also mentioned that Democrats have learned from past cycles and are now more efficient in how they use their resources on campaigns.
The trio also discussed Wolf’s work on Katie Hobbs's race for Arizona governor, which she very narrowly won after more than a week of ballots being counted. The stakes were extremely high for that race, and Wolf said it felt amazing to see the positive outcome:
I've been a part of a lot of competitive races, and we've won some really competitive races, we've lost a lot of competitive races, but the stakes have never been higher than they were in this race, and the outcome that we got, it was part of a really amazing candidate, and a really amazing team, and a lot of the folks that I worked with within my firm, the team on the ground, the manager, they were all just a lot of really excellent people were part of this, and worked really hard, and fought really hard, and we always knew what was on the line. We always understood that this literally could be the last free and fair election in Arizona if we didn't get the outcome that we needed.
The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at
[email protected]. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.
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