Forget the Red Wave. Why '22 Could Go Blue

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

I first met Simon Rosenberg in 1992 when he was working for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the original “war room” in Little Rock. Simon then went to the DNC, where he was responsible for putting the first major political party anywhere online (on Compuserve!). In 1996, he founded the New Democrat Network, which in the years since has helped Democrats modernize technology, strategy and communications. (For instance, NDN helped pioneer Hispanic polling). I thought Democrats made a mistake in 2005 when Simon lost for DNC chair, though he has remained influential as a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). He’s been a good source for me, especially in sorting through conflicting polling data and messaging confusion. While he has a vested interest in his analysis, it has proven mostly accurate over the years.

Simon—who at 58 is really too young to be an Old Goat — has never bought the glum conventional wisdom about the 2022 midterms being a disaster for Democrats. Now he has more evidence for his optimism. He’s highlighting a new Morning Consult poll showing that independents impacted by the January 6th hearings are shifting sharply toward Democrats. And Simon thinks the Inflation Reduction Act, which got on track just after our convo, will bring another burst of political energy for Democrats.

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi Simon. You admitted recently that you were wrong in 2020 when you said that if the Democrats won the election, extremism in America would fade some. Why didn't that happen?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I think it was more of a hope than a prediction. I will admit that I've been surprised by how much Republicans have run towards MAGA and extremism in the last year and a half because it hasn’t worked for them politically in recent years. The Democratic vote margin has been five points in the last two elections. We won the presidency, the House and the Senate. And so it's hard to argue that MAGA was a successful political strategy for them. Trump's lying about the outcome of the [2020] election may have made it harder for Republicans to accept that this wasn't really working for them. Rather than running away from a failed political strategy, they ran towards it. And running towards a political strategy that just had more people vote against it than any political movement in American history is a real risk. But they're continuing to double down —triple down —on it.

-more-

https://oldgoats.substack.com/p/forget-the-red-wave-why-22-could

[CrispyQ]

1. Republican extremism is waking folks up.

snip...

The question in the fall is what's going to drive the election? Is it going to be disappointment in Joe Biden and the Democrats? Or is it going to be fear of MAGA and the Republicans? The fear of MAGA and the Republicans is what drove the last two elections [2018 and 2020]. And I think that the combination of Uvalde and mass shootings; the ending of Roe and the radical abortion restrictions—the overall radicalized Supreme Court; and the general depravity of many Republican leaders and their terrible candidates is going to make it more likely that the driving force in the election is the fear of MAGA. That's why this is now a competitive election, not a wave election.

We still need to GOTV like crazy to beat these shady, lying assholes.

[Karadeniz]

2. I don't doubt that in fair elections, Democrats would retain or expand their majorities. But I don't

discount the harm gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics, voter ignorance and outright opposition cheating may do to the results.

[mercuryblues]

3. Red wave?

more like a red tide.