The Evaporating Democratic Majority

New York Times (Opinion)

By Ross Douthat

November 5, 2014

The Evaporating Democratic Majority 

“For Republicans, what counts as victory?” I asked in my pre-election post, and now we have an answer: This counts. Control of the Senate with room to spare, easy victories in what were supposed to be tight purple-state races and even easier victories in red states, an unexpected nailbiter in Virginia and an upset win in North Carolina, Rick Scott and Scott Walker re-elected, gubernatorial wins all over the map in deep blue states, a historically-large House majority … it’s a wave, it’s a thumping, it’s whatever metaphor you favor to describe a major repudiation of the president and his party.

There will be plenty of time to discuss what this means for the next two years, for policy and legislation, for 2016. For tonight, it’s enough to say that what we’ve just watched unfold does not fit easily into the models that many pundits have been using to analyze American politics these last few years — models which allowed for a good Republican performance this year (it being an unrepresentative midterm and all) but did not allow for anything quite this good, this sweeping, this geographically-comprehensive. Seen in this light, these results are an implicit rebuke to an entire “past is prologue” school of political analysis and strategy, which looks at existing trends and assumes that they can only continue, watches winning strategies and assumes they can be perpetually repeated, projects demographic patterns forward and then passes judgment on today’s politicians from the vantage point of a still-hypothetical 2035.

In this particular case, what was overestimated and misjudged was the permanent effectiveness of the Democratic blueprint from 2012, whose mix of social-issue appeals and tech-savvy voter targeting was supposed to work in tandem with demographic trends to cement a new socially-liberal, multicultural coalition, and render the G.O.P.’s position entirely untenable absent a major ideological reboot. That blueprint really was effective in ’12, and the underlying demographic trends are real, and one bad midterm election does not prove that the coalition cannot hold together, as Republicans may learn to their cost two years from now. But from a lot of the commentary after Obama’s re-election, you would have thought that the combination of ethnic-interest appeals on immigration policy, “war on women” rhetoric on social issues, and brilliant get-out-the-vote operations run by tech-savvy Millennials (who, we were told, were too liberal to ever build a website for a Republican) posed a kind of immediate and existential challenge to the G.O.P., requiring immediate capitulation on a range of fronts, with no time for finesse or calculation and no room for resistance.

No so, as it turned out. Events have intervened, Republican politicians and their party have managed to adapt, and — as often happens —  issue appeals that resonated in one political context have turned out to be less important than the fundamentals in another. The politics of immigration, for instance, turned out to look somewhat different once the issues were a sweeping executive amnesty and a child migration surge rather than the DREAM Act and the vague promise of something bipartisan and “comprehensive.” The politics of contraception turned out to be pretty easy to finesse by G.O.P. politicians with an ounce of savvy and no Akinesque tics, and the politics of abortion absolutism, as pursued by Wendy Davis and Mark “Uterus” Udall, turned out to be maybe not the way to turn Texas blue or keep Colorado from turning red. The turnout surge among minority voters that was crucial to Democrats in 2012 wasn’t easily replicated, notwithstanding efforts to use Ferguson and Trayvon Martin as rallying points. That amazing Democratic get-out-the-vote operation, staffed by geniuses and whiz kids, turned out to matter a lot less to who voted, and for whom, than more old-fashioned indicators like the president’s approval ratings. And nobody, but nobody, cared how many millions liberal billionaires spent trying to make climate change an issue.

Again: It’s one election, it’s a midterm (with the lower, whiter turnout that entails), the long-term structural forces still look good for Democrats, their presidential coalition can still be plausibly reassembled by Herself in 2016. But sufficient to the day the election thereof. And on this day, in this election, the Republican Party successfully told liberalism’s arc of history to get bent.

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