PFAW Member,
As you might have seen, Republicans squeaked out a narrow win in the hotly contested special election in North Carolina’s 9th District yesterday.
This was a deep-red district that Trump carried by 12 points in 2016 – it also went for Romney by 12 points before that and a Democrat had not been elected there in more than 50 years. Still, the race was neck-and-neck all the way through Election Day and it took EVERYTHING Republicans had just to eke out a 2-point victory.
THANK YOU to the nearly 1,700 PFAW members who donated to our efforts to turn out Latinos and other progressives in the district and to the hundreds – both in North Carolina and around the country – who volunteered to reach out to voters.
It’s because of your efforts that this was such a nail-biter, and just look what it took for Republicans to overcome our efforts in a 12-point Republican district: $7 million in spending by the GOP and outside right-wing groups, along with visits from several members of the Trump administration and the Trump family – including an Election Eve barnstorming rally by Donald Trump himself which helped shore up the far-right base vote for Election Day turnout.
Let’s unpack the results a little bit.
Despite the loss, and our failure to pick up one more House seat in a deep red district, there’s actually more good news than bad news for progressives.
This was a continuation of what we saw in the 2018 blue wave, and the trend lines still look bad for Trump in 2020. While the 10-point swing in favor of Democrat Dan McCready was not quite as much as some of the swings we saw in some Republican districts in 2018, it shows that Democrats still have the momentum and spells bad news for Trump and the GOP heading into the national election year.
Remember: Trump carried states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and several others that he won by MUCH fewer than 10 points… so he’s the one who should be sweating right now.
The geographic polarization we saw in both 2016 and 2018 was reflected in the NC-9 results, with the reddest, most rural areas getting redder and the bluer and more moderate areas getting bluer.
To break this down in more practical terms: the ‘burbs are still turning blue. And that’s also bad news for Republicans.
Nathaniel Rakich at Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website writes:
“The results also represent a continuation of the mini-realignment we’ve seen in the Trump era of suburbs getting bluer and rural areas moving even more toward the GOP. For instance, McCready lost the district even as he won suburban Mecklenburg County by 13 percentage points, an improvement on the 2018 results, when he won Mecklenburg by 10 points. (The portion of Mecklenburg that falls in the 9th District consists of affluent white areas of metro Charlotte.) But as noted by Ryan Matsumoto, an analyst at Inside Elections, McCready did worse than his 2018 performance in every other county, most of which are sparsely populated.”
This happened to be a very rural, very red district. But that’s a very different story than the districts and states Republicans will need to win to hold power in 2020.
The Senate might be our biggest challenge in 2020.
We’re committed to flipping party control of the U.S. Senate in 2020, but it’s no secret that it’s going to be an uphill climb. We’re already fighting like hell to go after every vulnerable Republican seat and end Mitch McConnell’s reign of terror, but some of the trends we saw in NC-9 possibly highlight some real challenges – especially in the tier of target states where we’re hoping to expand the map. So, we should be bullish on states like Maine, Colorado, and Arizona, but the NC-9 results suggest that we’re going to need to work even harder to expand the map in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and other states.
We now have one more chance to bring home a definitive progressive victory in 2019 and, with it, progressive momentum heading into 2020: VIRGINIA.
If anything, the close results of the North Carolina special election only up the stakes in the election happening just one state to the north this fall. The Virginia state election will be the last and biggest contest of 2019 and a chance to flip the state legislature from Republican to Democratic control – every seat in the state legislature is up and we only need to a net gain of 2 seats in each chamber for the Democrats to turn this critical bellwether state completely blue.
Again, if NC-9 trends portend anything for trends in other states and nationally, then we should be highly encouraged about our chances in Virginia, where PFAW is waging a MAJOR campaign to elect progressives and flip the legislature – and where many of our target Republican-held districts are far, far closer than conservative NC-9.
So long story short, winning in North Carolina would have been a sweet victory. And it was a fight definitely worth waging, even though we came up just short. But this shouldn’t feel like a pure defeat because the results validated not only our hard work but our strength heading into both Election Day in Virginia in a couple of months and the national elections in 2020.
Steve Benen, writing for MSNBC, commented on Trump’s Twitter victory lap, saying:
“[T]his should’ve been an easy one for the GOP. The fact that it wasn’t should put the party in an anxious mood, not a celebratory one.”
And added:
“It doesn’t appear to occur to Trump that there’s a reason Democrats are smiling this morning, despite having lost.”
THANK YOU for all of your support, for all of your help in this race, and for everything you do. And stay tuned for much more.
Onward,
Michael Keegan, President
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