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NDN News: Notes on the 2020 Elections, Continued
With Democrats – NDN’s current signature presentation, “With Democrats Things Get Better,” is an extended meditation on what is perhaps the most important reality driving so much of American politics today – the divergent paths of our two political parties since the end of the Cold War. The Democratic Party has been a successful and constructive force, winning more votes in 7 of our last 8 national elections, and leaving the country better off its last two times in the White House. The Republicans, on the other end, have struggled during this time and come unmoored from its Lincoln/Reagan roots - only hitting 48% or above in a single national election since the 1980s, overseeing three consecutive recessions, and in the Trump era in particular embracing a form of illiberalism deeply out of step with the American creed.
As we all prepare for the Biden Presidency, NDN will be working hard to bring many of the important insights in “With Democrats” to you, and to a broader audience. Learn more about the big arguments behind “With Democrats” here; watch our most recent presentation, from Wed 11/18; read Mike Tomasky’s glowing review of “With Dems” in the Daily Beast; consider how important the success of the modern Democratic Party will be to Joe Biden’s hope to build back better; and sign up for our December live viewings.
NDN in News– Simon’s insights into the 2020 elections has been featured in news outlets across the country in recent days, including these stories in The Atlantic, The Associated Press, CNBC, The Hill, Politico (here, here), the Raleigh News and Observer, US News (here, here), The Washington Examiner and the Washington Post (here, here, here, here) An excerpt from the Hill story: “My own view is that AOC’s criticism is half-right,” said Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network, a centrist group. Rosenberg argued that the New York congresswoman was correct in questioning “whether Democrats have moved as far in a digital-first posture on communication as we need to be.
But Rosenberg contended that the prominence of the left, and its slogans, make it more difficult for Democrats to win down-ballot races. His argument, in essence, was that Biden was able to overcome GOP attempts to tie him to socialism because he was already extremely well-known, has a very long record and beat leftist challengers in a closely-watched national primary. An average House candidate, he noted, has none of those advantages.
“Joe Biden was able to take all these attacks on ‘the radical left’ and ‘defund the police’ because he had so much exposure to the country,” Rosenberg said. “But if you are a House member running where your district is a small bit of a big media market, and you get $2 million or $3 million of ads tying you to ‘defund the police,’ your ability to rebut that is far different from Joe Biden’s ability to rebut that.”
The Importance of the Heavily Mexican-American Parts of the US to the Democratic Coalition – We’ve been a bit slower than usual in producing our post-election analysis due to a great extent the problem all the early voting had on producing a reliable understanding of what happened this year. But one thing we do know is that one of the big geographic stories of American politics in recent years has been increasing success of Democrats in the heavily Mexican-American states of AZ, CA, CO, NM, NV and TX.
In 2004, George W. Bush won all of these states in the general election with the exception of California, garnering 63 of the region’s 118 (54%) Electoral College votes. In Congress, Democrats controlled just 4 of the 12 (33%) US Senate seats, and 55 of the 106 (52%) available seats in the House. Today, 16 years later, Democrats won every one of these states in the general election with the exception of Texas (86 of 124 EVs/69%), now control 10 of the region’s 12 (83%) Senate seats and 69 of the 112 (62%) House seats. All told this is a net gain of 31 Electoral College votes, 6 Senate seats and 14 House seats from these six states for Democrats in the past 16 years – given the margins in 2020 these gains are no small thing.
The significance of this region to the Democrats was also acknowledged and cemented by Joe Biden picking Kamala Harris, who will be, remarkably, the first Democrat from the Western part of the US to ever serve as President or Vice President. It is also a reminder that today the Democratic Party is a true national party, hobbling together its majority coalition from many regions – the Northeast, the Industrial North and Midwest, the New South, the Southwest/Rocky
-Simon, Georgia, and the rest of the NDN team
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