Democrats Defeat the Polls - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues.
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“The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”
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ike the 2022 results in many of the key swing states, the Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party.
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“Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,”
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But the common thread through most of the major contests was the Democrats’ continuing strength in racially diverse, well-educated major metropolitan areas, which tend to support liberal positions on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those large population centers have trended Democratic for much of the 21st century. But that process accelerated after Trump emerged as the GOP’s leader in 2016, and has further intensified
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From a national perspective, the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature probably offered the most important signal. The Virginia race presented the same competing dynamics that are present nationally. Though Biden won the state by 10 percentage points in 2020, recent polls indicate that more voters there now disapprove than approve of his performance
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t Virginia voters gave Republicans a double-digit advantage on economy and crime. Beyond all that, Youngkin raised enormous sums to support GOP legislative candidates and campaigned tirelessly for them.
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he results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”
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a clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”