For Democrats, it was the Dunkirk election: They escaped disaster, but the road ahead is hard

For once, the polls were wrong in slightly underestimating, rather than overstating, Democrats' strength in an election. The party overcame its midterm curse for the first time since 1998, and severe economic headwinds from inflation and global supply shortages for once did not doom the party in power.

Media headlines capture disappointment and intraparty rancor in the GOP: "Republicans Reckon With Midterm Election Fallout," "Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell: Republican anger over midterms," "Sen. Rick Scott calls 2022 election a 'complete disappointment.'"

Depending on the Georgia runoff in December, Democrats will at least maintain the status quo ante in the Senate, or gain a seat — which would avoid the need to give the GOP equal representation on committees. Republicans won the House by a slim majority. Overall, Joe Biden's first national referendum as president was far more satisfying for Democrats than the midterms of Barack Obama's first term, when Democrats lost six Senate and 63 House seats. 

They may be even more encouraged by the state races, with Democrats holding all their governorships and flipping legislatures in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. This is critical to issues that have become urgent in the states, such as abortion and education, but also for thwarting rogue GOP legislatures in certifying elections. 

Why, then, compare it to Dunkirk?

Like the British in 1940, Democrats evaded a potentially disastrous encirclement by their opponent, doggedly staved off defeat and lived to fight another day. There were heartening signs of tough resistance. But it was deliverance rather than victory, as Churchill well knew, even though he spun the operation as a victory of sorts. In both cases, the protagonists would have to ask themselves, how did they end up in such peril in the first place?

In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published "The Emerging Democratic Majority," one of the most widely discussed political books of the year. They argued that owing to the growth of minorities, women and educated professionals, Democrats would become the majority party in the early 21st century.

The prediction largely came true in pure demographic terms, but this result never translated into anything like a stable political majority like the Democratic coalition of 1932-1968. Three factors determined this. The first was voluntary demographic sorting, making red states redder and blue states bluer; this magnified the inherent electoral advantage enjoyed by less populous states, a feature built into the Constitution, which I have argued elsewhere favors energized regional voting blocs in the Electoral College, just as the South had an inherent electoral advantage in the antebellum period. Without this factor, Donald Trump's electoral vote victory in 2016 would have been impossible.

The second factor is a massive GOP effort to gerrymander districts. Author David Daley — former editor in chief of Salon — has described how Republican operatives, taking advantage of the Citizens United decision, flooded states with dark money and created scientifically gerrymandered state and congressional districts. This explains how political control of states, roughly evenly divided between the parties 20 years ago, has become lopsidedly Republican. That, in turn, explains why the GOP is sometimes overrepresented in the House relative to its total national congressional vote.

The final factor is voter suppression by removing polling places, shortening early voting and enacting "gotcha" voter fraud measures based on deliberately confusing criteria. It is impossible to quantify how much this reduces the Democratic vote, but it likely tips a few close races into the Republican column.  

On the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, one might well have wondered how the GOP could even remain a competitive national party two years hence, much less win the House. That feeling would have been intensified if one foresaw that the party would nominate a number of epically awful candidates in 2022. It is a political truism that voters' memories are short, and apparently this extends even to attempts to overthrow democracy itself.

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While Democrats did well in the dwindling number of swing states, Republicans generally entrenched themselves in states they controlled. Contrary to perennial forecasts of an eventual blue Texas because of the growing number of Hispanics and tech workers, Greg Abbott won the governorship in a blowout even after miserable performances in the statewide power failure last February and after the Uvalde mass shooting. Attorney General Ken Paxton cruised to victory even while under federal indictment for securities fraud and facing an FBI investigation for bribery allegations. Republicans increased their dominance in both houses of the state legislature. 

Likewise, Gov. Ron DeSantis breezed to reelection and Republicans gained veto-proof majorities in both houses in Tallahassee, removing Florida from swing-state status for a long time. Briefly challenging Mitch McConnell for Senate minority leader after the election was Rick Scott, a winner of three statewide elections in Florida. Before his political career, his company was convicted of the country's largest Medicare fraud up to that time; he currently campaigns for Social Security and Medicare cuts while representing a state with the second-highest proportion of senior citizens in the country. Democrats may have a hard time appealing to the enlightened self-interest of voters in the Sunshine State for the foreseeable future.

Even candidates the GOP deemed to have fallen short of expectations elicit some surprise when viewed from the man-from-Mars perspective. For Herschel Walker, possibly displaying cognitive impairment from his football career, an accused domestic abuser and known serial philanderer who reportedly forced two or more women to have abortions, to have amassed as many votes as he did is astonishing. What was Walker's most avid voting base? White evangelicals, 88 percent of whom broke for him, even though Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, is an ordained minister. It is difficult for Democrats to fashion an electoral strategy when the political landscape more closely resembles Bizarro World than a reality-based community.

It is worth comparing Walker to Alan Keyes, arguably just as given to bizarre outbursts, yet with far less dirty laundry. In the 2004 Illinois Senate race, he polled 27 percent against Barack Obama for an open seat. As in the 2022 Georgia contest, both candidates were Black, so race factors out. That 27-point threshold can facetiously be described as the Keyes Constant, or Crazification Factor, meaning the amount of support a joke candidate of one of the major parties is likely to obtain. Yet Walker, even running against an incumbent senator, tallied 48.5 percent, and could conceivably win the December runoff. 

As for the state races, even with the undeniably encouraging Democratic wins, Republicans remain far ahead in aggregate political control. With results in legislatures in Alaska and New Hampshire as yet uncalled, the GOP still controls 56 legislative chambers to the Democrats' 40. A long slog remains to gain something like parity in time for the next census. There are, however, signs of hope.

Turnout by the young, which fluctuated near an abysmal 20 percent in midterms over two decades, increased markedly in 2018 and 2022. Many pundits believed the red wave failed specifically because of young people's votes. Still, a 27 percent turnout among younger voters is vastly below that of over-65 voters, now the Republicans' demographic base. There is substantial room for growth in the 18-29 demographic; Democrats should invest serious money in tackling issues for these voters like frequent change of address and living on university campuses, both of which tend to inhibit registration and turnout among that age cohort.

John Fetterman's victory in Pennsylvania was aided by the fact that he campaigned in rural Republican bastions. In what the American Communities Project defines as "Working Class Country," Fetterman reduced Mehmet Oz's victory margin to 27 points, compared to Trump's 36-point victory over Biden in 2020. That is admittedly still a large deficit, and it will be many election cycles before Democratic state legislative and congressional candidates are competitive in rural areas. But it is certainly a viable strategy for statewide candidates to cut into the GOP's rural advantage rather than relying solely on cities and suburbs.

Finally, Democratic organizations beyond the state level are at last putting significant money into state legislative races. A group called the States Project put about $60 million into state legislative contests, concentrating on Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. It seems to have been a better investment than operatives' past habit of pouring megabucks into high-profile races they had no prayer of winning — like the $91 million spent on Senate candidate Amy McGrath in 2020, when she lost to Mitch McConnell by almost 20 points.

Democrats had a good day overall, in spite of a news media primed and seemingly eager to declare a red wave. But it only gets harder from here. In 2024, the party must defend 23 Senate seats, as against the GOP's 10. Democrats will need all of their newfound successful strategies.