The 2021 off-year elections concluded last week with a number of high-profile Democratic defeats, and prognosticators are already driving themselves and anyone who will listen absolutely spastic with predictions of a wholesale Democratic collapse in 2022.
That’s “Democratic” with a big ‘D’ for the Democratic Party, not a democratic small ‘d’ for US democracy in general, but given the mood among the political left you would think American democracy was poised to be abolished on the morning of November 9, 2022.
Not that there aren’t some very real concerns with the health of the US democratic system and the designs of the Republican Party at this juncture. The Republicans demonstrated a decided willingness to play chicken with democratic norms in 2020, and several of the election security laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures in the spring 2021 legislative sessions are indeed worrisome.
Nevertheless, I am here to tell you that it is far too early to panic. Before we have a collective nervous breakdown – and by “we” I mean not only registered Democrats, but also Republicans and Independents (and Greens & Libertarians for that matter) who were deeply troubled by the events of Jan. 6, 2021 – let’s all take a really deep breath and attempt to recapitulate, calmly, the facts of Nov. 2, 2021.
If we look closely and consider the implications of what actually happened last week, there are various encouraging signs alongside a few worrying trends. But the signs are mostly encouraging.
NOV. 2 WAS AN ADJUSTMENT, NOT A REBUKE
The commentariat spent last Wednesday repeating the conventional wisdom that off-year elections are usually bad for the party in control of the White House. This is particularly true, we were assured, when the state of the country is unsettled by a weak economy of some other serious trouble.
Well, aren’t they the Prophet Jeremiah. Tell us something we don’t know!
There’s certainly some truth to the received wisdom concerning off-year elections. But for the sake of a reality check, it’s useful to compare 2021 to two other off-years: 1993 and 2009. In both of those years, Republicans made gains when a Democratic president was in the White House (Presidents Clinton and Obama, for the record).
In 1993, Rudolph Guiliani was elected mayor of New York City, the first Republican to win the office after a quarter century of uninterrupted Democratic dominance. Guiliani was also the most right-wing Republican elected to the mayor’s office since before the Depression. And this was before the Clintons’ healthcare expansion plan went down in flames in 1994, leading to major negative press for the Democrats.
On January 19, 2010, Scott Brown was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, winning liberal stalwart Ted Kennedy‘s old Senate seat. I place this election in 2009 rather than 2010 given that most of the campaigning occurred in late 2009, and so as not to confuse it with the Nov. 2010 mid-term elections.
Scott Brown’s election was a political earthquake the likes of which Massachusetts had not seen in 60 years. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat had been held by Democrats since 1952.
And this was before the Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’) passed on March 23, 2010, depriving Scott Brown of the option to campaign against Obamacare, a tactic adopted by Republicans (successfully) ever since. He won high office all the same.
Compared to these shocks to the body politic, the results of the 2021 off-year elections look a lot less remarkable.
THE SWING-TO-THE-RIGHT THAT WASN’T
Last Tuesday, Republicans captured Virginia’s governorship, lieutenant governorship and attorney general’s position, flipping the state ‘Red’. Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win the governor’s mansion since 2009, a fact noted with consternation by many Democrats.
But consider the circumstances. Virginia’s state government just spent the past year working to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from Richmond’s Monument Avenue. The statue was taken down on Sept. 8 after a series of lengthy legal filings and an affirmative ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court. The statues of other Confederate leaders are likely to follow.
Say it out loud. Virginia has removed Robert E. Lee’s statue from Richmond.
And by what margin did the Republican candidate win the election for governor? Glenn Youngkin won with 50.7% of the vote. His margin of victory was 72,000 votes out of 3.2 million cast — 2.2% of the total.
The removal of Lee’s statue was barely an issue in the campaign. Youngkin won the election because his opponent, former governor Terry McAuliffe, was dumb enough to say during a debate that “schools have the power to decide how to educate children, not parents”. Uh, hello?
Seen in this light, which is to say in light of the broader historical context, the Republican victory in Virginia’s state elections is not all that surprising. What is surprising is that they didn’t win with 68% of the vote. Clearly, Virginia has changed a lot since the 1960s. At least where Virginia is concerned, the 2021 elections represented an adjustment back to the center, and certainly not a shift to the right.
IN A SETBACK FOR ‘MURPHY’S LAW’, PHIL MURPHY WINS
New Jersey’s state elections are another contest that commentators are having a field day with after incumbent governor Phil Murphy was narrowly re-elected with 50.9% of the vote, down from 56% in 2017. Talking heads from across the political spectrum are describing this result as ‘a political earthquake’ and deploying various other seismic metaphors.
But the fact remains that Murphy won. And to top that, he was the first sitting Democratic governor of New Jersey to be re-elected since Brendan Byrne in 1977. That’s nearly 45 years ago. So, Murphy actually came out pretty well, considering the headwinds he had blowing against him for nearly his entire first term in office.
First there was President Trump, who was extremely hostile to Murphy both personally and politically. Second there was the COVID-19 pandemic itself, which struck New Jersey like a cyclone in 2020, killing 28,000 residents to date. Third and finally there was the backlash against Gov. Murphy’s public health restrictions, which were among the strictest in the U.S. and generated wide resentment, particularly among conservatives.
That Phil Murphy was able to push back against all of this disaster and hostility to win a second term in a state where no sitting Democratic governor had been re-elected since the 1970s is a stunning feat. The commentators should be talking about how he was able to pull it off, not the fact that it was a close election.
Seen in that light, Governor Murphy’s victory must be regarded as a triumph over the forces of circumstance. Even as a ‘come from behind” victory. There is a humorous old epigram that was very popular when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s that is still in use: ‘If anything can do wrong, then it will go wrong.” It’s called ‘Murphy’s Law’ and it is a supposed law of nature. Very popular in New Jersey. In 2021, it looks like Phil Murphy managed to stay in office in spite of ‘Murphy’s Law’.
DEMOCRATIC VOTER EXHAUSTION WAS CLEARLY A FACTOR
Where New Jersey’s elections are concerned, much has been able of the fact that there are 1 million more registered Democrats in the state than there are Republicans, as if that alone is what determines victory. Registered voters have to actually show up at the polls, however, to deliver a victory. The NJ Dems have a formidable get-out-the-vote machine, but the GOP’s operation on the ground in the Garden State is also a slick, well-oiled affair that has secured victories for Republican governors as recently as 2013.
There are two explanations for Republican gains in the NJ state Senate and Assembly in 2021, and neither of them centers on a sudden surge in registered Republicans or a shift to the right by New Jerseyans. The first is that Jack Ciattarrelli, the Republican candidate for governor, ran a classy and moderate campaign by current GOP standards. He agreed with some of Murphy’s pandemic restrictions and affirmed the scientific consensus around global warming. He didn’t embrace the stolen 2020 election myth.
The second explanation for the NJ Dems’ troubles is, quite frankly, the mental and spiritual exhaustion of Democratic voters. They spent 2020 fighting against the pandemic and to preserve US democracy. Democrats are worn out, and many feel they deserve a break from politics. This is especially the case in NY and NJ, where the pandemic hit first and hardest, delivering a shocking death toll.
Low voter turnout will reliably uncover the underlying weaknesses of old and creaky political machines that survive on established organizational structures rather than genuine voter enthusiasm. Such was the case with the South Jersey Democratic machine led by State Senator Stephen Sweeney, who narrowly lost re-election to Edward Durr, a truck driver new to politics who ran a shoestring campaign. Sweeney’s defeat is a case study in anti-incumbent sentiment and the continued shift by many white, working-class Americans to the Republican Party.
All told, voter turnout was higher in New Jersey than it had been in any election since 2009, the numbness of Democratic voters notwithstanding. That Phil Murphy governed as one of the nation’s most ‘progressive’ governors during his first term in office, and was re-elected, albeit by a lesser margin and with a smaller Democratic majority in the NJ Senate and Assembly, suggests that NJ voters were, like those in Virginia, making an adjustment back to the center from the extremes of left and right.
A BAD NIGHT FOR PROGRESSIVES
As most post-election analyses have taken pains to point out, progressives had a bad night on Nov. 2. Across most regions of the U.S. and both up and down the ticket, progressive support collapsed. Rare exceptions included the winners of a handful of mayor’s races: Justin Bibb in Cleveland, Ed Gainey in Pittsburgh, and Michelle Wu in Boston. All three cities are ‘deep blue Democratic’, however, making them unrepresentative of the nation.
In most other cities, suburbs and small towns, the progressive message and its messengers ran into stiff resistance. Several New York counties flipped Republican, as did suburbs across much of the Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast. In Seattle, a moderate Democrat, Bruce Harrell, defeated a progressive Democrat, Lorena Gonzalez, in the mayoral race. Ann Davison, a Republican, won the city attorney’s job promising a tough line on crime.
Both Lorena Gonzalez and the Democratic candidate for city attorney, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, ran on aggressive police reform platforms and both to varying degrees embraced the ‘Defund the Police’ slogan adopted by some Black Lives Matter protestors during the 2020 George Floyd protests. That these messages failed to resonate, or were rejected outright in another deep blue city like Seattle also suggests an adjustment back to the center by voters exhausted by the extremism and divisiveness of the Trump years.
Even in the deep blue enclave of Minneapolis, the scene of George Floyd’s murder and epicenter of last year’s unrest, a proposal to replace the city police department with a new department of public safety incorporating many social service functions was handily defeated. The sitting mayor, moderate Democrat Jacob Frey, is on track to be re-elected in a runoff.
GROPING FOR A NEW CENTER
If the center appears to be holding better than many feared it might, then it’s also safe to say that it’s not quite the same center that existed 20 years ago.
The country has shifted leftward on a number of issues: higher taxes on the wealthy, the need for an industrial policy, race relations, gay marriage, and the environment. That the center of gravity has shifted away from the conservative positions held by a majority of Americans at the turn of the century is undeniable. The question is: Exactly how far left has the center moved? And, if there is a new center-left consensus, is it sustainable?
DOES NEW YORK CITY, LONG AN OUTLIER, POINT THE WAY?
New York City is typically an outlier for assessing national questions given its unique size and many usual attributes, not the least its racial and ethnic diversity and tourism, finance, and infrastructure-dependent economy. As the nation slowly begins to look more like NYC, however, the Big Apple may prove to be an unexpected bellweather.
On Nov. 2, New Yorkers elected Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams as their next mayor in a landslide with 68% of voters casting their ballots for him. Adams is a former police captain with a long and colorful history in public life. He will be the city’s second Black mayor. Adams ran on a platform that was equal parts public safety and police reform. Adams has loudly rejected the ‘Defund the Police’ paradigm, but concedes that many police departments, NYC’s included, have demonstrated a pattern of heavy-handed policing against Blacks and other minorities.
Adams is relatively business-friendly and has said that his first priority will be to assist NYC’s post-pandemic economic recovery. As the nation as a whole starts to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic in actuality in 2022 after a disappointed 2021 that saw much progress against the pandemic, but failure to defeat it, Eric Adams performance and visibility in public life is likely to hold clues for what to expect in the next 2-3 election cycles.
Until next time, I remain –
Greymantle
