The Democrats’ election debacle

After another cycle of elections across the U.S., you can be sure about one thing. And that is the high likelihood that many of the “lessons” and analyses of the results mainstream pundits will advance with so much gravity today won’t be worth much in a few weeks, let alone a year from now. With that in mind, this article will offer a few takeaways from the November 2 election that was largely a debacle for Democrats.

What happened? In the two main high-profile races that the national media followed—the governors’ and state legislative races in Virginia and New Jersey—the Republicans scored major gains. In Virginia, a state that Biden won by 10 percentage points last year and where no Republican candidate has won a statewide race since 2009, the Trump-lite Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe by about three points. At the same time, the elections shifted the state House of Delegates five seats from Democrat to Republican, moving a 55-45 Democratic majority to a 50-50 statehouse tie.

In New Jersey, a state that Biden took by 16 points a year ago, Democratic incumbent governor (and former Goldman Sachs executive) Phil Murphy squeaked out a close win, in a race no opinion poll predicted to be close. Democrats retained control of both houses of the New Jersey legislature, even while the longtime senate president lost to a guy a who barely mounted a campaign.

In other notable developments, the corrupt Democratic Party incumbent mayor Byron Brown mounted an improbable and successful write-in campaign to defeat democratic socialist India Walton in Buffalo, N.Y. Walton had dispatched Brown in the Democratic Party primary in July. In Minneapolis, voters rejected a change to the city charter that would have replaced the police department with a “department of public safety.” In New York state, voters rejected a set of reforms that would have made voting and voter registration easier.What are some takeaways from the Democrats’ defeats?

It’s not complicated

The mainstream media are full of interpretations on the deep meanings of the vote and the long-term prospects of the two ruling-class parties. Yet, the explanation for the November results is pretty simple, and it starts with last November’s national election.

Biden won election as the anti-Trump while the Democrats actually lost ground in Congress and in many statehouses. He promised to conquer the COVID-19 pandemic and to bring a sense of the normal back to everyday life. In spring, with COVID cases dropping and the vaccines being distributed, Biden looked like he was on track to achieve this. But following the spread of the Delta variant and the re-establishment of closures and other public health measures, Biden’s support dropped. A president with the approval of only 42-43 percent of the electorate will drag his party down in national elections—as Trump proved from 2017 to 2020.

At the same time, an economy built on world supply chains and “just-in-time” inventory management has sputtered to respond to its climb back from the spring 2020 pandemic trough. As the economy recovered, it ran head-on into the Delta outbreak. The result in people’s everyday lives has been job losses, price increases and shortages of all sorts of goods. Add to this the psychological, emotional and economic toll the pandemic has taken on millions of people, and it isn’t hard to see why more than seven in10 Americans tell pollsters that they think the U.S. is “on the wrong track.” An electorate in a sour mood punished the Democrats, who are(barely) in control on the national level.

One aspect of the “normal” that has returned is Biden’s and the Democrats’ dashing of the hopes of their voters in the service of their big business patrons. This has played out in real time as an army of corporate lobbyists have picked apart Biden’s social infrastructure bill (without much opposition from Biden), reducing it from a proposed $6 trillion over 10 years to $3.5 trillion to, at the time of writing, $1.75 trillion.While this is usually portrayed as a contest between most Democratic representatives and two recalcitrant “centrist” senators (Manchin and Sinema), it’s an old story of business taking advantage of the U.S.’s multiple veto-point political system to get what it wants.

The most popular provisions of the Build Back Better plan, such as Medicare lowering of drug prices or increased taxes on the rich—key applause lines in Democrats’ 2018 and 2020 campaign speeches—have been watered down, if not eliminated, entirely. Moreover, Biden and the Democrats seem unwilling to do what is necessary—namely, eliminating the filibuster in the U.S. senate—to pass a voting rights or police reform bill. Given all of this, is it any surprise that the people opinion polls say are souring on Biden are “women, young people and those who are Black or Latino?”

Did the GOP “school” the Democrats?

One piece of conventional wisdom that developed soon after the results in Virginia was the notion that the GOP has found a key to winning elections by taking away the Democrats’ traditional advantage in the area of “education”. Especially, it was said, parents rejected Democrats, who, they said, wanted to force “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) on the schools.

The campaign against CRT is the latest GOP use of race as a wedge issue in electoral politics that dates back to the post-Civil Rights era. As usual, McAuliffe and the Democrats ran away from the issue, rather than confront it head-on. It’s yet another example of why the left needs to confront racism—and why Democrats won’t.

However, while the anti-CRT campaign unleashed poison into the political climate,it’s not clear that Youngkin’s campaign against CRT in Virginia had as much of an impact on the results as conservatives said it had. One analysis showed that support for McAuliffe declined uniformly in comparison to the winning Democratic performance in 2017—and didn’t decline any further in areas where CRT became a major point of contention.

Moreover, in several major school board elections in Ohio, Wisconsin, Connecticut and Colorado, conservative slates opposed to CRT and COVID-19 mask policies lost races to the more mainstream incumbents.So in many places where the conservative Kulturkampf was on the ballot—and where elections forced a choosing of sides—voters rejected it.

“Education” may have become a flashpoint in Virginia, especially after the clueless McAuliffe handed Youngkin a rhetorical gaffe that Youngkin was able to spin as “anti-parent.” But there’s no evidence yet that it will be the key that unlocks the door to future GOP electoral success. In fact, Biden’s and Democrats’ unpopularity—and the U.S.’s conservative-biased political system—are doing much of that job already.

Not just a ballot line

In their efforts to give the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) traditional orientation to the Democratic Party a radical-sounding facelift, writers associated with Jacobin and the Socialist Call and others have argued for socialists to make the “tactical use” of the Democratic ballot line. Better that socialists run as Democrats rather than as independent socialists, they argued, to avoid marginalization and the label of “spoiler” that would throw a race to the Republicans.

DSA member India Walton followed those prescriptions last summer, defeating incumbent Democratic Mayor Byron Brown, in the party primary in Buffalo, N.Y. to become the Democratic nominee in the mayoral election. She, like Upton Sinclair many years before her, soon found out that the “ballot line” is not the trivial detail that the DSA electoralists portray.

The Democratic Party is actually a state-backed institution that organizes money, voters and interest groups to back the policies that segments of capitalists want to see enacted. The idea that socialists can rent the ballot of a capitalist party and use it to “build power” for socialism is a fantasy that more than a century of experience has proven. In fact, as Brown showed, the Democrats don’t even consider its own “ballot line” as being as sacrosanct as the DSA does.

Even though Walton won the Democratic primary fair and square, nearly the entire network of interests that the Democratic Party represents deserted her in favor of the corrupt and compromised Brown. The state leaders of the Democratic Party refused to back her. One party official even compared Walton, an African American, to David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Brown, who wasn’t concerned with being a “spoiler,” freely collected hundreds of thousands from business—and even appealed to Republicans—to wage a successful write-in campaign against Walton. Walton faced a scorched-earth campaign against her. But her campaign also showed that a low turnout Democratic primary electorate based on millennials and college-educated liberals isn’t enough to win in the broader, more working-class (including the African American working class) electorate, the appeal to which is supposed to be the reason for socialists to run on the Democratic ballot line in the first place.

A new normal?

The Democrats currently hold their federal government majority by the barest of margins. The Democrats are hoping that the economy rebounds, COVID recedes, and their voters feel some positive impact from whatever part of Build Back Better they manage to pass. But GOP-directed redistricting in states and historical trends suggest that the Democrats will lose one or both houses of Congress in 2022. And if those facts come to pass, U.S. politics would have returned to the “normal” that Biden promised.

As the 2022 elections approach, expect to hear Democrats calling for support on the grounds that a Republican victory will lead to a Trump restoration and even the end of democracy as we know it. Nevertheless, the Democrats in power today are doing little to give their supporters much reason to listen to them—or to vote for them—next year.