The Washington Post foresees a reckoning for Dems

Most midterm elections are a reckoning for one political party or the other. When we named this newsletter “Ringside at the Reckoning,” the 2022 midterms were one of the reckonings we had in mind.

We didn’t know which party would suffer the reckoning, but strongly suspected it would be the Democrats.

We still don’t know for sure which party it will be, but our suspicion that it’s the Dems is stronger now than it was in May.

The Washington Post shares this strong suspicion. I don’t know what share of our subscribers reads the Post, but I’m guessing it’s a clear minority.

Subscribers who don’t read the Post, or who skipped over its recital today of the writing on the wall for Democrats, might appreciate this article called “Democrats scramble into defensive posture in final stage of midterms.” I have to give credit to the author, Annie Linskey. Her piece is long on candor and short on spin and wishful thinking.

Here are some excerpts (the emphasis is mine):

Democrats on Wednesday pumped at least $6.3 million worth of advertising investments into a trio of congressional districts in New York and New Jersey, where President Biden won by at least eight percentage points.

First lady Jill Biden spent the afternoon in Rhode Island trying to help save a Democrat running in a district her husband carried by nearly 14 points. The president is headed to the deep-blue Empire State on Thursday, where the Democratic governor is scrambling to avoid an upset in a closer-than-expected race that has put Democrats down the ballot in greater danger.

And in Pennsylvania, Democrats were trying to move past a shaky Tuesday debate performance by John Fetterman, who is recovering from a stroke. One former party official relayed hearing from people who wondered why Fetterman agreed to debate during his recovery. The U.S. Senate nominee’s once comfortable polling lead has shrunk in a race that party leaders have long seen as their best opportunity to flip a red Senate seat and take a step closer to preserving their narrow majority in the chamber.

If Pennsylvania represents the Dems’ best opportunity to pick up a Senate seat, and I think it does, that’s bad news for the party.

Less than two weeks before the midterm elections, Democrats have moved into a defensive crouch, scrambling to shore up the party’s candidates as Republicans charge deeper into their terrain. The scope of their challenge has come into sharper focus in the past 48 hours, when much of the attention in the party has been on protecting swaths of the country where Democrats have long enjoyed more support.

It amazes me that the Dems took so long to move into that “crouch.” It’s almost as if they believed their own BS, including what the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion would do to prop them up.

Actually, they did believe it, and some now regret doing so:

Late-summer Democratic talk of going on offense by running on abortion rights while Biden’s approval rating ticked up has run headlong into the harsh reality that Republicans are well-positioned to make potentially large gains on Nov. 8, some Democratic strategists said, by hammering them over crime and inflation — and seizing on fatigue over Democratic leadership in government.

Like other Democratic strategists, [Craig] Varoga said he worried his party put too much emphasis on abortion over the summer and should have more aggressively made it part of a broader argument that Republicans oppose personal freedom.

The problem is that there is no credible “broader argument that Republicans oppose personal freedom,” and voters know it. It’s the Democrats who are the enemies of free speech (think of campus restrictions on expression, cancel culture, etc.), freedom of religion (religious beliefs must always take a back seat to what’s woke, and what could be less woke than traditional religion?) , freedom to choose what schools to attend, freedom for parents to have a say in the education of their children, and so forth.

Multiple Democratic strategists said that fear of losing the right to abortion is proving to be a less motivating factor in blue states because voters believe their access to the procedure will be protected by current laws and Democratic control of state government.

Of course, it will. Did the Dems really believe their own BS about how draconian the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision would be? Probably not. Probably they just assumed Blue State voters would believe it.

Now, as the opening paragraphs above reflect, the Dems seem to be hurting in Blue States:

One Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid, described a “blue-state depression” for House races, pointing specifically to New York, Oregon and California where a handful of races are “closer than normal.”. . .

Some Democrats pointed to fatigue in blue areas over pandemic restrictions, one-party dominance, and concerns about violent crime and quality of life in large cities such as Portland, Ore., New York City and San Francisco.

“Crime, in many ways, is the thread that is holding those together,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Here, the Post gets to the heart of the reckoning.

Did the Democrats really think that, as crime rates spiked, voters wouldn’t punish them for their soft-on-crime policies? Did they think they could deflect the issue by accusing Republicans who call attention to it of racism?

I guess so. The New York Times is still resorting to that playbook, but Linskey’s candid article in the Post doesn’t go there at all.

Most Democratic politicians and operatives don’t seem to know much about history (other than slavery). Joe Biden has probably forgotten more of it than he remembers.

But common sense alone should have caused the Dems not to get on the wrong and unpopular side of the crime issue — the side that views the police as at least as much, if not more, of a threat than criminals are; tends to blame society as much as criminals for most crime; and therefore favors little or no punishment for most criminals, including many violent ones.

It didn’t — one of several major miscalculations (or perhaps indulgences) that has the Democrats scrambling to avoid a reckoning on November 8.