What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

I said this (ineloquently) on the podcast, Micah, but I agree with you that a lot can just be chalked up to human nature — and, therefore, you can’t easily separate my “it’s all macro trends!” from Nate’s “what are the real-world reasons?”

It’s virtually impossible for a government to do everything well, and because the grass is always greener on the other side, voters (and, to be honest, the media) will fixate on the stuff that isn’t going well, and that becomes the reason (or excuse, if you like) why voters turn against the party in power. Right now, it might be the delta variant; it might be the sluggish economy; it might be lack of action in Congress. But whatever it is, it’s scratching an itch that is inevitably going to be there.

Ahead of yesterday’s election, both Trump and Youngkin surrogate Amanda Chase were still beating the election fraud drum, with Chase even baselessly claiming that votes would be digitally switched. So how does Youngkin’s win fit into that narrative?

Well, Big Lie believers are rationalizing the victory by claiming that the election was rigged but that enough patriots came out to vote to overwhelm the planned fraud. Here’s the top comment on the top post currently on Patriots.win, a pro-Trump message board:

“Of course the elections are still rigged. I am not even remotely pretending otherwise. We need to vote en masse every time anyway to keep forcing them to cheat even harder. Not voting is surrender.”

And here’s part of a Telegram post from last night by a major QAnon influencer who has more than 125,000 subscribers:

“Here’s a dose of reality: Youngkin’s already won the Governorship. Right now the slow motion votes rolling in closing the gap is them attempting to cheat. Here’s the kicker though; MAGA came out and crushed their algorithms tonight! Virginians weren’t leaving it for chance and swept the state red!”

If you thought Republicans winning elections undercuts the Big Lie narrative, that is absolutely not the case.

We’re still waiting for more New Jersey updates, but I wanted to return to a theme we were discussing on the live blog last night (and which Sarah, Nathaniel, Geoff and Galen covered on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast in the wee hours of the morning):

How much of the strong shift toward the GOP that we’re seeing is down to macro factors versus local factors?

There’s been general agreement (on this live blog at least) that the macro factors are the more important ones, including the tendency of voters to swing against the party that controls the White House, the president’s unpopularity, etc. But Nate made the very good point last night that saying these macro factors are the bigger factors doesn’t quite answer the question of why those macro factors are factors in the first place. For example, sure Biden is unpopular and that matters, but why is he unpopular?

I won’t try to answer all that, though I think human nature is part of it — that it’s easier to motivate voters in opposition to something than in support of it. But I did want to posit a different way to look at this: It’s one thing to say that local/discrete factors weren’t determinative. So all the “education” talk in Virginia may not really be what drove the bulk of the swing among suburban voters to the GOP. Congressional Democrats’ failure to pass the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills likely wasn’t a major factor. And so forth.

But you can also reverse that: The macro forces this year and next are bad for Democrats. They know that. So the idea that they can upend these historical trends without doing something big — passing really ambitious legislation in Congress that really helps people, for example — is sorta crazy. Doing so still might not work. Passing health care reform didn’t help Democrats in the 2010 midterms, for instance.

Still, Democrats are fighting tectonic forces — don’t they need a strategy that is similar in scale?