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?