Why Democrats will lose the midterms, Part 1

I really hope I'm wrong, and I'll admit it if I am. But this looks bleak.

Sorry I’ve been out of touch. There has been a lot going on, and I’ll fill you in on most of it — soon, I promise — but I didn’t want to write to you until I had a few things settled. There are some things I’m reluctant to tell you, conversations I’m not looking forward to having, so last week I just went silent.

Now, though, I’m ready to talk, and I want to start with the elections, which I’m afraid are going to be bad. There’s enough data in early voting numbers already that 2022 is going to look a lot more like 2014 (googles, “Is ‘curb stomp” one word or two?”) than 2018. I want to take the next two weeks to work through what I think is happening. Here’s part one:

Can I admit something to you? To paraphrase some old Russian, brains are all dumb, but my brain is dumb in its own way. My brain tries to make sense of discrimination. For example, take anti-semitism. I have never understood anyone hating Jews, and — here’s my dumb brain working overtime — am continually surprised at its reoccurrence.

When those numbskulls were marching around in circles in Charlottesville carrying their Home Depot tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” my first thought was, Really? Anti-semitism? Still? I mean, it’s silly on its face. No Jew I know is plotting to take the place of an underemployed high-school graduate in Kentucky. That would be like me worrying that Barack Obama is angling for my job. Barry’s got bigger fish to fry.

But the bigger issue is that humanity has seemed unreasonably fixated on persecuting the Jews for thousands of years, which makes no sense to me, so I discount its existence, only to be surprised when dime-store Nazis pop up again. Really? This again?Like I said, my brain is dumb.

I bring this up because I had the same reaction last spring when my friend B told me that Republicans hated us. He is a political adviser to a trade association that trucks with lawmakers on both sides, so he goes to a lot of Republican fundraisers. He’s what liberals these days call a CisHet white man, which means that for all the world he comes across as a straight white dude. If you look like that, I’ve found, Republicans will tell you damn near anything because they assume that if you’re a straight white man wearing business clothes (as one does at a fundraiser), then you’re a Republican. And what they were telling B is that they hated Democrats.

“You don’t understand,” he told me. “They actually hate you. It’s personal.”

He didn’t mean that Republicans around here specifically hate Jason Stanford, though I’m sure some do. He meant that they thought all Democrats were the enemy and threats to democracy and what is always called “our very way of life.” They hate us because we’re socialists (which might be true for many leftists, I’ll admit) and godless (which is increasingly true for the population at large). But enemies of the state and threats to democracy? They’re just projecting, my dumb brain told me. That isn’t serious. And so I didn’t take it seriously.

I’m beginning to think that was a mistake.

OK, hold up. I can feel more than a few of you running to the Barricades of Bothsidesism. Republicans might hate Democrats, but Democrats hate Republicans, too, right? No, and here’s why:

It’s true that Democrats and Republicans have historically low opinions of members of the opposite party. And yes, Democrats think Republicans are dangerous, and vice versa.

According to a 2020 poll from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, 64% of Democrats see Republican policies as so misguided that they pose a serious threat to the country. Among Republicans, 75% believe Democratic Party policies are so misguided that they pose a serious threat to the country.

But things get more interesting when you dig a little deeper. The most-recent Mood of the Nation poll by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy sought not to measure how divided Americans are but why. Long story short, Democrats think Republicans are just misinformed by Fox News. If they would just sit still still long enough, Democrats think, we could explain it to them, and that would clear everything up.

When it comes to what Republicans think of Democrats, though… There’s an especially powerful passage of Robert Draper’s new book, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party lost its mind, about how Republicans justified not condemning Donald Trump for the January 6 insurrection that illustrates the asymmetry of the enmity.

The gaslighting and shaming committed by Republicans against Democrats was, in effect, an act of self-absolution. Whatever sin had been committed by their party’s leader to stoke an insurrection, whatever their complicity and cowardice, could and should be forgiven for a simple reason: the other side was worse. Apocalyptically worse.

Behind closed doors in caucus meetings, Democrats sometimes characterized their counterparts as wrongheaded, greedy, craven, callous and spineless. These were all character flaws for which rehabilitation was not necessarily out of the question.

What [moderate Democrat] Stephanie Murphy did not know was how Republicans described even moderate Democrats like her when no one else was listening. In the February 3 conference to discuss whether to remove Liz Cheney, it was not just Marjorie Taylor Greene [R-QAnon] saying the quiet part out loud about how Democrats were devious socialists bent on destroying the American way of life. It was not just Louie Gohmert with his addled- uncle vibe saying to his colleagues, “I mean, we’re facing real evil here.”

It was also Burgess Owens, the Utah freshman who was one of the House GOP’s two Black members, who said of Democrats, “They love mobs. They love to rev up hate. They love to destroy people without due process.”

And, too, it was Mario Díaz- Balart, the ten- term congressman from Florida, who half- jokingly compared his fellow Republicans in the room to the Democrats somewhere outside: “These are patriotic Americans. Those are Commies.”

Much of the fuel for this fire comes from QAnon, the online conspiracy cult that believes that the Democratic Party is essentially a pedophile sex trafficking operation. And if your brain is doing the dumb thing mine does — That is stupid. No one can seriously believe that. It must not be real. — then I have some bad news for you. An April poll found that 49% of Republicans and 52% of Trump 2020 voters believed that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.” To be sure, not all Republicans believe this, but all of the people who do are Republicans.

And if you believe Democrats are evil, then you find yourself in a holy war. As Draper summarized Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ascendent worldview, “Trump was the greatest president of her lifetime. The Democrats, the deep state, and the fake news media were evil. Greene and her fellow Trump supporters were patriots. The stakes in this battle for America were existential. Children all over America were gravely at risk.”

So here we are, coming up to Election Day in an off-year in which Democrats hold the White House, just as we did in 2010 and 2014, which were big years for Republicans. The elections were made somewhat less awful because Republicans nominated candidates with abhorrent views. Remember Todd Akin, the Missouri congressman who thought you couldn’t get pregnant from rape? Well, he wasn’t nominated by accident. Democrats recognized that even some Republicans would not vote for someone as extreme as Akin, so they spent big in the primary to make sure he was the one they got to run against. Akin, if you’ll remember, won the primary but lost the general.

Since then, Democrats have been meddling in Republican primaries to varying degrees, always trying to knock out the moderate to engineer campaigns against extremist Republicans. This year, Democrats went a little nuts, spending at least $19 million in at least 13 primaries — six gubernatorial races, two Senate contests, and five House campaigns. In the Arizona governor’s race, they attacked the moderate candidate. Same in the Pennsylvania governor’s race.

It worked, I think. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, the extremist, election-denying candidates won their primaries, kind of like when Hillary Clinton’s campaign elevated Donald Trump in the primary, thinking he’d be the easiest Republican to beat.

Democrats are still living in a 2010 world in which it is possible to disqualify a Republican in a general election by revealing them as being a flimflam man (Dr. Oz), a hypocritical religious conservative and family man (Hershel Walker), or a national security risk as well as a clear and present danger to democracy (Ron Johnson), “a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown” (J.D. Vance), or pretty racist (Blake Masters).

The problem with that theory is that Republican voters, whose enthusiasm will determine the outcome of the 2022 midterms, do not live in a 2010 world. The Republican Party is comprised of two halves: one that excuses candidates’ shortcomings no matter how shocking because at least they are not Democrats, and another that doesn’t consider these traits as flaws at all. Look at the list again: flimflam man who is hypocritical on religion, a national security risk disloyal to the fundamentals of democracy, and a racist clown. Remind you of anyone?

By casting Republicans in key races as embodiments of Donald Trump’s character flaws, Democrats have basically made the Republicans’ case for them. Democrats have done what we do best. We’ve outsmarted ourselves with our dumb brains.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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