What (the heck) happened, Part II

What issues might have driven Democrats' unexpectedly strong showing?

The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has taken a first stab at trying to make sense of the midterm elections. I’m going to share his basic thesis and then offer some comments on it.

The first important point Cohn makes is this:

The results by state only add to the uncommon picture. In our era of increasingly nationalized elections, trends in one part of the country tend to play out in others as well. Instead, this year we saw a split: Republicans fared exceptionally well in some states, including Florida and New York. In others, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, Democrats excelled.

When folks like Cohn talk about nationalized elections, they mean that whereas elections past in American history were often best understood as a series of local affairs, they’ve followed a much more uniform logic in an age when voters are more clearly ideologically sorted, there is much less split-ticket voting than there used to be and people’s antipathy toward the other party is a prime motivator for their voting. That newer phenomenon is often dated to 1994, when Newt Gingrich emerged as the GOP House leader in a body that had been in Democratic hands continuously since the 1950s. In 1994, Bill Clinton was an unpopular first-term incumbent and Gingrich decided to role out a “Contract with America” that would provide Republicans with uniform talking points across the country. Republicans won sweeping shocking victories that year, taking control of the House and rolling up unexpected victories the length and breadth of the land. There’s much more to be said about what a consequential historical figure Gingrich has been, and how much he did to contribute to the more intensely bloodsport nature of our politics since the 1990s.

Increasingly, since then, analysts have assumed that they could fairly reliable extrapolate from trends and polling in one part of the country to analyze likely outcomes in other parts of the country. But Tuesday looks different, with the parties experiencing sharply divergent fortunes in the places Cohn mentions.

So how, in Cohn’s words do “we make sense of it?”

The results seem unusual because of two unusual issues: democracy and abortion.

Unlike in the typical midterm election, these issues were driven by the actions of the party out of power. Indeed, the party out of power achieved the most important policy success of the last two years: the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s nothing like the typical midterm, which might be dominated by a backlash over a first-term president’s effort to reform the health system, as with Obamacare in 2010 or Mr. Clinton’s health care initiative in 1994.

These issues were unusual in another respect: Their importance diverged by state or by candidate. Abortion rights might not be seen as under immediate threat in many blue states. The possibility that a Republican governor might overturn a Democratic presidential victory in New York might not seem especially realistic, either.

As Cohn himself says, it’s a first cut, and there are plenty of caveats. For example, neither democracy nor abortion was at stake in California, yet Democrats there seem to have had their usual dominating performance. And in North Carolina, Democrats had a terrible night up and down the ballot. Republicans here came within a whisker of a legislative supermajority and, therefore, the ability to enact extremist anti-abortion legislation in a state that has become a haven for women elsewhere seeking abortions. These counterexamples don’t undermine the general argument that this was an unusually (for recent history) idiosyncratic election. Indeed, it suggests the need to find additional locally-specific drivers of turnout, including the state of the Democratic Party machinery in New York and North Carolina, for example.

And I think Cohn is generally right that both the abortion issue and the election denialism that many Republican candidates embraced helped Democrats and hurt Republicans.

About democracy/election denialism, I’ll take that up in a future substack (buckle up!)

About abortion - for decades, a question that has hung over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade was whether abortion, which has done so much to galvanize the Christian Right and conservatism more generally, would have a similarly galvanizing effect for liberals and Democrats. That’s not to say that Democratic politicians and pro-choice advocacy groups *haven’t* run on and organized around abortion rights over the years. Of course, they have. But there is evidence that the balance of intensity on the issue, what motivated and mobilized voters, tipped in favor antiabortion forces as long as Roe v. Wade stood as the law of the land.

The 2022 midterms marked the first major election in post-Roe America. We still don’t have a full breakdown of how various groups voted, but we do have the results of ballot measures in five states. In every one, voters either enshrined the right to abortion in their state constitution (Vermont, California and Michigan) or rejected efforts to codify sweeping bans (Kentucky, Montana).

The political scientist Christina Wolbrecht put together this chart, comparing support for the pro-abortion position in each of the five states to other statewide races for office in those same states. In Kentucky and Montana, in particular, you can see the divergence between support for abortion rights and support for the Democratic candidate.

Christina Wolbrecht @C_Wolbrecht

Updated with more recent results. Again: Pro-choice votes outpace statewide Democrats. Can Democrats turn those votes into support for their candidates in the future?

It’s only one cut at thinking about the issue, but whatever ambivalence exists in American public opinion broadly about abortion, the anti-abortion extremism that the end of Roe has unleashed is far removed from the mainstream of American public opinion. As an aside, I’ve written before about the difference between operational and symbolic ideology - people’s preferences on specific issues versus their party loyalties, roughly speaking. Consistently, in red, purple and blue states, when given the opportunity to vote directly on policy in ballot measures, majorities favor raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid and, clearly now, protecting abortion rights. This has not, so far, translated clearly into greater support for Democratic officeholders among up-for-grabs voters.

Preliminary data from Tuesday both suggest strong relative turnout among folks 18-29 and *overwhelming* support among young women in particular for Democratic candidates. People who study political socialization consider these early experiences with voting formative¹, which means the possibility exists that a generation of women - who’ve already been tilting heavily Democratic in recent years - are going to cement themselves as a staunch bloc of voters who view the GOP as antithetical to their interests and worldview.

And, of course, abortion isn’t just about a specific medical procedure. This excellent Monica Hesse column makes the point incisively. It encompasses a broad range of issues that are fundamentally about autonomy, freedom and life chances. That larger context is relevant to the possible coalescing of people’s political identities in the years ahead.

1. Obligatory CYA statement about socialization - there are lots of caveats.