Ignore the polls and pundits. Something is happening and it's good for Democrats.

In North Carolina, Democrats won in areas they have not won in years

In the wake of Tuesday’s election, pundits and even a bunch of whiny Democrats are trying to convince us, and themselves, that the results are not good news for Joe Biden. They may be right that the election is not predictive, but they are dead wrong that the Democratic wins have nothing to do with Biden. Republicans in Kentucky and elsewhere tried to wrap Democrats around his record and it didn’t work. At least at this point, Biden is not a liability to other Democratic candidates.

The political environment is almost always driven by national events. If people are happy with the way the world is going, they reward the party in the White House. If not, they punish the president’s party. In 2018, dissatisfaction with Donald Trump led to Democrats taking control of Congress. The following year, Virginia Democrats won both houses of the legislature for the first time in more than 20 years. A year later, Biden beat Trump.

When Obama was president, pundits blamed his presidency on massive Democratic losses in every off-year election of his tenure. In 2016, NPR titled a piece, “The Democratic Party Got Crushed During the Obama Era.” “The Democratic Party’s down-ballot collapse, explained,” read a Vox headline in 2017. And FiveThirtyEight wrote, “Barack Obama won the White House, but Democrats lost the Country.” They told us that Democrats have become a party that can only win in presidential years.

Suddenly, according to pundits, there’s little correlation between off-year elections and the presidency. New York Magazine has an article out with the headline, “Are Democrats the party of low-turnout elections now?” That’s enough to give you whiplash, especially since Democrats won in 2020, the highest turnout election in history.

Ignore the pundits trying to reconcile polls with elections. The polls show deep unrest with people down on the economy, down on the direction of country, and dissatisfied with Biden’s performance. That angst did not transfer to the voting booth. As I noted in an earlier post, Democrats won far and wide, up and down the ballot.

In North Carolina, Democrats won everywhere, not just the urban centers that have been their stronghold. As WRAL reporter Laura Leslie noted, “Democrats swept the mayor’s race and council seats in Huntersville, in Republican-leaning northern Mecklenburg County — the first time that’s ever happened, according to Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer…Democrats also won all the open seats in New Hanover County, which is politically nearly evenly divided. They won the mayor’s race in High Point, a seat that’s been held by a Republican for many years. They even swept the town councils in Cooleemee, a tiny town in Davie County, and in Mars Hill and Marshall in Madison County, all typically Republican areas.”

Something is happening. I suspect that moderate voters are starting to leave the GOP. They’re tired of the drama and the extremism. For all the noise from the left, they see that Democrats, in the White House, in Congress, and in Raleigh, govern from the middle. If that trend holds, Democrats will likely do quite well next year.

Too many pundits and political consultants put too much emphasis on polling. Polls are only one data point, but we’re giving them outsized consideration. David Brooks says in a column this morning, “Americans increasingly use polls to vent, not to vote.” As a country, we’ve been dissatisfied with our political institutions and parties for 20 years and polls reflect that, but elections are choices between candidates and Americans understand the difference.

Brooks points out that the economy is strong, incomes are up, personal debt is down, and average household wealth has increased. The prosperity has been shared widely across rural and urban communities and across demographic lines. Those are all data points that are just as valid and predictive as polls. While people say they aren’t happy with the economy, they say their own finances are good. Tuesday’s results reflect that feeling of security, even if there’s a broader malaise concerning the overall direction of the country.

Pundits are right that the electorate in 2024 will not look much like the one that just voted. Trump will certainly draw out his MAGA base who aren’t engaged enough to participate in any election that doesn’t include their cult leader. Turnout will almost certainly be sky high. Democrats will need to engage their portion of the base that tends to stay home in off-year elections, too. But unless things change, and they certainly can, the 2022 and 2023 elections indicate that a broad swath of midde-of-the-road voters is trending overwhelmingly toward Democrats.

I’ll take that data point over a New York Times/Sienna poll. It’s certainly just as valid.