Democrats, and the Majority that Nearly Wasn't

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

While January 5th will officially signal the end of the 2020 election (when the Georgia Senate runoffs will have been completed), it's worth noting that we still have two seats that are, at least by some, not yet called.  In Iowa's 2nd congressional district, State Sen. Rita Hart (D) is appealing to the US House to stop the seating of her opponent Marienette Miller-Meeks (R) after the latter won the race by six votes (and due to the condensed timing of Iowa's certification process, Hart was unable to continue to pursue recounts in court).  And in New York's 22nd congressional district, the race between Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D) and former Rep. Claudia Tenney (R) remains tenuous.  There Tenney leads Brindisi by 12 votes, with hundreds of mislaid/affidavit ballots potentially still to be counted pending court cases (while Hart/Miller-Meeks seems to just be an unbearably close race, the New York contest is an indictment that the New York Board of Elections is an abomination to democracy, and resignations should start pouring in here).

Assuming the current vote count leaders win here (which in Iowa seems probable & in New York it's too early to call), the Democrats will have lost 14 seats since their last election, though one of those they lost in a special election earlier this year (in California) and couldn't regain in November.  This was, to say the least, an embarrassing performance by the Democrats.  There was talk prior to the election from most leading pundits that the Democrats would gain seats, potentially as many as 10 seats, in the election, and instead they barely held the majority; Nancy Pelosi nearly had to face the shame of losing the House in an election no one thought was competitive.  The Democrats beat no incumbent Republicans while the Democrats saw at least 12 (possibly 13 if Brindisi loses) incumbents lose their elections.

There were two reasons for this, and one relates back to the conversation we had discussed a week ago about the Senate-straight ticket voting has become so ubiquitous to the point where split-ticket Democrats are an almost impossible-to-find species.  Joe Biden helped this by flipping at least a dozen seats that went for Donald Trump in 2016 but now went blue in 2020.  A number of these districts featured potentially-vulnerable freshmen incumbents like Angie Craig, Lauren Underwood, Lucy McBath, & Susie Lee, who all scored second terms.  Donald Trump appears to have flipped two districts (TX-23 & FL-26), and in both cases the Republicans were able to win, with the latter having an incumbent Democrat losing due to Trump's district takeover.

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL)

But the bigger problem for the Democrats was that they weren't able to hold a number of seats that Joe Biden kept blue, or in some cases, converted.  Incumbents like Rep. Donna Shalala under-ran Biden in Florida's 27th district, and it's clear between these races and the fact that so few Democratic Senate candidates did poorer than Joe Biden that congressional Democrats completely failed in linking the policies of Donald Trump to the Republican Party, essentially giving the Republicans a free pass for the past four years.  These Democratic voters in key districts simply assumed that beating Trump would solve their problems, and didn't see any urgency in giving him a Congress that matched the President-Elect's views.

I have been very critical of Chuck Schumer on this blog, but I do think that Nancy Pelosi deserves some blame here, as the Democrats clearly overshot their reach in 2020, and some incumbents ended up losing as a result (while most of the "expand the map" races look like they were never possible to begin with).  You could almost forgive Pelosi for some of the losses (it's possible that no one was going to save the likes of Kendra Horn or Joe Cunningham), but the pulverizing that happened in Pelosi's home state of California is unforgivable.  Democrats lost four seats that they won in the 2018 midterms, and in three cases (CA-21, CA-25, & CA-39), Biden literally took these districts by double digits and the Republicans still won.  There doesn't appear to be anything close to this on the Republican side (I don't have New York's numbers, so I don't know where NY-22 would land yet if Brindisi ends up winning).  Trump's biggest win margin in a district the Democrats won was Maine-2, which he won by 7.44 points, and no other seat that the Democrats took that Trump won gave Trump better than a 5-point margin (whereas Biden that was true in seven districts, the aforementioned seats in California plus NE-2, NY-24, PA-1, & TX-24).

Leaving so many seats on the table, ones that simply could've been won by just keeping the people who had already voted for Biden's party, is a failure, particularly in an era where ticket-splitting is virtually extinct.  In 2008 83 seats were held by the party opposite of the one that won the presidential election.  In 2016, it was 35.  In 2020, it could be as low as 16, and many of those were in open seats or seats with Democratic incumbents that Biden won handily, but the Democrats failed to ride his coattails.  This trend feels unlikely to change, but it's one that even with redistricting we cannot ignore.  The Republicans have essentially found a way to guarantee that even-popular incumbent Democrats fall in districts that go red for the presidency.  If Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer can't do the same trick (and Maine, California, & Florida this year showed that they can't), the Democrats are going to struggle to gain traction in Congress in 2022 & beyond.