What the Left Doesn't Understand About Winning Elections

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-NY)

This past week, former First Lady, Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted a graphic about the climate plans of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  In it, you can see that Trump has significantly higher carbon emissions by 2050 than Biden, though neither are currently projecting to their target.  For rational people, the graphic and Clinton's intent is simple: she is showing how Biden is actually trying to improve the climate crisis while Trump ignores it, and also points out that voters have some say in the matter if we want to get to zero emissions.  Biden has been very public about wanting to get zero emissions by 2050; this is, in fact, on his official White House page.  Trump, on the other hand, has publicly backed growing coal production if he is elected.  Two very different plans on a vital issue.

This was not, however, how Twitter reacted, and it was in fact the far left on Twitter who regularly disparaged the graph claiming "there's no difference between the two candidates" despite Clinton's graph clearly illustrating that there is a difference between the two.  This is not a singular phenomenon, nor is it a new one.  Other issues-of-the-day, such as the situation in Gaza, public healthcare, & criminal justice reform are all situations where the left has recently stated "there's no difference between the two candidates...what does it matter?" even when there was clearly a big gap between the two.

As a Democrat my whole life, this is is the single most annoying thing about my party (that, and how we always seem to lose Florida in even the tightest of elections).  We regularly make the perfect the enemy of the good, and as a result, we get neither.  Some will claim this is a Gen Z issue, but it's not-it goes back as far as I can remember.  I recall distinctly in the 2000 election, for example, that people were claiming there was no difference between Bush and Gore that cycle, a profoundly stupid proclamation given both their politics (Bush was considerably more conservative than Gore) and what would happen next (on one side you have An Inconvenient Truth, the other side you have the Iraq War, two polar opposite situations for the planet).  This has frequently been an issue from the young, and that has made it more pronounced now, not just because social media becomes an echo chamber where you're rewarded for having less-nuanced takes, but also because the youth vote continues to be more liberal.  In 1980, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan received roughly the same percentage of voters under 25; in 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump with voters under 25 by 20-points.  If young voters stay home, Democrats lose.

And low turnout among Democrats cost them elections.  I'll give you an example with the 2014 midterms.  In 2012, Democrats had a 6-point advantage in turnout over the Republicans, with 38D-32R-29I in terms of the electorate.  Mitt Romney actually won Independents slightly over President Obama, but the sheer force of turnout amongst Democrats got Obama a victory in both the popular and electoral votes that year.  If you compare that with 2014, though, you have a situation where the electorate was 36R-35D-28I, a three-point loss for Democrats and a four-point gain for Republicans.  This isn't because the Republicans did a marvelous job in 2014 with turnout, as turnout that cycle was the worst for a presidential midterm since 1942.  No, this happened because more Democrats stayed home, despite President Obama & congressional Democrats trying to persuade progressives to get out the vote by centering the campaign around key issues from the left such as a minimum wage increase, climate change, & same-sex marriage protection, Democrats abandoned their position, and let the Republicans win.  As we would see two years later with the contentious campaign between Hillary Clinton & Bernie Sanders, this showed a serious gap between Democrats who wanted to get as much as what they could from a plausible electorate, and Democrats who would threaten to stay home if they didn't get their specific way.

This causes serious issues.  You all know the story of what happened to Clinton, where a dip in both Democratic turnout (she had an overall two-point drop from Obama, likely enough to cost her Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, & Michigan, and with that, the election) caused her to lose to Donald Trump (and if you can't see there would've been a difference between a President Clinton and a President Trump at this point, you are beyond repair).  But 2014 is just as important.  Let's assume that the Democrats can get a 4-point swing by just matching the 2012 turnout percentages (that seems roughly in the sweet spot).  Democrats in that case will hold the Senate races in North Carolina, Colorado, & Alaska.  Not quite enough to flip the Senate, but enough to make Mitch McConnell's stop of the Merrick Garland nomination moot.  After all, the Democrats netted two seats in 2016 in the Senate...meaning the Democrats would flip the Senate in 2016 under this scenario, and Neil Gorsuch & Brett Kavanaugh are not able to get confirmed.  Staying home in 2014, making the perfect the enemy of the good in a low-turnout election, cost the Democrats the Supreme Court for decades (also side note given I slammed them earlier-that increase of turnout would've ended Rick Scott's career as he would've lost in 2014 and never run in 2018, meaning Bill Nelson wins again...so two Florida losses prevented in one moment).

Democrats cannot win every election-it's not possible, and quite frankly it shouldn't be possible.  But Democrats frequently leave election victories on the table because they seem to be convinced that winning by inches doesn't count...the only way that it counts is an undisputed, immediate victory.  But as Clinton's graph clearly illustrated-that's not how it works.  You win as many victories as you can, in hopes of not just getting to your end goal, but also by knowing that every additional Democrat you elect, you win a better seat at the table.  In an increasingly partisan era, every new Democrat brings your legislation further to the left (even if they're a moderate) as long as they're beating a Republican.  With winning elections, it's almost always a game of quantity, not quality.