Here are two uncontroverted facts about the 2020 election:;
- Commercials for GOP House and Senate candidates typically focused on what I would call the Twitter left–rioters, looters, advocates of political correctness, and socialists.
- The ostentatiously moderate Joe Biden ran ahead of his party’s House and Senate candidates.
The initial conclusion that you probably draw from those facts is that the left is responsible for the poor showing of the Democrats in the congressional races. But is that really true?
The truth is more complicated than that, as follows:
- The lack of a blue wave similar to 2008 is due primarily to the economic factors I discussed in a previous post. Most notably, PBPs who turned against the Republicans when the market tanked and their house values collapsed in 2008 had little reason to do so this time. Their votes were not primarily motivated by calls to defund the police or pay reparations, but by what they perceived to be Trump’s success on economic issues.
- Since the GOP candidates put so much emphasis on culture war issues and the radical left in their commercials, you have to think that those issues made a difference in some swing districts.
- But the radical left to which the GOP candidates referred consists of Twitter activists, not prominent Democratic politicians. Even the much-reviled AOC is hardly a leader of the movement to defund the police.
The bottom line here is that blaming prominent left-leaning politicians is a mistake, while blaming activists is fair, but a waste of time, as they cannot be controlled. The Democratic leadership needs to pull itself together and move on.