And Yet, Democrats Keep Winning Elections

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

 

On paper, Republicans have a lot of advantages. The GOP owns what polling indicates are the most salient issues for voters heading into the 2024 general-election cycle. Inflation is moving in the wrong direction. The crisis at the southern border is only getting worse. The international threat environment is deteriorating at an alarming pace. As all this would suggest, the Democratic president who presides over these conditions is about as popular as head lice. And yet, Democrats keep winning elections.

 

Florida’s 35th legislative district in eastern Orange and Osceola counties should have been a Republican district. Ron DeSantis won it by double digits in his gubernatorial reelection bid. State representative Fred Hawkins, who represented the district before resigning to assume the presidency of South Florida State College, defeated his Democratic opponent in 2022 by ten points. But in last night’s special election to replace the outgoing Republican, Democrat Tom Keen flipped the district with a vote of 51 to 49 percent.

 

“What actually clinched the win for Democrats was this massive margin with NPAs [no-party-affiliation], and perhaps some Republican moderates as well,” Democratic elections analyst Matt Isabell told the Orlando Sentinel. “If anything, this should be concerning for the GOP because it indicates a voter anger that maybe they have not understood.” That partisan analysis might be the correct analysis, according to New York Times chief political analyst Nate Cohn.

 

Keen’s victory is representative of a trend toward Democratic overperformance in down-ballot and special elections throughout 2023, and much of that phenomenon is attributable to high turnout among voters who should be depressed by the national political environment.

 

In December, Democrats retained control of a relatively uncompetitive legislative district in Minnesota. “Republicans were hoping to use an expected low turnout to their advantage,” the Minnesota Reformer observed. But voters didn’t cooperate with the GOP. Special elections in 2023 helped Democrats retain control of the Pennsylvania house of representatives, which the party won for the first time since 2010 in 2022 but briefly ceded due to vacancies. “In New Hampshire, a Democrat won by 12 points in a district Trump narrowly carried in 2020, putting the party within one seat of ending the GOP’s state government trifecta,” Axios reported last year. And it’s not just special elections. In November 2023’s off-year elections, Republican candidates failed to oust the Democratic governor of Kentucky or recapture Virginia’s lower legislative chamber, and they sacrificed what should have been relatively safe GOP seats in New Jersey.

 

Democratic elections analyst Simon Rosenberg — a partisan analyst who nonetheless foresaw the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms despite the historic tailwinds from which the party was expected to benefit — saw signs of the Republican Party’s turnout problem manifesting in Monday’s Iowa caucuses. “Iowa’s really low turnout made the Caucuses another election where Republicans struggled, underperformed, as they’ve done again and again since Dobbs,” he wrote.

 

Maybe. Perhaps those caucuses were the lowest attended since the year 2000 because of the abominable weather and the relatively uncompetitive contest between Donald Trump and his opponents. Or maybe turnout was conspicuously low in the state’s urban and suburban counties because the GOP can no longer count on the votes of what used to be the party’s bread and butter: well-educated, reasonably affluent, high-propensity voters in the suburbs.

 

All this points to a counterintuitive set of circumstances. For all the conditions that should be suppressing Democratic enthusiasm, it’s the GOP’s voters who are depressed.