On Get Your Shit Together
The politics of change has a golden rule. “Take care of the basics first”. Exit polling indicates that yesterday’s Virginia and New Jersey Governor’s races were determined by immediate economic pressures and educational fears. Poverty, infrastructure and climate didn’t make the decision tree for voters. As the Republicans found out in 2020, and Democrats woke up to this morning, a pandemic economy will take you down. “We’re done with it”, said voters. “Why haven’t you made it go away?”, they demanded.

The education issue is a subset of the pandemic economic malaise. It was partly fueled by a reaction against school board mask and vaccine mandates and partly fueled by race-baited fears over a college history course that isn’t taught, or proposed to be taught, in any K-12 curriculum. You can build on unhappiness with all kinds of diversionary grievances.

The voters responsible for yesterday’s results weren’t Republicans or Democrats. They were that one-third of the electorate that is mis-named “independents”, but in reality, are fickle voters. Lacking a real political touchstone, they live and vote in the moment. Last year they disliked Trump and voted for Biden. This year they’re unhappy with a bunch of immediate issues, so they sent a blast over the Democratic ships bow. The pollsters can’t figure out how they are going to vote because they don’t know themselves.

Underlying the voter’s mood is a sense that the Democrats can’t solve their problems. Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and their hidden allies should take a victory lap with Governor elect-Youngkin. The inability to move legislation, when you hold the majority in Congress and the Presidency, erodes confidence, even if people agree with your goals. That played out in “voter-enthusiasm” polling that gave Republicans a serious advantage in momentum.

This couldn’t happen at a better time. The Democrats have a year before the mid-terms to get their shit together. That means both moving their long-term agenda AND addressing the basic economic and educational issues that threaten their majorities. There needs to be a laser focus on speeding up the economic recovery from the pandemic. That means working on supply chains, lowering the price of gas (the public’s measurement of the economy), encouraging job placements and taking on the hysteria about Critical Race Theory. When there’s a sense the ship is sinking, people are less interested in the Captain’s maps on where they were headed. The nation needs something akin to Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. An “explainer in Chief” that talks about the roots of these immediate issues and demonstrates a command of their resolutions. Job one is building confidence that the Democrat’s understand the immediate problems and are effectively doing something about them.

At the local level it was a mixed bag. Pittsburgh elected its first black mayor. New York elected a black moderate mayor. Boston elected a Progressive mayor. It appears the moderates took away a progressive mayor primary victory in Buffalo. Results that were less focused on national issues. Police ballot initiatives, designed to alter current hiring and direction, failed in both Milwaukee and Austin. The public still not convinced that policing can be changed without erosion of security.

All in all, yesterday was a wake-up call from voters. While Trump’s influence was in the background, he was no longer the boogeyman the Dem’s had counted on. The voters want their immediate issues addressed. No one has the middle third locked up. We’re in for an interesting run-up to the 2022 mid-terms in this nation with a badminton-style voting pattern…

Ihg 11-3-2021

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