Unless The DCCC Backs Shit Candidates, The Dems Will Win Back The House
Michigan has been looking pretty blue for a swing state. After Hillary narrowly lost the state in 2016 (47.5% to 47.3%), Biden beat Trump 50.6% to 47.8%, in great part due to a gigantically increased turnout— 63% in 2016 and 71% in 2020, which helped him flip Kent (Grand Rapids), Saginaw and Leelanau counties. Two years later, there was a powerful blue wave in Michigan. Democrats swept all the statewide races, winning the gubernatorial election by 10.6 points, the attorney general race by 8.6 points, and the secretary of state race by a massive 14 points (at which point the GOP appointed the losing candidate— Kristina Karamo— state party chair, just in time for her to shred the party and bankrupt it). In 2022, the Democrats also won a previously red congressional seat and would have won two had the DCCC not ignored MI-10, which Republican John James won by just 2,600 votes (48.80% to 48.31%), one of the closest races in the country and the closest race among the ones the DCCC sabotaged by ignoring.
More great Michigan news saw the Democrats win both Houses of the state legislature by 2 seats each— taking 3 red seats in the lower house and a shocking 4 in the senate, which gave them control of that chamber for the first time since 1984. It was the first Democratic Party trifecta in Michigan in 40 years. And the Democrats made the most of it, passing popular bills to increase the minimum wage, to guarantee free school breakfasts and lunches, to protect women’s choice, a civil rights bill to protect Michiganders against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in areas like employment, housing, and public accommodations. The Clean Water Act allocates $1 billion to address PFAS contamination in the state’s drinking water and they allocated an immense roads and bridges repair and improvement infrastructure (and job creation) bill— all in just one year!
A Detroit News/WDIV poll conducted in October 2023 shows that 52% of Michiganders approve of the job Gov. Whitmer is doing, while 43% disapprove and approval for the specific pieces of legislation is similarly high. That’s a very big number for a swing state.
All that said, the Democrats are about to nominate a total piece of crap for the open US Senate seat, Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA agent who has been a completely unremarkable corporate-oriented backbencher in the House since 2019. If you had to pick one person who has ZERO chance for enthusing the Democratic Party base it would be Elissa Slotkin, a Republican-lite Democratic version of Susan Collins. And she’s already making excuses that if she loses, it will be because Biden is unpopular.
I have a very different idea— she and other sub-par Democrats stand a good chance to win despite themselves and because 2024 will be an anti-Trump wave election. Reid Epstein and Lisa Lerer wrote that “Biden’s top aides and most fervent surrogates have for months insisted that the race will change once voters understand that Trump will be the presumptive Republican nominee, potentially as soon as next month. At that point, the Biden team argues, the campaign will transform from a referendum on Biden to a choice between the president and Trump, whose brand of right-wing Republicanism has lost most major elections since he won the 2016 election.”
Democrats have been winning— or outperforming— in statewide and local races almost everywhere, often because of the Roe-effect but just wait ’til the Trump effect kicks in on top of that. I expect the special election to fill George Santos’ seat on Long Island to be an important harbinger, although the Nassau County GOP will work hard to prevent any association between their less-than-mediocre candidate and Trump. Still, Santos won the district-- which has a D+4 partisan lean-- against a terrible Democratic candidate, 145,824 (53.8%) to 125,404 (46.2%).
Recall what happened in Virginia last month? Despite a no-holds-barred GOP effort, the Democrats used the Roe effect to hold onto the state Senate and take back the state House. Joan Greve reported that “Democrats’ wins in Virginia may now offer some helpful lessons for the party heading into a crucial presidential election. A year and a half after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion continues to weigh heavily on voters’ minds, helping to lift Democrats’ prospects at the polls. Even as Biden remains unpopular and voters express pessimism about the state of the economy, Republicans have struggled to translate that dissatisfaction into electoral success… For Republicans, the results in Virginia present the latest in a series of warning signs about how the party is suffering because of its stance on abortion. Youngkin’s failure to take control of the legislature may signal that Republicans must find a way to shift the conversation away from abortion, although that strategy risks angering their rightwing base.”
Democrats have been doing badly on Long Island in the last couple of years, in large party because the Nassau County Democratic Party is very badly-led and incompetent on a Florida-Ohio level. [That's Jay Jacobs on the right-- you won't find a worse party boss anywhere.] But the February special election should be able to transcend that because of the quality of the candidates. The Democrat, Tom Suozzi, was mayor of Glen Cove, one of the most important towns in the district and then became Nassau County Executive. In 2016 he was elected to the House and before leaving that seat to run for governor, he beat Santos by over 12 points. The Republican candidate is a big zero... and can't even answer a simple question about how she feels about Choice. (And she's a registered Democrat.)
Nationally, with Trump at the top of the ticket, Democrats will have a big advantage in the general election but candidate quality will also be very important. With Democrats nominating sure losers— like backward congressional candidates Adam Gray, Rudy Salas, Kim Nguyen and David Min in California-- they may actually save the Republicans’ bacon, always a DCCC specialty.