The New York Times
Democrats beat Trump in 2020. Now they ask, what went wrong?
Democrats emerged from the 2020 election with full federal government control and a pile of lingering questions. In private, party leaders and strategists have grappled with a dilemma: why was President Joe Biden’s convincing victory over Donald Trump not accompanied by a broad Democratic win after the vote? With that puzzle in mind, a cluster of Democratic advocacy groups has quietly launched a review of the party’s performance in the 2020 elections with a view to shaping the Democrats’ approach for next year’s midterm campaign, seven people said. were familiar with the effort. There is particular concern among Democratic sponsors of the initiative about the party’s losses in large minority House districts, including Florida, Texas and California, people briefed on the initiative said. The assessment covers probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including democratic messages about the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions such as avoiding personal recruiting. Sign up for The Morning’s newsletter from the New York Times. Democrats had expected to expand their majority in the House, by penetrating the historically red areas of the Solar Belt where Trump’s unpopularity had destabilized the GOP coalition. Instead, Republicans took 14 seats in the Democratic House, including a dozen that Democrats had captured in an anti-Trump golf election just two years earlier. The results stunned strategists in both sides, raised questions about the reliability of campaign polls, and seemingly underscored the democratic vulnerabilities in rural and suburban areas to the right of the center. Democrats also lost several disputed Senate matches by unexpectedly large margins, even as they narrowly took over the chamber. The strategists involved in the Democratic self-assessment have started interviewing elected officials and campaign advisers and reaching out to lawmakers and former candidates in major house and senate races where the party narrowly won or lost. Four major groups are supporting the effort, which includes a range of democratically leaning interests: Third Way, a centrist think tank; End Citizens United, a pure government group; the Latino Victory Fund; and Collective PAC, an organization that supports black Democratic candidates. They would work with at least three influential bodies within the House Democratic caucus: the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist lawmakers. The groups have retained a democratic consultancy, 270 Strategies, to conduct interviews and analyze election data. Democrats are feeling significant pressure to refine their political playbook ahead of the 2022 congressional election, when the party will defend tiny majorities in the House and Senate without a presidential race to boost turnout on both sides. Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the party recognized that, despite Biden’s victory, the 2020 cycle had not been a genuine democratic success story. “I think people know that good and bad are coming out of ’20s, and there is a desire to look under the hood,” Sena said. One of the party’s goals, Sena said, should be to study their gains in Georgia and to look for other areas where population growth and demographic changes could drive the party’s strong election goals by 2022. “There were a range of factors that made Georgia actually do this cycling,” he said. “How do you start to find places like Georgia?” Matt Bennett, Third Way senior vice president, confirmed in a statement that the four-sided project aimed at positioning Democrats for the midterm elections. “With small Democratic majorities in Congress and the Republican Party under the spell of rioters backing Trump, the stakes have never been higher,” he said. organizations will provide Democrats with a detailed view of what happened in 2020 – with a wide range of input from whole party votes – so that they are fully prepared to take on the GOP in 2022. ”In addition to the external assessment, some traditional party committees are taking more limited steps to scrutinize the results of 2020. Concerned about a decline in support among Latino men, the Democratic Congressional organized Campa ign Committee earlier this year focus groups in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, said a person familiar with the study. It is not clear exactly which conclusions emerged from the exercise. So far, there is no equivalent trial on the Republican side, party officials said, citing the general lack of appetite among GOP leaders to openly grapple with Trump’s impact on the party and the wreckage he inflicted in significant regions of the country. As a candidate for re-election, Trump collapsed in the Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest – giving up his major breakthroughs of 2016 – losing to Biden in Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally red states where GOP has plunged abruptly in recent years. The party lost all four Senate seats of those states during Trump’s presidency, three of them in the 2020 cycle. But Trump and his political followers have so far responded with anger to critics of his stewardship of the party, and there have been is no apparent desire to tempt his anger with extensive analysis likely to yield unflattering results. An unofficial review conducted by Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio concluded that Trump had lost significant support for his handling of the pandemic, with particularly damaging losses among white voters. In the past, democratic attempts at self-examination have led to somewhat mushy conclusions aimed at avoiding controversies within the party’s multifarious coalition. The Democratic Party appeared to be on the road to a public reckoning in November, when the party took on its setbacks in Parliament and failed to put in their seats several Republican senators deemed ripe by Democrats for defeat. A group of centrist House members blamed leftist rhetoric for democratic socialism and defending the police for their losses in a number of conservative-leaning suburbs and rural districts. Days after the election, Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger said the party should renounce the word “socialism” by pushing back progressives like New York Deputy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That broadcast of differences didn’t last long: Democrats quickly closed the ranks in response to Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, and the party’s unity hardened after the Jan. 5 second election in Georgia and the U.S. Capitol attack on the 6th. January. But there are still significant internal disagreements over campaign strategy. It has been eight years since one of the political parties conducted a comprehensive self-assessment that recommended profound changes in structure and strategy. After the 2012 election, when Republicans lost the presidential race and gave up seats in both chambers of Congress, the Republican National Committee assembled a task force calling for major changes in the party organization. The so-called 2012 autopsy also recommended that the GOP embrace the cause of immigration reform, warning that the party would face a bleak demographic future if it did not improve its position among colored communities. That recommendation was effectively rejected after House Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate and then completely obliterated by Trump’s presidential candidacy. Henry Barbour, a member of the RNC who co-authored the committee’s analysis after 2012, said it would be prudent for both sides to consider their political position after the 2020 election. He said the Democrats had succeeded in the election by opposing Trump, but the shift to the party’s left had alienated voters to win differently, including some black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities that were gradually shifting to Trump. “They’re running away with many middle-class Americans working hard to live inland or in big cities or suburbs,” Barbour said. “That’s partly because the Democrats have walked too far to the left.” Barbour said Republicans, too, should take a clear look at their 2020 performance. Trump, he said, had not done enough to expand his appeal beyond a large and loyal minority of voters. “The Republican Party has to do better than that,” he said. “We are not just a party of one president.” In addition to the four-way revision on the Democratic side, several more limited projects are underway aimed at addressing shortcomings in the polls. Both Democratic and Republican officials found serious flaws in their poll research, particularly House race polls that could not foresee how close Republicans would retake the majority. Both sides sprang from the campaign feeling that they had significantly misjudged the landscape of competitive House races, with Democrats unexpectedly losing seats and Republicans as a result, perhaps missing an opportunity to conquer the chamber. The main Republican and Democratic super-political action committees targeting House races – the Congressional Leadership Fund and House Majority PAC – are both studying their polls for 2020 and debating changes for the 2022 campaign, said people familiar with their efforts. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican group, is said to be conducting a somewhat more comprehensive review of its spending and messaging releases, although no greater diagnosis is expected to be made for the party. “It would be foolish not to take a serious look at what worked and what didn’t and how you can evolve and move forward,” said Dan Conston, the group’s chairman. Several of the largest Democratic poll companies also hold regular consultations with each other to close research gaps for 2020. Two people involved in the talks said there was general agreement that the industry should update its practices before 2022 to assure Democratic leaders they would not be taken by surprise again. Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who was involved in reviewing research from the previous cycle, said the party is only now digging deeper into the results of the 2020 election, as other crises have dominated recent months. Several Democratic and Republican strategists warned that both sides faced a challenge in formulating a plan for 2022; It had been more than a decade, she said, since a mid-term campaign wasn’t dominated by a life-size presidential personality. Based on the experience of the 2020 campaign, it is not clear that Biden is destined to become such a polarizing figure. “It’s hard to know what an election is like without an Obama or a Trump,” Greenberg said, “just normal, ordinary, ordinary people running.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company