That’s Charlie Cook’s Amy Walter deep dive into the 2020 House races where Democrat ‘s lost there 2018 wave push…
Cook goes in depth showing g us something we already knew….
Joe Biden had virtually no coattails….
Cook now points out why….
Republicans out performed Democrats by NOT running on Trump….
This would seem to point to something I’ve been pointing out here …
Donald Trump HIMSELF hurt the Republican Presidential vote….
(He has continued to lose support from GOP voters ‘as a person’….)
But?
Republican’s down ballot voted for mostly Republican House members….
And those voters support Trump/Republican ‘policy…
There are a LOT Republican lawmakers who instinctively know this and have pushed to divorce the party from Trump…They are looked down upon…
Trump 2024 could prove to be a lock for a 2nd President Biden term….
But unless House (and Senate ) Democrats can find something to sell to down ballot Republicans?
They could very well lose their slim even status majorities in 2022 and 2024…
Once a political narrative takes hold, it’s hard to dislodge. And, one of the most stubborn of those narratives is that while GOP attacks on Democrats for their support of “defunding the police” and ‘socialism’ may not have cost Biden the election, it came close to denying House Democrats the House majority.
Here’s how the Washington Post’s Paul Kane, one of the sharpest reporters on Capitol Hill, described an internal analysis by the DCCC about what went wrong for their candidates in 2020. “With so many freshmen running as still relative newcomers, they often lagged behind Biden in their races.” Kane writes. “And the socialist attacks landed heavier on House Democrats than on Biden, a household name for more than 40 years with a moderate brand.” DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney, who commissioned this deep-dive, told Kane, “If you had a crystal ball, you would have surged resources around incumbents that we now know were in more danger than the polling suggested, and you would have felt less enthusiastic about some red-to-blue opportunities.”
But, when you look at the closest races of 2020 — including those involving the 12 freshman Democrats who lost — this narrative starts to get clouded. In fact, what’s more accurate to say is that Republicans had an easier time distancing themselves from Trump than Democrats had in out-running Biden’s showing in their CDs….