Me?
I join the crowd that says Biden & Co. need to SELL the Good stuff coming form the Infrastructure Law and what can be Good from a Social Safety Net law and Budget….
Other President’s in Biden’s spot have recovered for a second term…
But that’s him…
He’s got time….
Looking at the Virginia Terry McAullife loss and New Jersey Murphy close encounter ?
What can Democrats take from these campaigns and final vote numbers?
We KNOW they’ll hardly listen…
Democrats tend to have different bases to play to and rarely unify like they did against Trump who will not be on the ballot next November….
One veteran consultant in Washington said that after last week, he is advising early-career strategists to work on ballot measures or other non-candidate campaigns next year.
“We’re just going to get crushed,” he said, doubting Democrats would take any lessons from their beating.
The House’s passage of an infrastructure bill on Friday night marked a major, post-election victory for Democrats and Biden’s legislative agenda. But if last week was any indication, it’s not clear that the bill’s passage will matter in a midterm election a full year from now. Democrats last week did not appear to benefit from Congress’s passage of Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill — seemingly a distant memory despite coming just months before votes were cast. Democrats will soon take up another round of wrangling over a larger social spending package, whose prospects in the Senate are unclear….
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“Democrats are losing the messaging war,” said Kelly Dietrich, a former Democratic fundraiser and founder of the National Democratic Training Committee, which trains candidates across the country. “We talked about this in ‘20. We promised to solve problems, and rather than talk and brag and point out the fact that government is working the way it should — making sausage is messy — we’re bogged down in process, and in the meantime, the other side is capitalizing on issues that really matter to the day-to-day lives of voters.”
He said, “It’s got to get fixed in like eight to 10 months, and the prospects for ’22, it’s a year away, I don’t know … Honestly, I don’t know. We need some radical change within the Democratic ecosphere.”
None of this is new. Following Democrats’ losses in Virginia and New Jersey in the gubernatorial elections in 2009, Barack Obama’s White House downplayed the significance of the off-year contests, while prominent Democrats on the sidelines feverishly tried to make sense of why independents defected from the party, casting it as a “wake-up call.” It didn’t make a difference. The party sleep-walked all the way into the midterms the following year, when Democrats lost more than 60 House seats in what Obama described as a “shellacking.”
The landscape for Democrats today is even bleaker. Not only do Democrats hold a slimmer majority in Congress, but Biden’s low-40s approval rating — a metric closely correlated with a party’s performance in midterm elections — is much worse than Obama’s was at this point in his presidency.
The difficulty conducting a postmortem after an election like last week’s is that the losses were so widespread that it’s hard to pin defeat on any one thing. Democrats lost the culture wars, but they also got pinned down on the economy. They were drubbed in rural areas and with non-college educated whites, but they also lost independents in the suburbs. And two issues that worked so well for Democrats last year — the coronavirus and Donald Trump — no longer resonated as much with voters.
In the aftermath of the election, there was broad recognition that McAuliffe made specific missteps that a candidate in 2022 could avoid…