Wednesday, January 15. It’s hard to know what to say or write as we struggle to reset our lives after the fires. Many in our community have lost their homes; others are displaced for what may be weeks or months as debris is cleared and services slowly restored. It reminds us how we take for granted the clean water in our faucets, the power out of our outlets, the gas for our stoves and heaters, our internet connectivity. Even for those whose houses were not impacted, restoring that basic infrastructure may be a maddeningly slow process.
Compared to what we are facing, affairs in Washington seem remote and almost trivial, all the more so as they are proceeding in a starkly alien direction over which we have, at this point, essentially no influence. We just have to watch in amazement as the election results give rise to a profoundly disheartening reality.
Yet this is not an irretrievable or irreversible slide into dysfunction and malevolence. Yes, we are in for a hard two years. That notwithstanding, we need not surrender. There will be some wins; the Trump machine is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. They will claim credit for all the good things that happen (like the budding truce agreement in Gaza, toward which President Biden has been mightily striving for nearly a year now) and will try to shift blame for everything that goes wrong (like the inflation rate, which seems to be edging up instead of down). They will struggle with extremely narrow governing majorities and starkly divergent demands within their own coalition. The courts are not genuflecting to the President-elect, and the utterly unrealistic nature of President-elect Trump’s boasts and promises is becoming more and more obvious.
So what is on the horizon? Virginia had a pair of special elections, with Dems keeping control of the state legislature and local Dem candidates doing fractionally better than we did in November. In Florida, Matt Gaetz is making noises about running for Governor in 2026 when Ron DeSantis is term-limited; that might put the GOP far enough out there for a Dem to capture the seat. Of all the President-elect’s Cabinet nominees, Tulsi Gabbard seems the most endangered. Defeating even only one of his loser nominees would be a win for Dems, but I wouldn’t attach too much importance to it.
The most impactful event will be the special election in New York to replace Elise Stefanik. She won her district with a 62% margin, but the district is only modestly tilted toward the GOP side (the Cook report gives it an R+9 rating, meaning it has a 9% tilt more Republican than the average district nationwide). The NY Governor has 10 days after Stefanik resigns her seat in which to schedule a special election within the following three months. There is no primary election – each party’s county chairs of 15 counties within the district get to select their party’s nominee, in a classic “smoke-filled room” exercise of party control. Those nominees then run in a winner-take-all election.
Thus, the election should be in the latter part of April, by which time there likely will have been some considerable fall-out from Trump’s administration. It could well be enough to swing a low-turnout election highly dependent upon voter emotion and passion. This is probably the premiere opportunity for Democrats nation-wide to donate, participate, and give vent to their distress over the Trump agenda and Trump administration.
Clearly, this is a bit of a long shot. But switching that seat wouldn’t merely reduce the GOP House majority from 220 – 215 down to 219 – 216, it would make a statement to all those Reps in narrowly favorable districts that their survival might not depend entirely on kissing the Presidential ring. That could lead to all sorts of mischief in the GOP caucus, right when they are trying to tackle next year’s budget (after dealing with this year’s budget through the reconciliation process).
The last thought I want to offer is that, in the next few months, we will start to get truly hard, accurate data about who voted and who did not. To date, most of the supposed analysis of what went wrong in November is actually speculation. Soon, though, we’ll have complete data sets of who voted in each state. With that data, we can see which voters we registered actually did vote; we can see which voters on whose doors we knocked actually did vote; we can see what impact repeated texts or phone calls had on truly getting people out to vote, and sometimes when they voted, so we can tell which messages might have actually broken through the inertial barriers.
Once we have that data, then we can start doing some real analysis. My guess is that we’ll find Trump really did mobilize more of his “occasional” voters than we did. We’ll find that some of our 2020 voters stayed home, and some of our 2022 voters stayed home. I suspect we’ll see that especially in the non-battleground states where we didn’t have real field operations. It seems pretty clear already that in the states where we heavily contested the election, we did better. The problem was, so did Trump.
But my point is, that until we have that data, don’t worry too much about the various pundits and their analyses. At this point, it’s still mostly speculation. In another few months, we’ll start to have some real answers.
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