Some helpful perspective
For those of you still licking your wounds over the election results, I’m right there with you. Last night, I heard some perspectives that don’t necessarily make me feel great, but at least give me a better understanding of what happened and why.
Charlie Cook, of the non-partisan Cook Political Report, spoke to a crowd of Iowans at Drake’s Sheslow Auditorium. We’re really blessed to have Cook come to Des Moines after every election cycle. He serves on the board of the Harkin Institute, and always shares his insights with a crowd at Drake University’s Sheslow Auditorium.
Cook says that inflation and the border situation were enough to bring down any Democratic candidate. He said he had not been that impressed with Kamala Harris when she ran a brief campaign in the Iowa caucuses in 2019, and her first two years in the VP role were unspectacular. But, when Joe Biden dropped out, he thinks Harris was impressive during the condensed campaign she had to run. She gave a great convention speech, she clobbered Trump in their debate and she raised a billion dollars. Her only mistake, Cook says, was in not separating herself enough from Biden, which he says is tough for any vice-president to do.
Abortion it not the silver bullet
He thinks Democrats miscalculated in thinking abortion would result in support for their candidates. Abortion is important if it’s the singular issue in any race, but when it gets thrown in with inflation and immigration, it loses its power. “Abortion is not the silver bullet Democrats thought it would be,” Cook said.
Cook says it’s easy for critics to blame Biden for not getting out of the race in 2023 so Democrats could have vetted a variety of candidates. But there are two caveats to that. Cook said when an incumbent president doesn’t run again, it’s usually his vice-president who wins the nomination, like George H.W. Bush after Reagan or Al Gore after Clinton. So, a Democratic primary would likely have favored Kamala Harris anyway. According to Cook, for the Democratic party to have denied the nomination to a minority woman would have alienated wide swaths of Democratic voters and left any nominee except Harris badly wounded.
Who’s to blame?
Cook does blame Biden for trying to do too much in his first two years in the White House without having won the 2020 election by a wide margin. If you want to do big things, Cook says, you should have won the election in a landslide. Instead, Biden rolled out historic programs on infrastructure and climate change, which created a lot of pushback from Congress where Democrats held only a slim majority.
“He may have been more prudent going with a less ambitious agenda. It’s not as exciting but he wouldn’t have gotten so much pushback or ramped up inflation. I think there was a bit of hubris involved.”
His conclusion on the presidential race: “I put more blame on the Biden administration than I do on Kamala Harris.”
A nothingburger
As for the Congressional races, Cook says it was always going to be a tough year for Senate Democrats, who had to defend 23 seats while Republicans defended 11. And three of the Democratic Senate seats were in red states that Trump won in 2020. “Not that much of a shocker,” Cook says. “It was always going to be an ugly one.”
In the U.S. House, Republicans currently enjoy a majority of 221 to 214. When all the counting is done on the final few races, he thinks it’ll end up within about three seats of that same margin. “For whatever zillions of dollars were spent on 435 House races, we’re going to end up about where we were,” Cook says. “Below the presidential level, it was a nothingburger of an election.”
A few other topics.
“Ann Selzer is a very good pollster. If you’re in the businesses long enough, you’re going to have this happen.”
Cook: “It’s blatantly unconstitutional, but if I could, I would ban all cable news. It just sucks brain cells out.” That line got the biggest applause of the night. Cook says he doesn’t think the cable news networks intention is to propagandize. Their intention is to make money. He says the way to make money is to feed the rage machine and keep viewers coming back.
My takeaways:
The House and Senate races were predestined to turn out like they did.
Even IF Biden had dropped out last year, Harris likely would have been the candidate anyway.
Harris was a solid candidate who ran a great campaign but could not overcome inflation and the border.
I left Cook’s talk feeling a little better. Not great, but better – with some understanding that no matter how good the candidate is, sometimes they’re overtaken by events out of their control. That Americans will choose their pocketbook over about any other issue.
None of this makes the next four years any easier to face but at least I have a better grasp on how we got here.
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True. I expected some more commentary about Trump. Maybe Cook read the room and decided that crowd really didn’t want to hear it. It is the Harkin Institute, after all.
Thanks for your generous support, Mary.
This helps. However, I’m still convinced the electorate is stupid. A decent, smart person lost to … someone not even capable of decent.