If you’re sick of the national horse race polls (14 months before a national election, they’re worthless) and you’re sickened by the House Republican lunatics (we’re one week away from another government shutdown), here’s a quick cure:
Check out what happens when people actually cast ballots in actual elections.
Earlier this week Democrats won two crucial state legislative races, in the swing states of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, decisively beating two MAGA Republicans – marking the 25th time since 2020 that Dems have “over-performed” in special elections, winning by margins far exceeding the red-blue partisan norms in those districts. In the words of ex-federal prosecutor and pro-democracy advocate Dennis Aftergut, “Elections are the answer to Trumpism.”
In New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Democrat Hal Rafter, an abortion-rights supporter ridiculed by the GOP as “far left,” flipped a Republican state House seat; in a district that went MAGA in the ’16 and ’20 presidential elections, a district that’s six percent more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, Rafter swamped his MAGA foe by 12 points. Meanwhile, in a western Pennsylvania district, Lindsay Powell drew a whopping 65 percent of vote, thus ensuring Democratic control of the state House in Harrisburg. Her district is blue, but she outperformed Joe Biden’s 2020 tally against Trump.
Care to guess one of the big reasons why those Dems did so well?
Rafter’s opponent in New Hampshire, Jim Guzofski, was predictably moronic, straight from MAGA central casting. He declared that Mike Pence had “betrayed” Trump on Jan. 6 by refusing to overturn the ’20 election results. He insisted that Trump was “still the elected president,” that the election was stolen, and that “prophets” had informed his thinking. He also said that abortion rights supporters – like Rafter, his opponent – want to make “blood sacrifices to their god, Molech.”
The landslide loser in the western Pennsylvania district, Erin Connolly Autenreith, was cut from the same MAGA mold. No wonder the voters scraped her off their shoes. Autenreith, a local GOP chairwoman, said she “questioned” the 2020 election results, and she’d proudly declared on Facebook that she was in Washington for the Jan. 6 insurrection because (I kid you not) “there is only one person who has stood up to the Pedophilia, Sex Trafficking of Children, and Satanic Worship and it is Donald J. Trump.”
Sane Republicans and reality-based conservatives (they do exist) are appalled by those two MAGA losers, but not surprised. Noah Rothman, who’s no friend of Dems, assessed the MAGA agenda this week in the conservative National Review: “This stuff is weird. It is a bizarre genuflection (to) a series of narratives that most Americans do not believe. These are expressions of backward-looking grievances that are utterly divorced from the concerns voters have today and will have tomorrow. It’s kookery that American voters have rejected in election cycle after election cycle after election cycle. And yet, (Republicans) seem to resent the unmistakable signals they are receiving from the electorate.”
A New Hampshire Republican legislator, Ross Berry, is furious; Rafter’s win in that GOP district means that power in the state House is now evenly split between the two parties. He warns, “If you cozy up to and campaign with former president Donald Trump, you can expect to lose votes. No amount of money, campaigning, or deep roots to your community will overcome the voters’ absolute rejection of Trump-affiliated candidates in New Hampshire” – where, by the way, MAGAt Don Bolduc, running last year for the U.S. Senate, was wiped out by nine points.
The lesson: Early national polls showing a Biden-Trump tie are worthless; pay attention to what’s actually happening on the ground, locality by locality and state by state, when people actually vote. As evidence by Democratic over-performance in the two-dozen special elections since 2020, there’s every reason to believe that when the chips are down – with our imperiled democracy and the abortion issue driving much of the narrative – that the blue base, blue-leaning independents, and even ex-Republicans will show up en masse. Especially if the GOP keeps mainlining the MAGA drug.
Conservative analyst Rothman laments, “Registered Republicans appear committed to testing the general electorate’s tolerance for their preferred nonsense. General-election voters appear to be as eager as ever to demonstrate the folly of (that) judgment. Until this dynamic changes, Republicans will continue to lose races up and down the ballot.”
Gee. That would be a shame.