I see that Murphy in New Jersey and Northam in Virginia are the projected winners of their respective governor races, and that the Democrats seem to have done well. While congratulations are in order, this is a small first step in returning the GOP to sanity, and by itself it’s fairly meaningless. The next elections, in a year, will be far more important for the Democrats to win.
And winning takes organization, so I’m a little worried that I was receiving donation requests saying that they had run out of supplies because of an overwhelming response yesterday, Monday. They may be trying to spin this in a positive way, but any clear-headed evaluation is either going to be
- This is bad, bad organization, which will discourage your voters and prove, once again, that the Democrats are not truly ready to be a national governing party, or
- This is deception to increase donations.
Either answer is bad. The Democrats need to get their shit together on every level, from operational crap like this all the way to figuring out how to properly message. If you want to see a criticism concerning that, see this column by Andrew Sullivan, where he expected Northam to lose or barely win (I haven’t seen actual numbers just yet, although one article suggests > 5 percentage points; UPDATE – WaPo says 9 points), based on his campaign:
Northam seems to me almost a classic Democratic politician of our time. I have no idea what his core message is (and neither, it seems, does he); on paper, he’s close to perfect; his personality is anodyne; his skills as a campaigner are risible; and he has negative charisma. More to the point, he is running against an amphibian swamp creature, Ed Gillespie, and yet the Washington lobbyist is outflanking him on populism. Northam’s ads are super lame, and have lately been largely on the defensive, especially on crime, culture, and immigration. He hasn’t galvanized minority voters, has alienated many white voters, and has failed to consolidate a broader anti-Trump coalition. In Virginia, Trump’s approval rating is 38/59, but Northam is winning only 81 percent of the disapprovers, while Gillespie is winning 95 percent of the approvers. Northam’s early double-digit lead has now collapsed to within the margin of error.
If a political Ph.D. doesn’t understand a candidate’s message, this suggests the Democrat’s internal training programs (you guys do have them, right?) are in serious need of revamping.
And if the Democrats start taking next year for granted, I fear they’ll get a very big shock. Most voters just want to shake things up; they’re not particularly ideologically driven, they’re more disgusted by political behavior than anything. The Democrats need to bear this in mind.
