The tea: Democrats should run as Democrats

 

Democrats in Senate, House and Governor’s races made enormous strides Tuesday. The Democrats managed to flip enough House of Representatives districts in their favor, including some districts Donald Trump won in 2016, to secure the majority.

Georgia’s sixth Congressional district received national attention in 2017 when Jon Ossoff ran for the seat, which had been vacated by Tom Price, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump only won the district by a percentage point in 2016, but Price won his seat with more than 60 percent of the vote the same year. It became the most expensive House race in history with $50 million being spent in the lead-up to Election Day. Ossoff ultimately lost 48.2 percent to Karen Handel’s 51.8 percent, but this year, Handel faced Lucy McBath in the general election and lost 49.5 percent to McBath’s 50.5 percent.

Senate races in Arizona and Florida remain outstanding, as the Democratic candidates trail their opponents by a percentage point or less. The Georgia governor’s race has not been called yet, with Stacey Abrams within 2 percentage points of her Republican opponent Brian Kemp. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Arizona by about 4 percent, in Florida just over 1 percent and in Georgia by over 4 percent.

Even in races where Democrats lost, they made great strides. Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke for Senate with just over 2 percent of the vote in Texas. Trump beat Clinton with almost 9 percent of the vote in 2016 in Texas.

O’Rourke and Abrams, in particular, ran campaigns of progressive Democrats in typical Republican-controlled states, and they made big dents in those GOP strongholds, and while no candidate in the closely watched Senate races across the country particularly underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in their states, many of them lost their seat or came out on the wrong side.

In Tennessee, Phil Bredesen ran for Senate as a moderate who tried to pull in the support of some middle-of-the-road thinking Tennesseans. The problem with this tactic is when someone says they are running as a moderate or that they want to work with Democrats and Republicans to “get things done,†no one hears it the way the candidates want them to. 

In the end, moderate people end up looking like they stand for nothing. No one crosses the aisle to vote for them, and no one feels the need to go out of their way to vote for a candidate from their preferred political party.

While Bredesen also bested Clinton’s 2016 margin of defeat by about 15 percent in Tennessee, the race was called almost as soon as counting the votes began. And while that increase in votes is nothing to be scoffed at, it should also be noted that the Democrats who ran as Democrats instead of moderate candidates did better in the end.

While Abrams, O’Rourke and all the other candidates who came close but lost or who may end up losing, the one opening that remains lies in the reality of Georgia’s sixth Congressional district. When the nation watched them vote in early 2017, Ossoff lost, but this year, McBath won. It takes time and effort to swing the vote totals in your favor, but candidates have to show up and compete like they think they can win every single time, so maybe someday someone will.

And that’s the tea on that.