People Making the 2019 Elections About Impeachment Are Full Of It
The 2019 elections are what we thought they’d be. With a few notable outliers, Democrats did well in blue areas and Republicans did well in red ones. The biggest surprise of the night was America’s most unpopular governor losing. The second biggest surprise of the night was that Virginia’s Speaker of the House, one of the most powerful and canny politicians in the state, didn’t lose. It suggested that the continued polarization of the country into younger, more diverse, better educated and denser Democratic regions and whiter, less educated and sparsely populated Republican ones continues apace.
So why are people making this about impeachment? I’m not setting up a straw man here — The New York Times’ inexplicably popular podcast The Daily did a whole episode based on this faulty premise. The savvy-obsessed DC press corps is trying to make it a thing too.
But look at the following results and tell me if these lead up to a coherent story about impeachment?
Virginia: Democrats flip both chambers of the General Assembly, largely through their strength in districts that Clinton won.
Mississippi: Democrats come closer to winning the governorship than any year since 1999 but fell just short, with mixed results, including some surprising victories, in the state legislature.
Kentucky: The most unpopular governor in the country lost to Democrat Andy Beshear but Republicans won the rest of the state constitutional executive races.
New Jersey: Incumbent parties prevailed except for in rural South Jersey, which is trending away from Democrats.
Pennsylvania: Municipal races saw Republicans in blue counties and Democrats in red counties go down in defeat.
Special Elections: Democrats flip a seat that Trump won in the St. Louis suburbs while a Houston suburban seat goes to a low turnout runoff where anything could happen.
Taken together, do you see a cohesive narrative springing from those races? I don’t. The results make sense within the states and circumstances where they took place but there’s no overriding national narrative other than a continuation of the trends that have shaped American politics for the past few decades.
If impeachment were making an impact on these elections, it stands to reason that there’d be some big nationwide trend in either direction. If impeachment were truly helping Democrats then they probably would’ve flipped more seats that Trump won in Virginia and been able to knock off some incumbent Republicans in New Jersey. If it was creating some type of blowback favoring Trump then there’s no way Andy Beshear would’ve won and Democrats wouldn’t have had as many state legislative flips in Virginia, Mississippi and Missouri.
Moreover, we know that impeachment wasn’t a factor in these races because Future Now Fund was actually there. We were working closely with candidates in Virginia and ran our own electoral program in Mississippi. Gun control and health care were the biggest issues in Virginia while schools, hospitals and roads were what Democrats ran on in the Magnolia State. Impeachment didn’t come up. These were local races where federal issues weren’t in play.
To the extent impeachment affected anything, it’s that it helps speed along the trend of nationalizing elections. When Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2008 Democrats controlled the state legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. Today they’re at or near superminority status in each. As political culture has increasingly fused with personal identity it’s left less room for ballot splitting at any level. As long as Trump is dominating the news (which he normally is but is exacerbated by impeachment) it’s hard to stop that trend.
But there’s no compelling national story to tell about impeachment beyond “people still have strong feelings about our big wet president.” If you want to know why the 2019 elections went down the way they did you need to look at it on a state-by-state, race-by-race basis. Thankfully we’re going to do just that over the next week, as we’ll go into how what we saw in the states could impact 2019 going forward. And we promise you won’t have to look at Rudy Giuliani’s face while we do it.