From The IL 10th Round-Up:
We Won Their Votes. Then We Counted Them Twice.
WRITTEN by Keith Brin
Last year, Texas Republicans took a map and found five congressional districts they figured they could win.
All five were held by Democrats.
Under the new lines, Donald Trump would have carried each by at least ten points in 2024.
On Tuesday, Republicans won one of the five and lost two seats they already held.
They went to all that trouble to send one fewer Republican to Washington.
I hope somebody in Austin kept the receipt.
The Texas mapmakers made the same mistake a lot of us made after 2024.
We took a vote somebody cast for Donald Trump, under a particular set of circumstances, and penciled it in for the next Republican on the ballot.
Then we spent two years talking about the voters we had won as if the matter had been settled.
Last Tuesday, Democrats took both chambers of Congress, won Senate races in Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas and South Carolina, and broke Republican control of state governments that had been in our hands for years.
Apparently, the voters didn’t read the memo.
Vice President JD Vance argued after the election that Trump voters showed up and that too many of them voted Democratic.
Some did.
In a preliminary national survey by NORC, about seven percent of people who said they voted for Trump in 2024 and returned for the midterms said they voted Democratic.
In a close race, seven percent is plenty.
But look at who was in the electorate to begin with.
Former Trump voters accounted for 38 percent.
Former Harris voters accounted for 43 percent.
And the 15 percent who said they skipped the 2024 election broke for Democrats, 59 to 36.
There’s no clean way to divide the loss into people who switched and people who stayed home based on one early survey.
What we can say for certain is that Americans showed up in big numbers.
The University of Florida’s Election Lab director initially estimated 124 million ballots, roughly 12 million more than in the last midterm.
The trouble for Republicans was who showed up, where they showed up, and what they did when somebody handed them a ballot.
Take Texas again.
Compared with the 2022 midterm, turnout rose more than eight percentage points along the border and nearly eight in the big urban counties.
It rose just over one point in rural Texas.
Ken Paxton still carried rural Texas by about 45 points in the Senate race.
That sounds like the part of the map you can put away and forget about.
Except Ted Cruz won rural Texas by roughly 54 points in his 2018 Senate race.
You can watch a county turn the same shade of red on television and miss how much the margin shrank.
Or take young voters.
Tufts University’s early estimate put turnout among eligible voters under 30 at 27 percent, the same as its early estimate four years ago.
This year those voters favored Democratic House candidates by 35 points.
Think about the young person who gave Trump a look two years ago because rent was high and groceries were getting more expensive.
What did that voter hear from us this year that would make them tell a friend to vote Republican?
It’s a question worth sitting with before we blame the kids for failing to appreciate us.
And here’s the number I’d make every Republican member of Congress sit with.
In the AP Voter Poll, about four in ten Republican voters said Congress was doing too little to check the presidency.
These are our own voters.
They know what they expect Congress to do when a Democrat is in the White House.
Some of them seem to think it ought to do its job when a Republican lives there, too.
The same AP poll found that more than half of voters called government corruption crucial to their congressional vote, slightly more than said the same about the cost of living.
A voter can be angry about the price of groceries and still find time to wonder who’s getting rich in Washington.
We should be able to answer both concerns without first asking which party the voter belongs to.
We spend a great deal of time explaining why voters should distrust the other side.
Last Tuesday was a pretty expensive reminder that they’re perfectly capable of applying the same scrutiny to us.
The results that will outlast the election-night panels are in the states.
Democrats took both legislative chambers in Wisconsin and the state Senate in Pennsylvania, giving them full control in both states.
In Texas they won the governor’s office and the state House, breaking a Republican trifecta that dated to 2003.
Ted Cruz stands tall as the only remaining Republican statewide office holder.
In New Hampshire, voters reelected Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte and handed both legislative chambers to Democrats.
Imagine trying to explain all of that with a single national talking point.
When the new legislatures convene, the people who won those races will decide what goes into state budgets and what gets a hearing. The rest of us will still be arguing about the exit polls.
I’ve spent enough time in Republican politics to know the temptation after a loss.
Everybody has a theory, and most of the theories have the pleasant feature of making the loss somebody else’s fault.
There’ll be plenty of time for that on television.
I’d rather hear a Republican at a kitchen table explain
- what we did about the bills piling up there,
- what we did with the power voters gave us, and
- what we’ll do differently the next time they give us a chance.
If we have a good answer, it ought to work in a Texas border town, an Iowa farm county or a Chicago suburb.
And if you want to know the most well-known secret sauce to the next election cycle, chew on this until I go over things in some detail in an upcoming column:
- voters elect people who are responsive to their needs, not their party’s needs.
- They elect people who don’t appear to be abusing power or acting crazy, and they election people who are perceived to be focused on solutions for them.
Can the Republican Party retake that position?
I don’t know yet.
But I do know this – a voter who gave us a chance in 2024 had every right to ask what we did with it.
We had two years to give them an answer.
Last Tuesday, they gave us theirs, and
- they didn’t care in what state you lived, or
- what level of office you were running for.
