I substantially agree, but I have a nitpick about the implications of underwater approvals.
That doesn’t necessarily suggest a hunger for an alternative from the Democratic Party. It might suggest a hope of a primary challenge from a better (whatever that means for the voter) conservative.
To Leah's point though: is it possible or even desirable that the Democrats field a candidate that can outflank the Republican candidate to the right on one or more key issues?
The parties used to operate this way, of course, back when conservative Southern Democrats were a thing. But right now, that world appears to be gone forever, I suppose due to a national media environment.
And surely some nonzero percentage of people disapproving of McConnell are specifying their disapproval for reasons such as this: they want someone more MAGA than him, someone further to the right, and they absolutely will not support someone to his left. What percentage? Not sure, though the number is likely higher for McConnell than any other Senator.
There's much more of this with Congress than at the state level. With the decline of split-ticket voting, most people are voting for Congress as a referendum on the President. But meanwhile, at the state level, the same Kentucky that overwhelmingly re-elected a deeply unpopular Mitch McConnell also re-elected a popular Andy Beshear. If your approval numbers are bad as governor, then it should really be your opponent's election to lose, even in a "safe" state for Presidential elections.
Winning gubernatorial races like this MIGHT also offer a platform into national politics. But not necessarily. Phil Bredesen was a very popular two-term centrist governor of Tennessee. But when he was recruited to run for an open Senate seat against Marsha Blackburn in 2018, he was defeated easily. This was even with outgoing Senator Bob Corker sort of half-endorsing Bredesen, and with Bredesen saying he supported Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation, and with this being a Blue Wave mid-term election year against an unpopular Trump.
That race, in particular, illustrated to me how hard a game it is right now running for Congress with the wrong color jersey.
Yes, the world is very different than it was in the 1990s to say nothing of the 1960s. I'm aware of all the history you cite.
Could a Democrat outflank Republicans to the right? I think it depends in part on how you define right and left. Trump is a protectionist, for example, which used to be labor left-coded; Democrats could be free traders. But I don't think that's what you mean.
Could an individual Democrat outflank or at least neutralize Republicans on a core MAGA or traditional Republican issue that hasn't flipped? Something like abortion, or immigration, or crime? Maybe! What exactly is stopping them from trying? It may well take more than vibes, more than "I'm a proud gun owner" and stuff like that -- it may take "my party is dead wrong on guns and I will fight my party to the death to protect the Second Amendment."
Would the party really say to someone who did run that kind campaign "you are not welcome in the party now"? And if they did, based on the premise that outflanking to the right helps, wouldn't that *help* the campaign?
Or who knows? Maybe the left-wingers are right on some level, and someone needs to run in Nebraska on "nationalize the banks (but also DEI is evil and guns are holy)" or something.
I genuinely don't know. What I do know is: nobody is born wearing a jersey, voters have demonstrated a willingness to switch teams repeatedly, and the current configuration *does not work* for Democrats. If they can't change the configuration, *someone else should.*
I agree that Democrats should compete in these states – but saying that much is the easy part. The question is *how?* That's what I'm really scratching my head about it. Dan Osborn had as good a playbook as I could think of; if he couldn't do it, how could an actual Democrat? By now I begin to think that Republican vs. Democrat in the US is like Catholic vs. Protestant in Ireland - people just aren't going to vote for the party of the other ethnic group. I hope that's not the case, but I haven't seen evidence to make me hopeful.
The Founders actually assumed that's how people would vote, but they figured regional loyalties would outweigh everything, and that both Congress and the Electoral College would be fora for negotiation between regions for a national consensus policy and a national consensus President. And while the emergence of parties threw a monkey wrench into the Madisonian design, regionalism was an important feature of American politics for most of its history.
So maybe the thing to do is to lean into that? I don't know if it would be possible to build regional "third" parties such that there's real competition in the Northeast and Pacific coast on the one hand and in Tennessee, Nebraska and Wyoming on the other. Probably not, or it would have happened already.
But I still like the timeline where Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski and Kyrsten Sinema formed a third party *solely* for the purpose of making partisan control of the Senate practically impossible.
I substantially agree, but I have a nitpick about the implications of underwater approvals.
That doesn’t necessarily suggest a hunger for an alternative from the Democratic Party. It might suggest a hope of a primary challenge from a better (whatever that means for the voter) conservative.
In practice, it’s probably a mix of both.
That’s kind of my point right? It’s plainly *not* a hunger for the Democratic alternative. But it’s a hunger for *an* alternative.
To Leah's point though: is it possible or even desirable that the Democrats field a candidate that can outflank the Republican candidate to the right on one or more key issues?
The parties used to operate this way, of course, back when conservative Southern Democrats were a thing. But right now, that world appears to be gone forever, I suppose due to a national media environment.
And surely some nonzero percentage of people disapproving of McConnell are specifying their disapproval for reasons such as this: they want someone more MAGA than him, someone further to the right, and they absolutely will not support someone to his left. What percentage? Not sure, though the number is likely higher for McConnell than any other Senator.
There's much more of this with Congress than at the state level. With the decline of split-ticket voting, most people are voting for Congress as a referendum on the President. But meanwhile, at the state level, the same Kentucky that overwhelmingly re-elected a deeply unpopular Mitch McConnell also re-elected a popular Andy Beshear. If your approval numbers are bad as governor, then it should really be your opponent's election to lose, even in a "safe" state for Presidential elections.
Winning gubernatorial races like this MIGHT also offer a platform into national politics. But not necessarily. Phil Bredesen was a very popular two-term centrist governor of Tennessee. But when he was recruited to run for an open Senate seat against Marsha Blackburn in 2018, he was defeated easily. This was even with outgoing Senator Bob Corker sort of half-endorsing Bredesen, and with Bredesen saying he supported Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation, and with this being a Blue Wave mid-term election year against an unpopular Trump.
That race, in particular, illustrated to me how hard a game it is right now running for Congress with the wrong color jersey.
Yes, the world is very different than it was in the 1990s to say nothing of the 1960s. I'm aware of all the history you cite.
Could a Democrat outflank Republicans to the right? I think it depends in part on how you define right and left. Trump is a protectionist, for example, which used to be labor left-coded; Democrats could be free traders. But I don't think that's what you mean.
Could an individual Democrat outflank or at least neutralize Republicans on a core MAGA or traditional Republican issue that hasn't flipped? Something like abortion, or immigration, or crime? Maybe! What exactly is stopping them from trying? It may well take more than vibes, more than "I'm a proud gun owner" and stuff like that -- it may take "my party is dead wrong on guns and I will fight my party to the death to protect the Second Amendment."
Would the party really say to someone who did run that kind campaign "you are not welcome in the party now"? And if they did, based on the premise that outflanking to the right helps, wouldn't that *help* the campaign?
Or who knows? Maybe the left-wingers are right on some level, and someone needs to run in Nebraska on "nationalize the banks (but also DEI is evil and guns are holy)" or something.
I genuinely don't know. What I do know is: nobody is born wearing a jersey, voters have demonstrated a willingness to switch teams repeatedly, and the current configuration *does not work* for Democrats. If they can't change the configuration, *someone else should.*
I agree that Democrats should compete in these states – but saying that much is the easy part. The question is *how?* That's what I'm really scratching my head about it. Dan Osborn had as good a playbook as I could think of; if he couldn't do it, how could an actual Democrat? By now I begin to think that Republican vs. Democrat in the US is like Catholic vs. Protestant in Ireland - people just aren't going to vote for the party of the other ethnic group. I hope that's not the case, but I haven't seen evidence to make me hopeful.
The Founders actually assumed that's how people would vote, but they figured regional loyalties would outweigh everything, and that both Congress and the Electoral College would be fora for negotiation between regions for a national consensus policy and a national consensus President. And while the emergence of parties threw a monkey wrench into the Madisonian design, regionalism was an important feature of American politics for most of its history.
So maybe the thing to do is to lean into that? I don't know if it would be possible to build regional "third" parties such that there's real competition in the Northeast and Pacific coast on the one hand and in Tennessee, Nebraska and Wyoming on the other. Probably not, or it would have happened already.
But I still like the timeline where Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin, Lisa Murkowski and Kyrsten Sinema formed a third party *solely* for the purpose of making partisan control of the Senate practically impossible.
https://gideons.substack.com/p/the-real-missed-romney-opportunity