Michelle Goldberg - Four Stark Lessons From a Democratic Upset
Nov. 14, 2022
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When I reached Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Monday morning, the Democratic representative-elect from Washington State was sitting on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Her race against Joe Kent, a stolen-election conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump, had been called on Saturday, giving her enough time to get to Capitol Hill for new-member orientation. Because of the Republican lean of her district, Washington’s Third, her victory was widely considered the biggest upset of any House contest; FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast had given her a mere 2 percent chance of winning. “A lot of people sacrificed to get me here,” she told me, speaking with particular gratitude of all the mothers who called in babysitting favors to knock on doors for her.
I’d gone to Gluesenkamp Perez’s district in September because I saw it as a microcosm of the midterms. Kent, a Fox News regular who put a member of the Proud Boys on his payroll, had ousted Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection, in the primary. Gluesenkamp Perez hoped that there would be enough moderate Republicans worried about the future of American democracy, and aghast at the end of Roe v. Wade, to offset Kent’s partisan advantage. The outcome, I thought, would tell us whether Republicans would pay any price for their extremism.
It is a profound relief to see that they have. Having spent a fair amount of time thinking about this bellwether race, I see four main takeaways from it.
1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.
Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.
“I hope that people see that this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”
2. Voters can see the link between abortion bans and authoritarianism.
During her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez spoke about having a miscarriage and being forced to make her way through a wall of protesters to get medical care at a Planned Parenthood clinic. While Kent called for a national abortion ban, she appealed to her district’s libertarian streak by including both gun rights and reproductive rights in her promise to “protect our freedoms.”
On Monday, she said that voters connected abortion bans to a broader narrative of right-wing radicalism. Even if voters thought abortion rights in Washington State were safe with Democrats in charge, the end of Roe showed that Republicans are willing to upend some basic assumptions undergirding American life. “It made people take Republicans, especially the extreme wing, seriously when they say they want to defund the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I.,” she said.
3. MAGA Republicans are stuck in a media echo chamber.
A common rap on liberals is that they’re trapped in their own ideological bubble, unable to connect with normal people who don’t share their niche concerns. This cycle, that was much truer of conservatives. The ultimate example of this was the Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, the human incarnation of a right-wing message board, who lauded the Unabomber manifesto and put out gun fetishist campaign ads that made him look like a serial killer.
Kent suffered from a similar sort of insularity. He attacked sports fans, suggesting it’s not masculine for men to “watch other men compete in a silly game,” a view common in corners of the alt-right but unintelligible to normies. Gluesenkamp Perez said Kent seemed shocked when, during a debate, his line about vaccines as “experimental gene therapy” didn’t go over well, which she took as a sign that he’d spent too much time “operating in the chat rooms.”
The ultimate expression of the right-wing echo chamber was the Stop the Steal movement itself. Conservatives might have been less credulous about it if they weren’t so out of touch with the Biden-voting majority.
4. Data isn’t everything.
As FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich acknowledged on Twitter, the site’s model didn’t take into account Kent’s personal weaknesses, and included only one post-Labor Day poll. An overreliance on a few data points made Gluesenkamp Perez’s position look weaker than it really was. Democrats I spoke to in Washington State — as well as some Republicans — believed she had a decent shot, but national Democrats seem to have remained unconvinced. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gave her no financial support.
Democrats obviously shouldn’t disregard poll numbers or data about the partisan breakdown of the electorate. But we underestimate the human factor in politics at our peril.
“You’ve got a Trump cult-of-personality acolyte, and everybody writes off the district,” Brian Baird, a Democrat who represented the Third District from 1999 to 2011, told me in September. “But up steps this young, feisty, bright, moderate woman, with a young child, trying to run a small business, and she says, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’” Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. @michelleinbklyn
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