It Wasn't Ideology That Sank House Democrats. It Was Bad Strategy. [View all]

[JoeOtterbein]

Politico

Poor decisions from the national party left Democratic candidates in swing districts unable to hold their own.

By MITI SATHE and WILL LEVITT

11/25/2020 04:30 AM EST

Miti Sathe is the executive director of Square One and a former Obama White House appointee.

Will Levitt is a co-founder of Square One.

The results are still uncalled in several closely-contested House races—but that hasn’t stopped congressional Democrats from launching into “deep dive” mode, trading bitter accusations as they try to come to terms with their party’s unexpectedly poor performance in key battleground districts this year. The scale of the losses has come to many as a shock, and yet the intramural immolation is all too familiar: Progressives accuse moderates of having alienated the party’s base, while moderates blame progressives for having scared off potential crossover voters, independents and even some Democrats in tough swing districts with sloganeering around “socialism” and calls to “defund the police.”

For the past three and a half years, through our organization, Square One, we have been working exclusively and on the ground with Democratic candidates running in precisely those sorts of districts. We are with many of our endorsed candidates from day one, providing the connections, resources and support to launch, run and win their campaigns. And from our experience, we are sure that both arguments are wrong.

It wasn’t ideology that this year sank seeming Democratic shoo-ins like Gina Ortiz Jones, a first generation American and Air Force veteran who, when she first ran in 2018, came only 927 votes short of winning her longtime red south Texas border district. (We endorsed and supported her in 2018 and again in 2020.) Nor were too-progressive politics what sent highly regarded first-term members of Congress like New Mexico’s Xochitl Torres Small back home to traditionally Republican districts, or that consigned other high-performing freshman incumbents like Lauren Underwood of Illinois into painfully protracted ballot counts—the latter of whom we’ve endorsed and worked with for the past two election cycles as well.

It was weak strategy, based on bad polling information and poor decisions from the national party that left Democratic candidates in swing districts—and candidates of color in particular—unable to hold their own in the face of a massive, and massively underestimated, Republican voter surge. The fact is: If you’re going to win a campaign, you’ve got to campaign, which means getting in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing that Democrats running for Congress could not do this year, upon orders from the party’s campaign arm in Washington, DC.

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