A relatively new term is popping up in articles on 2024 strategy for Democrats that I explained and explored at New York:
When you have a presidential candidate who is struggling to generate enthusiasm in the party base, it’s natural to look for some external stimulation. In the case of Joe Biden, the most obvious source of a 2024 boost is the deep antipathy that nearly all Democrats, many independents, and even a sizable sliver of Republicans feel toward Donald Trump. But in case that’s not enough, Team Biden is looking at another avenue of opportunity, albeit a risky one: the possibility of “reverse coattails” taking him past Trump on a wave of turnout that incidentally benefits the president of the United States.
That’s not the conventional wisdom, as the term reverse coattails makes clear: Normally, it’s the head of the ticket from whom all blessings flow, which makes sense insofar as presidential-election turnout dwarfs that of off-year and midterm contests in no small part because people who don’t necessarily care about the identity of their senator or governor are galvanized by the battle for the White House. But as Russell Berman of The Atlantic explains, this year is different:
“Faith in the reverse-coattails effect is fueling Democratic investments in down-ballot races and referenda. In North Carolina, for example, party officials hope that a favorable matchup in the governor’s race — Democratic attorney general Josh Stein is facing Republican lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who has referred to homosexuality as ‘filth’ and compared abortion to slavery — could help Biden carry a state that Trump narrowly won twice. Democrats are also trying to break a Republican supermajority in the legislature, where they are contesting nearly all 170 districts. ‘The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot,’ Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.”
In other states, high-profile ballot measures, particularly those aimed at restoring the abortion rights denied by conservative courts and Republican lawmakers, may generate bottoms-up enthusiasm benefiting Biden and embattled Democratic Senate candidates as well:
“In key states across the country, Democrats and their allies are planting ballot initiatives both to protect reproductive rights where they are under threat and to turn out voters in presidential and congressional battlegrounds. They’ve already placed an abortion measure on the ballot in Florida, where the state supreme court upheld one of the nation’s most restrictive bans on the procedure, and they plan to in Arizona, whose highest court recently ruled that the state could enforce an abortion ban first enacted during the Civil War. Democrats are also collecting signatures for abortion-rights measures in Montana, home to a marquee Senate race, and in Nevada, a presidential swing state that has a competitive Senate matchup this year.”
Berman notes that the reverse-coattails strategy is unproven. Voters, for example, who attracted to the polls by abortion ballot measures don’t always follow the partisan implications of their votes when it comes to candidate preferences. Red-hot down-ballot races are probably more reliable in attracting voters who can be expected to follow the party line to the top of the ticket. A positive precedent can be found in Georgia’s coordinated effort of 2020, when a powerful campaign infrastructure built by Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock clearly helped maximize Biden’s vote; the 46th president won the state by less than 12,000. Perhaps a strong Senate candidate like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey could help Biden survive as well. As for the possible effect of ballot measures, it was once generally accepted that in 2004 a GOP strategy of encouraging anti-same-sex-marriage ballot measures helped boost conservative turnout in battleground states like Ohio, enabling George W. Bush’s narrow victory (though there are analysts who argue against that hypothesis). One reason it may work better today is the increasing prevalence of straight-ticket voting and the heavy emphasis of Democratic campaigns up and down the ballot on the kind of support for abortion rights that should help them take advantage of ballot-measure-generated turnout.
We won’t get a good idea of how either reverse-coattails strategy is working until late in the 2024 campaign when it becomes possible to measure new voter registrations, screen registered voters for their likelihood to participate in the election, and assess states where down-ballot contests are turning into a Democratic blowout. Team Biden would be wise to do everything in its power to lift the president’s popularity and build a favorability advantage over Trump that can reduce the number of “double haters” likely to stay home or vote for a change in the party management of Washington.
McConnell and Trump said it was a bump for them and they did so with authority and great strength so it must be true!
The only bump I was aware of was after Helsinki which happened to be a couple weeks after 8 Republican Senators spent the 4th of July in Russia. Right, because before that everyone Trump endorsed lost. I guess that was the same kind of situation though. What everyone thought would be a disaster for Trump’s GOP turned out to be great for them. How do they work their magic?
Stranger still, Trump’s Republicans are overflowing with offerings to help Democrats target them in the election and they are either ignored and become “wins” because the GOP is playing a game of destroying the hearts and minds of Americans while Democrats try to find the best economic policies for people who are known to vote against their own economic interests.
Are Republicans trying to help Democrats so they can impeach Trump because theyre too afraid to do it?
They become more and more extreme because the Democrats arent noticing now Republicans are trying to help them?
Or is it just that they believe that if you can communicate a lie with force and conviction, you win
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/mcconnell-calls-deficit-very-disturbing-blames-federal-spending-dismisses-criticism-of-tax-cut/2018/10/16/a5b93da0-d15c-11e8-8c22-fa2ef74bd6d6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9465a672e731
Will Democrats grab this and go after Republicans with it, or will Helsinki strike again?
Democrats were already on track to win the House before all the Kavanaugh posturing.
Now we are assured to make it even more difficult for those Red State Democrats to remain in the Senate for 6 more years.
Sacrificing 6 year terms for 2 year terms is not smart.
Also, the hearings have created a backlash for sexual assault survivors all over the country. The standard of proof for rape has actually gone up again and has become part of the partisan culture wars.
This is not a win for Metoo or for Democrats.
Both long term Senators like Feinstein and new candidates like Kamala Harris completely mishandled the hearings allowing them and even making them part of partisan politics.
This proves that Democrats’ leadership problems going forward are not a matter of age or identity. The problem is ideology and an almost total inability to communicate with non-liberals in common sense plain language.
We can’t have complex policy issues and moral discussions be reduced to hashtags and catchphrases like Believesurvivors.
The electorate deserves and expects better.
The leftwing consultant and activist apparatus with its narrow liberal coastal views has proven time and again incapable of speaking to the rest of the country.
We need to have accountability for the consultant/activist class. After disasters like this nomination heads should roll. People shouldn’t be allowed to define defeat as success. This was nowhere near even a moral victory.
We should have 55-65% opposition to Kavanaugh, not a completely irrelevant 46%. We should be above the 50s in almost all states.
Instead people like Harris and Booker who want to be President are pandering already to primary voters and donors. They are catering to polarize audiences in Blue States further yet even there are not able to get to the upper 60s.
The United States doesn’t have national elections. Even when issues are nationalized the consequences are always filtered via the States and congressional districts.
The strategy of not having national strategies and not having national calls for liberals in the cities to restrain themselves and at least try to appeal to non-PC activists is not working.
We should not have lost in 2016. We should be in line not only for gains in the House but also for unequivocal victories in the Senate and Electoral College.
Instead we are just muddling through.
If Trump can get away with murder it is because Democrat’s discourse is still overwhelmingly disliked.