From “Despite presidential headwinds, these Senate Democratic candidates won states Harris lost” by Arit John at CNN Politics: “As of Monday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin – who won the race to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – had won 24,000 fewer votes than Harris in the state, but her Republican opponent received 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won roughly 500 more votes than Harris, while Republican Eric Hovde missed out on 57,000 votes Trump received. And in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen trailed Harris by 3,000 votes, while Republican Sam Brown had received 70,000 fewer votes than Trump….In some races, the differences between the Senate candidates’ and Harris’ performances were more pronounced among subsections of the Democratic coalition. In Nevada, Rosen won 50% of the Latino vote, while Brown won 43%, according to exit polls. Latino voters in the state, however, were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with both candidates winning 48%. While Trump won independents by 2 points, Rosen won the group by 6….This year’s most endangered Democratic incumbents – Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – were seeking reelection in states Trump won in 2020 by 16 and 8 points, respectively. Tester lost his bid for a fourth term to Republican Tim Sheehy, trailing by about 7 points as of Monday afternoon (Harris lost the state by 20 points). Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno, was trailing by 4 points as of Monday, while Harris trailed Trump by 11 points….“They ran respectable races and damn near pulled it off, but it’s so hard to do, even in a closely run swing state,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Doing it in a red state is now probably impossible.””
“Overall,” John continues, “Democratic Senate candidates received more votes than Harris in about half of this year’s races, including in less competitive states such as Minnesota, Virginia and Missouri. Republican Senate candidates across the country ran behind Trump in about 80% of states. A notable exception was Maryland, where Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan ran nearly 9 points ahead of Trump and received more than 200,000 more votes. (Hogan lostto Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.)….In addition to Tester and Brown, Republicans are also counting Pennsylvania as a flip. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, where Democratic Sen. Bob Casey is trailing Republican Dave McCormick by 0.6% with 95% of the vote in….Even before Harris became the Democratic nominee, Senate candidates were running ahead of President Joe Biden. Candidates in battleground states sought to distance themselves from the president while also running on key parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, such as the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare patients and new projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law….In one ad, Baldwin noted that both Biden and Trump signed bills she introduced to bolster American manufacturing. On costs, candidates from Rosen to Casey vowed to take on “price gouging” from corporations….After the change atop the ticket, Democrats were more willing to campaign with Harris, who energized the party base in the early days of her 107-day campaign. Slotkin, Casey, Baldwin and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Senate nominee in Arizona, all spoke at the August Democratic National Convention. (Tester, Brown and Rosen skipped the convention altogether.)”
Geoffrey Skelley opines on the same topic in “How Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump carried” at 538:,” and writes, “the 2024 election represents a notable uptick in split-ticket results and downturn in same-party outcomes. Based on the results as they stand right now, different parties won the presidential and Senate contests in 12 percent of the states that had both contests on the ballot, the highest share since 18 percent of 2012’s presidential-Senate races had split-ticket outcomes….Naturally, this has led to easy headlines about split-ticket voting making a comeback. And there’s some truth to that, both in split-ticket outcomes and in relatively larger differences in the vote margins between presidential and Senate races in the same state. If we look at contemporaneous presidential and Senate races in which both a Democrat and Republican were on the ballot (including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont as Democrats), 2020 saw the narrowest gap in the margin of victory between the two major parties in these types of races since at least 1992 — 2.8 points in margin. Based on the present results, the median gap in 2024 will be higher, around 4 points — though still historically quite low, roughly half the almost 8-point mark in 2016….Yet only one of the four likely split-ticket outcomes appears to have come about because a big percentage of voters cast ballots simultaneously for Trump and the Democratic Senate nominee. In Arizona, which remains unprojected, Gallego has won nearly 6 percent more raw votes than Harris has, while Republican Kari Lake has won almost 10 percent fewer raw votes than Trump — a signal that a not-insignificant group of Trump voters backed Gallego….Now, a few other states did see sizable amounts of split-ticket voting between the presidential and Senate races that, potentially, stood to affect control of the Senate. In Montana, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester significantly outperformed Harris, winning 19 percent more raw votes than she did, while in Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won about 5 percent more. In Maryland, former Gov. Larry Hogan gave Republicans an unusually strong candidate in a blue state, and he won a whopping 24 percent more raw votes than Trump did.”
In “One striking pattern hidden in the election results: Were voters rejecting Democrats — or just the Biden-Harris administration?,” Andrew Prokop argues at Vox: “So why were there so many voters casting their ballots for Trump and Democratic Senate candidates?….Some might argue for racism or sexism explaining Harris’s struggles, but I’d note that several of the Democratic candidates who overperformed Harris were nonwhite or female. Others might argue that she was a uniquely flawed candidate or campaigner, but President Joe Biden was on track to do much worse if he’d stayed in the race….My suspicion is that Harris’s electoral struggles were more about Biden’s unpopularity and her association with his administration than any newfound love of the American public for the Republican Party generally. (This is also reflected in the House of Representatives contest currently looking somewhat close and in Democratic success at the state level in places like North Carolina.)….Call them the “I don’t like Republicans much, but the economy was better under Trump” voters. Biden lost them, and Harris failed to get them back.” There may be a related, but somewhat different category: “I don’t like Republicans much, but I really disliked the way Democrats suddenly switched presidential candidates without a vote.”
The thing about trans and gay rights is that the right is actually on the defensive.
They are actually trying to turn things back because they mostly lost the culture war and even the Supreme Court has mostly ended up on the side of sexual minorities.
What the right has going for itself is that it is always seen to be on offense even when it is playing defense. This can be very effective though and we must be vigilant to a cascade of backlashes via a reverse slippery slope against gay and trans wins.
A mere two decades ago the questions were whether gay and trans people could be sent to jail.
The right has now “conceded” that, as well as employment non-discrimination.
What the right is doing now is trying to move the conversation to its favorite terrains: children and sex panics one the hand and religious exceptions on the other.
Also, sports and prisons, because sports are the one area apparently anyone can think of where biological sex confers an advantage and prisons are part of the sex panic discourse (along with bathrooms).
(An aside on sports. Society doesn’t seem to have an issue with girls playing sports in men’s teams as allowed by federal law because in those cases women are disadvantaged in favor of men.)
Bathrooms are tricky because they have rarely actually been regulated by the state (and in reality many many places have always had unisex bathrooms) and because any attempts at enforcement would be prone to very embarassing mistakes.
But it is all coming down to children because this is where the generations of liberal helicopter parents can be convinced to think as conservatives and even reactionaries.
Attacking the right to self-identification of children opens the door to strenghtening the role of the state in recognizing sex/gender.
First they will say parents need to decide on children. And accuse (liberal) teachers of trying to “convert” children (the old gays are pedophiles discourse).
But then they will say the state needs to decide for parents in the supposed “best interest of the child”.
The child’s best interest becomes entirely a political issue.
And after attacking gender identity you can move on to attacking sexual orientation as well. So now you can mandate that schools “out” children to their parents. Or move further and question whether things like Gay-Straight Alliances or PFlags deserve any school tolerance, much less support.
Once you stir the moral panic you move from children to adults.
If the state can deny children self-identification even against the wishes of parents, then the next step is to deny adults’ will as well.
So you can change sex if you want, according to the right, but you can’t change your driver’s license.
Eventually the whole things starts to question the role of medical professionals in the affair.
Again, first they start with children. First block the rights of children, then those of parents, then move to ban treatment for children, then ban treatment for adults.
At the very least ban government funding of sex transition or allow insurance (and Medicare/Medicaid) to deny coverage.
So it can quickly move from attacking self-identification without surgery to attacking surgery itself and the consequences of both surgery and non-surgery.
Like the 1990s it can go back to being “you can be gay or trans, we don’t ‘discriminate’, but don’t ask for any ‘special treatment’”.
This is the kind of logic (or cynicism) that can ban sodomy for everyone but think of itself as not discriminating.
Similarly it will say you can identify with whatever gender you want, but in your own time and with no recognition from society.
If all that fails, then comes religious “freedom” and its “exceptions” designed to neutralize any rights.
Religious exceptions are specially meant to keep the red states/societies from actually having to accomodate sexual minorities. Our own version of “separate but equal”.
You start with the wedding cake exception but what the right really wants is to be able to keep discrimination in employment and public accomodations.
Now you don’t have the right to be served if you look like the wrong gender or find a Bed and Breakfast with your same sex partner in all but the major cities in a lot of states.
We have won the culture war, but the win is incomplete due to congressional Democrats not doing their job.
And they won’t be able to finish the job as long as some remaining questions are settled.
There is still a lot of persuasion to be done at the margins of the debate.
In order to be effective we need to remember ourselves and remind others about the full terms of the debate.
Children and sports are meant as bad faith arguments and poison pills, but we won’t be able to ignore them without the risk of allowing the current backlash to continue.
We must remember that one of the most effective first lines of attack on sexual minorities were against school teachers.
I think a first step would be to stop using the language of activists as the starting framework in any discussion. This simply can’t be the starting point.
I think cis people find don’t identify with the label for example.
If we insist that gender is a social construct but also insist that gender is an individual choice, then I would lean towards a framework in which the state had as little influence over gender as possible.
The state would continue to have at least some business with biological sex (eg intersex, parenthood) and with sexual orientation (mainly nondiscrimination).
When it comes to the rights that would be attached to transgender people, I think the insistence on mere self-identification is misguided in relation to some state interventions (eg prisons) and would probably continue to move in the direction of “special case” in those where society sees a clash with fairness (eg sports).
When it comes to children, the law already has the right balance between parental rights and the best interest of the child.
The issue with the role of schools is newer and more complicated. I think parental rights will end up prevailing in the school setting and, though regretable for many kids, I don’t see an alternative to emancipation or special court order. Those special court orders or special laws would be hard for society to swallow right now in many states.
I’m not sure if activists would accept the argument that this should be an issue for the several states. I do think if federal government ends up intervening it would be in favor of parents and not kids or teachers.