Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:It's a weird election that I don't know what to make of. DeSantis ran super Trumpian and won in an evenly divided state while Kris Kobach of the infamous voter fraud commission lost Kansas. The Democrats got gut punched in the Senate yet a lot of more liberal ballot initiatives (non-partisan redistricting, felon voter restoration [which passed here], etc) are passing. Democrats are clawing back state gains made by the GOP in 2010 yet can't seem to make progress in the Senate. I guess the biggest lesson of this election was the death of the moderate. If you were a more moderate GOP member in the House, you could get the fuck out. If you were a more moderate Democrat in the Senate, you could get the fuck out. There were obviously exceptions here and there, but for the most part it seemed to hold true.
Moderates have been in decline since Reagan, but I'd say that the process was pretty much complete in the Senate by 2012, and rather earlier in the House. 2012 saw the defeat of Scott Brown and the retirement of Ben Nelson, the last pair of Senators where the Democrat was more conservative on DW-nominate scores than the Republican. It also saw the retirement of Olympia Snowe, the last truly moderate Republican senator, and Joe Lieberman, though he had moved left on everything except Iraq and pharmaceuticals by that point. The prior decade had seen the defeat of Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee (last liberal Republican), Gordon Minnick (last conservative Democratic congressman outside the South), and Gordon Smith; it also saw the retirement of Jim Jeffords and Zell Miller (last conservative Democratic Senator).
I don't see liberal Republicans getting elected anymore, and while there are a small handful of conservative Southern Democrats in the House, I don't see them getting elected to the Senate and their numbers will probably continue to dwindle. Moderates also face a harder time getting elected in both parties. That said, I don't think this cycle signals the death of the moderate.
Both parties are unwilling to nominate moderates if they think that a doctrinaire partisan can win the nomination, but will consider nominating moderates if that looks like the only way forward. It's not a coincidence that McCaskill, Donnelly, and Heitkamp each represented and Bresden was running in a deep red state. It's not a coincidence that Brown and Kirk represented deep blue states and Hugins was running in one. So it's not surprising that they lost their (re)elections. What is surprising is that Manchin and Tester (who isn't even really a moderate) were still able to pull off a win. Angus King and Lisa Murkowski have been able to hold on as well, though that is explained by the small size and quirkiness of the states they represent.
I'm worried that Democrats will learn the wrong lessons from the near-wipeout of their moderate caucus. A lot of people already seem to be saying that this plus Beto O'Rourke's 3% loss and Hillary's performance in 2016 show that motivating the base is more important than persuading the relatively small number of swing voters. However Texas is far less red than Indiana, Missouri, or North Dakota, and the lesson of Hillary's defeat should be to not nominate gaffe-prone, uninspiring candidates. In Florida, Andrew Gillum did about a percentage point worse than Nelson. And according to FiveThirtyEight, in every competitive House district where a liberal beat a moderate in the primary, they lost in the general election.
This all suggests to me that while the traditional emphasis on winning over the middle was vastly overstated, it still helps a little bit. And every bit counts. At the least, the Democrats could avoid doing things like calling for AR-15 bans and Trump's impeachment, as Beto O'Rourke did. Nominating O'Rouke, a highly charismatic liberal candidate, was probably better than nominating an
uninspiring moderate candidate. O'Rourke did about 2% better than the Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Agriculture Commissioner, 5% better than the candidates for Comptroller and Land Commissioner, and 6% better than the candidate for governor, which suggests that charisma, name recognition, and not being Ted Cruz are worth at least 2% here. But if a charismatic moderate like Julian Castro had done 1.5% better, which the 2018 results suggest is possible, the Democrats might have sealed the deal in Texas.