White House celebrates a year of Trump’s presidency amid GOP lessons from recent elections.
All right, all right, all right. Republicans had a bad night yesterday — and so did New York City in particular — but let’s keep a little perspective at the same time. The GOP has some lessons to learn from the elections yesterday, and perhaps especially on perceptions of the economy at the moment.
Let’s start with the lessons. Mark Halperin makes the doom-and-gloom case at the Daily Mail today:
Democrats didn’t just win on Tuesday. They crushed it. From Virginia to New Jersey to California, they rolled through every major contest, as a party that has rediscovered its swagger. .
Democrats didn’t just win because they were organized. They won because the Trump coalition, shorn of Trump himself, became deflated. Minority voters and suburbanites who flirted with the GOP under Trump’s spell just last year seem to have slipped off without him on the ballot. In Virginia and New Jersey, Republicans were wiped out among Hispanics and working-class non-white voters — the very blocs Team MAGA boasted had joined their movement.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer who first flipped a deep-Red seat during the anti-Trump backlash of 2018 and has since cultivated a pragmatic, centrist image, romped to victory. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran and former federal prosecutor representing the affluent suburbs west of New York City, turned back her GOP challenger with ease. Exit polls show Spanberger winning 84 percent of non-white voters without a college degree, Sherrill winning 71 percent, and both women taking more than 70 percent of Latinas. Their Republican opponents, according to the exit polls, got only 31% and 34% of Hispanics and 5% and 8% of Black voters, respectively.
Data Republican points to a different, and perhaps much more pertinent, data set:
As far as I know, I was one of the few who expected a clean D sweep, and hopefully that gives me at least a little credibility in talking about why it happened.
