Democrats need to drop identity politics to make inroads in the Rust Belt

If you like your politics to have clear moral outcomes, the 2020 US midterm elections were certainly no place to look.

In the cool light of day, the overall result might have looked good for Democrats but, for a few hours on election night, it didn’t auger that well for the blue side. It now feels like a win they snatched from the jaws of the defeat they’d somehow managed to engineer out of a never-in-doubt victory. It’s understandable, then, if they should feel a little deflated. Understandable too why Trump boasted of a “Big Victory”, though that’s probably what he would have said in all eventualities.

With considerable hindsight, the results make all kinds of sense. It’s certainly unwise to think that it is hugely disappointing for Democrats simply because their chances were probably overstated in the first place. These midterms were never set up kindly for them. Democrats were not going to win the Senate so, really, nothing can be read into the Republicans marginally improving their hold on the upper chamber. In the House, the Democrats will take control with a more-than-workable majority. That’s a base from which they might reach out to the President and attempt to find some common ground on issues ranging from healthcare to immigration. Yet, of course, that majority also gives them some extremely potent instruments of oversight and that might be the other side to the win. The next two years could see them inflict considerable pain on the White House and that’s unlikely to reduce the temperature of US politics.

So, if there wasn’t a ‘Blue Wave’, there was something that looked a bit wave-ish. It was a small blue splash and what last night really did was restate the scale of the Democrat’s challenge.

It highlighted some ugly truths about America’s electoral systems. Note, that’s not “system” but “systems”. Across the Republic, the states still have antiquated and inadequate systems in place for taking a ballot. They seem to have learned nothing from the debacle of “hanging chads” in 2000 but, perhaps, that in itself is quite telling. Some of those systems are designed to be flawed (or not in enough supply), to suppress the vote in areas where local officials are happy to see the vote suppressed. The gerrymandering of districts has also been declared illegal by courts.

Then there’s the electoral college, which doesn’t get seen in the midterms, but will come back into play in 2020. It’s a system designed to undermine the notional democracy that the US enjoys, effectively biasing the system in favour of the southern states, which at the time of the founding, were slave-owning. The Senate also reflects that old discrepancy, with the 39 million people in California having the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming with just over half a million people. It’s a simple fact that rural America has more political power than coastal and urban America. Democrats always have a slightly steeper hill to climb in order to match the Republicans.

The other revelation has also been something that should have been obvious from the outset. The choice of candidate does matter. It’s all too easy to be cynical about Beto’s loss. Admittedly, in Ted Cruz, you couldn’t find a more dislikeable candidate east of Bert Smirk’s School of Snake Oil Salesmanship. Yet O’Rourke fought a stunningly well-executed campaign, bringing considerable charm and passion to the race. Certainly, the result might say a lot about the die-hard conservative vote in a place like Texas (though the demographics are changing) but it also showed what a seriously well-engineered campaign can do when led by a charismatic figure. Beto says he won’t run for the presidency in 2020 but it’s easy to see why Democrat’s hope to change his mind.

In the end, the 2018 midterms felt like a censure to Trump but also a victory wrapped in a mild rebuke for the Democrats who have treated the first two years of this presidency as if they needed to do very little in order to win. They need to rid themselves of the self-inflicted mistakes and the worst excesses of identity politics that prevent them from making roads into the rural heartlands.

These midterms should have rid them of that foolish illusion that there’s a huge untapped source of blue votes out there. Beto did well but Democrats shouldn’t be too quick to assume that was because of his progressive platform rather than his energy, passion, and, almost as important, his opponent. It might be true that many Americans do not vote but if they haven’t responded to Trump’s behaviour by the end of 2018, it’s hard to see why they might respond by 2020.

There simply is no other America out there, filled with the perpetually outraged wearing their pink pussycat hats and still indignant about Kavanaugh being put on the Supreme Court. What is “out there” is still that moderate America that needs good candidates and convincing reasons to vote Democrat. The landscape will certainly be more favourable to Democrats come 2020, with many Senate seats up for grabs where they stand a far better chance of winning. Yet nothing is for certain and this weeks midterms were no validation of the view that America is now ready to leap to the left.