Forget the Red Wave. Why ’22 Could Go Blue

Ruminating with Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network about post-Roe politics

I first met Simon Rosenberg in 1992 when he was working for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in the original “war room” in Little Rock. Simon then went to the DNC, where he was responsible for putting the first major political party anywhere online (on Compuserve!). In 1996, he founded the New Democrat Network, which in the years since has helped Democrats modernize technology, strategy and communications. (For instance, NDN helped pioneer Hispanic polling). I thought Democrats made a mistake in 2005 when Simon lost for DNC chair, though he has remained influential as a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). He’s been a good source for me, especially in sorting through conflicting polling data and messaging confusion. While he has a vested interest in his analysis, it has proven mostly accurate over the years.

Simon—who at 58 is really too young to be an Old Goat — has never bought the glum conventional wisdom about the 2022 midterms being a disaster for Democrats. Now he has more evidence for his optimism. He’s highlighting a new Morning Consult poll showing that independents impacted by the January 6th hearings are shifting sharply toward Democrats. And Simon thinks the Inflation Reduction Act, which got on track just after our convo, will bring another burst of political energy for Democrats.

Simon Rosenberg, President, NDN and the New Policy Institute

JONATHAN ALTER:

Hi Simon. You admitted recently that you were wrong in 2020 when you said that if the Democrats won the election, extremism in America would fade some. Why didn't that happen?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I think it was more of a hope than a prediction. I will admit that I've been surprised by how much Republicans have run towards MAGA and extremism in the last year and a half because it hasn’t worked for them politically in recent years. The Democratic vote margin has been five points in the last two elections. We won the presidency, the House and the Senate. And so it's hard to argue that MAGA was a successful political strategy for them. Trump's lying about the outcome of the [2020] election may have made it harder for Republicans to accept that this wasn't really working for them. Rather than running away from a failed political strategy, they ran towards it. And running towards a political strategy that just had more people vote against it than any political movement in American history is a real risk. But they're continuing to double down —triple down —on it.

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“[Republicans] running towards a political strategy that just had more people vote against it than any political movement in American history is a real risk. But they're continuing to double down —triple down —on it.”

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JON:

For 100 years, the party controlling the White House has gained seats in the first midterms only twice—in 1934 [when FDR’s New Deal was working] and 2002 [just after 9/11]. Isn’t a red wave just part of the physics of American politics?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

At this point, the traditional political physics of the midterm may not apply. For those voters who had just voted against MAGA twice in record numbers, it isn’t going to take a lot for them to be reminded that this was a group of people that they had just voted out of power with incredible enthusiasm. And that's what I think is happening in the election: A real MAGA hangover.

The data we have has been misleading. For months, we had inflation and Biden's [low] approval rating and the chattering classes said those two things mean it will be a terrible election for Democrats—a red wave. I never bought it. I just went back and found a piece I wrote in November of 2021 showing that the Biden approval rating and the congressional generic [which measures party favorability] had already decoupled.

The question in the fall is what's going to drive the election? Is it going to be disappointment in Joe Biden and the Democrats? Or is it going to be fear of MAGA and the Republicans? The fear of MAGA and the Republicans is what drove the last two elections [2018 and 2020]. And I think that the combination of Uvalde and mass shootings; the ending of Roe and the radical abortion restrictions—the overall radicalized Supreme Court; and the general depravity of many Republican leaders and their terrible candidates is going to make it more likely that the driving force in the election is the fear of MAGA. That's why this is now a competitive election, not a wave election.

JON:

Another misleading data point is the right track/wrong track polls, which tell us nothing about political preferences in today’s world. There are a tremendous number of Democrats who, if a pollster called and asked them is the United States on the right track or the wrong track, would say wrong track— and still be enthusiastic Democratic voters. They might not like Biden but they don’t blame him for the country going to hell.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

There are a lot of misleading polls. You know how Hispanics are supposedly trending Republican? Well, I was part of the largest poll of Hispanic voters that has been done so far in this election cycle. We did it with 1800 interviews [a large and reliable sample] in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Biden’s approval rating was not great. But the party favorability numbers and everything else looks like 2020. And where we tested the actual Democratic candidates versus Republican candidates known as extremists, the numbers look like 2018.

Mark Kelly in Arizona was 10 points ahead of his 2020 numbers with Hispanics in our polling. Kelly and Catherine Cortez Masto [the Democratic incumbent senator from Nevada], are up 40 with Hispanics, while Biden was only up two or three points. And I sat with this data and I was like, “What is going on here? This looks like a blue wave election, not a red wave election. How could conventional wisdom be so wrong?” And so I started looking at just the publicly available data and found Democrats were over-performing their numbers and Republicans were under-performing in every poll. The Republicans aren't at 50 percent in virtually any competitive race.  There's more evidence of a Democratic wave, frankly, right now than there is of a Republican wave. I'm not gonna say that's where we're gonna end up. But the data just didn’t comport with the notion that this is going to be a red wave election.

There’s only been one actual election recently and that was [June 28] in Nebraska [to fill a vacancy in the First Congressional District]. We didn't spend any money, and our candidate [while losing in a Republican district] outperformed the 2020 numbers for Democrats by six points. That's blue wave numbers, not red wave numbers.

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“There's more evidence of a Democratic wave, frankly, right now than there is of a Republican wave. I'm not gonna say that's where we're gonna end up. But the data just didn’t comport with the notion that this is going to be a red wave election.”

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JON:

Midterms are all about turnout and how much it drops off from presidential elections. So for Democrats, the enthusiasm gap was the most worrying statistic. Has it evaporated?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

In some polls, the Democrats are ahead [in likely to vote]; in some, even; in some, they're down under two. But statistically, the way it works is that when we're even, we’re ahead. That’s because there's a lot more of us than there are of them. So they needed us to drop off hugely and we’re not, especially with the recent news.

JON:

The handy metric that I've been using is if Democrats come close to their 2018 midterm turnout, they'll be fine. But if they if they're closer to their 2014 midterm turnout, they're in deep trouble. The big difference between those two election was the turnout of young voters, which was much higher in 2018. With young people so unenthusiastic about Biden, it seemed like there was a good chance that turnout this year would be closer to 2014.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

That’s much less likely now. The gun issue is very much a voting issue for young people. Ending abortion disproportionately affects younger Americans. Pre Roe reversal, we asked Hispanics: Would you be more likely to vote Democrat if Roe ended? Among Hispanic voters, 45 percent [answered yes], which is just a gargantuan number.

JON:

I thought that Hispanics are more conservative on that issue.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

They're [disproportionately] young and in their childbearing years. You old goats forget that those most affected by abortion rights are people who are having to make these decisions about managing their families.

JON:

If Democrats can frame it right, this could be a big deal. Do you want state troopers on the border of your state stopping cars with pregnant women who are driving to another state? Is that the kind of country you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country where a 10 year old who's raped cannot get an abortion? Some of these incumbent Republicans have themselves locked into the wrong side of 80/20 issues—like gay marriage. You never really want to be on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue, right?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I think that the Republican brand will continue to degrade as Americans grow to understand the radical nature of what's happened here. [Parents] will be thinking, “Oh, my God, my daughter is going to college somewhere where abortion isn’t legal anymore. What happens if she…?” So there's going to be all these conversations happening all over the country when schools come back. I think it will further reinforce that the radicalization of abortion and contraception is just barbaric and outside the mainstream. Some of these laws are just taking effect and there's gonna be an enormous amount of press coverage until [Republicans] back off and move back to a nine week or 12 week cutoff or exemptions, whatever they're going to do.

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“I think it will further reinforce that the radicalization of abortion and contraception is just barbaric and outside the mainstream. Some of these laws are just taking effect and there's gonna be an enormous amount of press coverage until [Republicans] back off and move back to a nine week or 12 week cutoff or exemptions, whatever they're going to do.”

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The second thing that's happening that could degrade the Republican brand for a very long time, is the investigations into January 6th. We now know that this investigation is of a criminal conspiracy involving hundreds of Republicans, including Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson, and House members, and Republican Party leaders in seven states. The RNC chairwoman herself admitted to having participated in the conspiracy to overturn the election. It could be party leaders in several states, not just Trump and his inner circle, who are in deep trouble. This has the potential to remind voters of the criminality and the disdain for democracy that is so core to MAGA.

The question now is, will the Republicans, who haven't broken 47 percent in the last three elections, have to abandon democracy because it's the only way they can overpower that losing dynamic?  That's where we're headed here.

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“The question now is, will the Republicans, who haven't broken 47 percent in the last three elections, have to abandon democracy because it's the only way they can overpower that losing dynamic?”

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JON:

We often hear that the fate of democracy is not a “voting issue” for the bulk of voters, who are much more concerned about inflation. That may be true. But for the Democratic base, democracy can be hugely helpful in creating a corps of ground troops for get-out-the-vote efforts, which with call tools can now easily canvass across state lines. Obama used to have a million volunteers working in November. Is that a realistic goal in midterms? The volunteers care a lot about democracy and they obviously care a lot about abortion and and a couple of other issues. And so in a turnout election, it’s not decisive that voters overall are actually more concerned about the economy if you can do the hard work of making sure they “have a plan to vote”—dragging them to the polls. Does that make sense?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

Yes, and I think that an important validator of your theory is that Democrats have a massive financial advantage over Republican candidates going into the final four months of the election. Their [GOP] fundraising went down in the second quarter, which is evidence of the grassroots enthusiasm [going down]. In House races, we have an eight-to-one cash-on-hand advantage over the typical Republican. J.D. Vance is not raising any money in Ohio. Again, when you really look honestly at the Republican thing right now, it's weak. It's underperforming. There's no race you can point to and say, well, that [GOP] candidate is doing really well.

JON:

Except maybe in key state and local races for positions like secretary of state and election board chair, where election-denying Trumpsters are much more focused, as my daughter Charlotte explains in TIME this week. And Republicans are still heavily favored to win the House.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I don't agree with that. I mean, we have not lived before through an experience that's the magnitude of ending Roe. Anyone who is still claiming, “Oh, inflation’s still gonna dominate.” I mean, that’s just bullshit. Abortion, mass shootings, January 6— this amalgam of stuff. And it’s early. It usually takes four to six weeks for any kind of shock to a political system to migrate to the public consciousness. It takes a while for people to really understand what's happening and to come up with their opinion. It's like throwing a rock into a pond and there are these cascading circles of awareness that flow out over a period of time.

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“We have not lived before through an experience that's the magnitude of ending Roe. Anyone who is still claiming, “Oh, inflation’s still gonna dominate.” I mean, that’s just bullshit.”

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I think the polls have shifted about four to five points to our advantage in the generic, but it's gonna take a while for it to cycle through FiveThirtyEight [Nate Silver’s compendium of polls] because they retain older polls for a long time.

JON:

And they include outliers like Rasmussen that are way off.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

They're putting in what are clearly polls that are being designed to game the polling average. These aren't serious polls.

To conclude on polls, we won't really know where the election is, I think, until early to mid-September.  The general view at the DCCC is if we're up in the national popular vote, we can keep the House because we have the advantages of incumbency. Many of the seats we lost in 2020 were in heavily Trump districts. So we sort of took the hit already to our majority.

JON:

But some of the districts are so much worse for Democrats because of gerrymandering. Take Elaine Luria (D-VA), who has been in the news and terrific [on the January 6 Committee].  She's in a really challenging district now. Even if polls show Democrats up by three, they don't really account for turnout. And they don't account for gerrymandering.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

That line [on gerrymandering] has to be stripped from the Democratic Party.

JON:

Really?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

Yeah, because we gained back a few seats in re-districting that we thought we had lost. Look, we're up five in the House and the tide is turning. And I think if the election were held today, the Senate would go Democratic. Republicans are in very serious trouble in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Ron Johnson's numbers [in Wisconsin] are terrible— the kind of numbers that a candidate has when they lose an election. [Herschel] Walker in Georgia and Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania are two of the worst candidates in our lifetimes, and J.D. Vance is really struggling in Ohio.

JON:

Tim Ryan (D-OH) will be an instant presidential candidate if he wins that race.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

The point is, it's competitive. We don't know if we're gonna win there but we don't need to win that one [the Ohio seat is currently Republican]. And then there’s North Carolina and Florida. The Republicans are under 50 in both of those races. And we have good candidates.

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“The general view at the DCCC is if we're up in the national popular vote, we can keep the House because we have the advantages of incumbency. Many of the seats we lost in 2020 were in heavily Trump districts. So we sort of took the hit already to our majority.”

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JON:

I heard Cortez Masto (D-NV) was in some trouble in Nevada.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

She's not in trouble. [Of the seats held by Democratic incumbents], I would say it's the most competitive race. But Adam Laxalt [the GOP candidate]  is a MAGA extremist.

JON:

And Nevada is a big pro-choice state.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

That’s right. It’s close because it was a tourist economy and COVID was really brutal. And Democrats were in charge in Nevada, right? And so there's unique dynamics that are making it a little bit different from the other states.

Kelly [in Arizona]  is up in some polls and it's very likely that he's gonna get this complete lunatic [Blake Masters] to run against. Maggie Hassan is way up in New Hampshire.

I can tell you that we have more ammunition to describe these Republicans as being out of the mainstream than we've ever had in the modern era.

JON:

So why aren’t the Democrats better at using that ammunition? Democrats may have a lot more ammo, but their soldiers don't have as good aim as the soldiers on the other side. And where are the company commanders leading the charge? Where are the tough operatives who can get on MSNBC and CNN and crystallize the message?  Democrat after Democrat I talk to all say the same thing, and I don't think they're wrong: The Democrats are just on the wrong side of the message gap, and they need to grow a pair in the way they approach the election. So when is that going to happen?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

This is a very complicated subject. Since 1989, there have been 45 million jobs created in America, and 43 million of them had been created under Democratic presidents. We've created three strong growing economies, with lower deficits; they've created three recessions, with spiraling deficits. How can it be that we've basically done a really good job managing the economy three times in a row— right after they left it in a shambles— and people don't know that this happened? I think there is this fundamental piece of information that we have to put into people's heads.. And I've called on the DNC to do it.

JON:

It’s almost a sign of political malpractice by Democrats. It turns out that Democratic presidents have presided over the creation of literally 20 times as many new jobs as Republicans [in the equivalent number of years in the White House] and I didn’t even know that until I saw some of your stats. And to go back even further, for the 13 presidents beginning with Truman, total job creation was about 70.5 million for the 7 Democratic presidents and 29.1 million for the 6 Republican presidents. I get that inflation makes them feel defensive, but why don’t Democrats just proclaim that they’re the Party of Jobs? The Party of Jobs! Repeat it like 50,000 times and you'd start hearing it back in focus groups: “Yeah, inflation is terrible but the Democrats are the Party of Jobs.”

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I have written about this many, many times. They need to do a victory lap on the recovery.

JON:

But is it right to be focusing on the economy now—especially with the risk of recession— or should all the focus be on MAGA Republicans? Because if you talk too much about the economy, then it goes back to an old fashioned referendum on Biden's economy when you really want it to be a choice.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

Both of those things are actually true. And when things are true, it is easier to sell them. The country is better off today than it was when Joe Biden took office and Republicans are unfit. We can make both those arguments. And here's my thinking about what's going to happen with the closing ads. There's one big piece of information that voters don't have, which is that the economy is actually booming.

JON:

I don’t trust Democratic media consultants. They’re still incentivized to make expensive ads for broadcast television.

SIMON ROSENBERG:

We are stuck in between the TV age of communications and the digital age. The greatest difference between TV and digital is that digital can be amplified. People can take the media and spread it to others. You can't do that with television. The Republican Party became amplified in the 2015-2016 cycle and they are at least an entire election cycle ahead of us in adopting amplification tactics. At the D Triple C [DCCC] in 2018 we could see in our research how amplified their messages were. Millions of people get up every day as Republicans spreading Fox News and Trump's Twitter feed and everything else. And we have nothing like that.

There are many people in our party who argue that we shouldn't be doing that. Extremists and crazy people do that. Right now, there’s a huge strategic meltdown happening inside our party, which is why what the Fetterman campaign is doing [clever digital ads] is so important.

You and I met when I was working in the Clinton war room in Little Rock in 1992. It was real people leading this information war from that little room, right? The 21st century war room has to be four million people wired together in network communications, amplifying core messages and narratives and spreading them out through the political discourse. But you have to have a strategic effort to create amplification.

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“And we’re still not good enough at telling a story. in order for your story to cohere, there has to be a through-line, right? There has to be a beginning, middle and end. We have all the elements but there's nobody creating through lines and narratives and stories. . And that's where we are: The sum is not greater than the parts.”

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JON:

Part of that is because many of the consultants are still compensated with a percentage of the broadcast buy, so they have a huge financial incentive to do analog media. Obama understood this, by the way. He said to Axelrod, “You're not getting a percentage of the buy—you’re on a monthly retainer. To my mind, any candidate who gives their media consultant a percentage of the buy doesn't deserve to hold public office — they're too stupid. They're pushing these ads out into broadcast media, which nobody young watches. Am I wrong about that?

SIMON ROSENBERG:

I'm not gonna comment on that. This transition from broadcast to digital has been difficult for us as a family, in part because of some of those reasons.

And we’re still not good enough at telling a story. In order for your story to cohere, there has to be a through-line, right? There has to be a beginning, middle and end. We have all the elements but there's nobody creating through lines and narratives and stories. . And that's where we are: The sum is not greater than the parts.

We are part of the greatest political party in American history, and we don't feel it.

JON:

Thanks, Simon.