Monday’s episode of The Daily, “Midterm Surprise: Democrats Are Surging in Red America,” features a conversation with host Michael Barbaro and NYT chief political analyst Nate Cohn. Despite the headline, it is no longer surprising that Democrats are polling well in states Trump won in 2024. What is surprising, at least to me, is that they’re doing that while simultaneously struggling in some Democratic strongholds.
To put the headline in context, though:
Cohn: [W]e polled the five red states where the Democrats seemed to have their best chance of winning, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Alaska, and Kansas. All five of those states voted for Trump by at least 11 points in 2024. And we found the Democrats were really highly competitive in all five of them. We found them with meaningful leads in three of the states, Texas, Alaska, and Ohio. We found the race tied in Kansas, and we had the Republicans with a nominal one point edge in Iowa.
[…]
It’s extraordinary. I mean, to take a historic perspective on this, for the Democrats to even win one of these states would really be exceptional. It has been 16 years since a party has managed to win even one state that leans so much toward the other side in a regularly scheduled Senate election. So to contemplate that the Democrats have a serious chance to not just win two, but perhaps even more, this is something that we just haven’t seen in this era of polarized politics.
His analysis as to why this is happening isn’t novel:
This is an exceptional set of circumstances with a really unpopular Republican president, in some cases weak Republican candidates, and in all five cases strong Democratic candidates.
This is followed by a dive into each of those candidates. But, again, what prompted me to write about it is this:
Cohn: [I]n addition to the five red states that we just pulled, we also surveyed three blue to purple states, Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire. And despite these enormous Democratic breakthroughs in the Red states, the races are still pretty competitive in these more Democratic-leaning states.
Barbaro: And why is that?
Cohn: Well, the answer ultimately comes back to candidate quality again. Donald Trump is extraordinarily unpopular in all of these states, but the Republicans have either nominated really strong candidates who are relatively moderate and have well-established bases of support in the state, or the Democrats have nominated someone who has the potential, at least, to alienate some voters who would otherwise vote for a Democrat.
Again, this is followed by a breakdown of the candidates in those races.
Intuitively, I find the explanation satisfying. Going back at least to the 2010 election, which I wrote about extensively in real time, Republicans have handicapped themselves by nominating extremist and/or wildly unappealing and/or unqualified candidates. It’s largely why Georgia has two Democratic Senators. And why Doug Jones briefly represented Alabama in the Senate.
But the political science literature is pretty clear: voters who go for “the man, not the party” are exceedingly rare and getting rarer. In our hyper-polarized era, voting for the other party’s candidate is just too costly. Everything from the control of the Supreme Court to transgender rights to abortion rights is at stake.
As Cohn himself notes, “there is and always has been a meaningful part of the Republican Party that has serious reservations about Trump, because there are Republicans who disagree with Trump on tariffs and disagree with him on immigration and disagree with his personal conduct and his moral character.” And yet they have voted for him, anyway, rather than hand the extraordinary powers of the presidency to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris.
While I rather hope Cohn is right, in that I think we’d be better off as a country if parties were punished for nominating extremist, disreputable, and unqualified candidates, I’m skeptical that we’re going to see that emerge all at once. Which makes me wonder if there isn’t some sort of systematic bias in polling relating to response rates.
If, in fact, there’s a blue wave that gives Democrats Senate seats in the likes of Texas, Alaska, and Kansas—and there are good reasons to think there will be—then it’s just highly unlikely that it will be counterbalanced by Republicans winning traditional blue states in the same cycle.
