Earth to Democrats: stop digging

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Pondering red political waves crashing onto Tennessee shores (if we had shores) the mind is drawn to that fateful election night in November 1994: At 7 p.m. as the polls closed, Tennessee had a Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and a majority Democratic delegation in the House of Representatives. A few cocktails later, give or take, we had a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a majority Republican House delegation. 

The wave’s riptide that night was savage: Don Sundquist took the governorship by 10 points, Bill Frist and Fred Thompson won their Senate seats by 12 and 22 points respectively, and the two House seats that flipped blue to red did so by 7 and 14 points. “A Disillusioned State Gives Up on Democrats,” headlined a story in the New York Times the following week recapping the blue Tennessee carnage.

With 1994’s political bloodbath in mind, the national shift rightward in 2024 feels here in Tennessee more like a sip of rosé than a gulp of shiraz. After all, how much redder can the reddest of red states get? A pretty good bit, it turns out. 

One way to see it is to have a glance at the New York Times shift map showing changes in vote margin everywhere from 2020 to 2024. If we were already peak Republican, you wouldn’t see that big concentration of red there in Tennessee. 

Here’s another way to look at it: In 2020, Tennessee’s margin for Donald Trump was already in the top 10 among the states, yet our further shift in vote percentage toward Trump in 2024 relative to 2020 was fifth highest among red states and ninth highest among all states. And by the way, this is accelerated Volunteer State reddening: shift maps for 2020 (from 2016) and 2016 (from 2012) show a good deal less rightward movement in those cycles.

We see it also in the U.S. Senate race that returned professional sycophant Marsha Blackburn to Washington for another six-year term. Blackburn waxed Democratic challenger, Rep. Gloria Johnson, by just under 30 points — for Democrats a disheartening rout given that Johnson got in early, built a healthy warchest, and sought to run a legitimate statewide campaign. 

It’s instructive to compare Blackburn’s 2024 Senate win over Johnson with Sen. Bill Hagerty’s 2020 victory over Marquita Bradshaw. Johnson came to this year’s race as a more formidable political presence than Bradshaw (the “Tennessee Three” thing), and Johnson’s $7 million fundraising haul more than quadrupled the $1.6 million Bradshaw was able to pull in four years ago. 

So, naturally, with these advantages Johnson came closer than Bradshaw, right? Wrong. Blackburn’s margin of victory over Johnson was more than two points larger than Hagerty’s over Bradshaw. Around the state, Blackburn’s 2024 margin was equal to or larger than Hagerty’s 2020 margin in 71 of Tennessee’s 95 counties. This year’s red wave splashed far and wide.

Systemic observations

This is the place in the column where I pivot to a piercing soliloquy on causes and remedies. I’ll pass. One clear election outcome has been the full employment act it generated for blue (in both senses of the word) post-mortem commentary, and a lot of it is high quality — nothing like a shock to the system to spark tedious punditry back to life. Lookout readers don’t need me to pile on, but I will toss in three quick observations about the national and state political scenes.

It’s the media, stupid. Liberal frustration with a conservative communication advantage is nothing new. First it was talk radio (remember Air America? nobody does), and it’s long been fashionable to blame cable news — the red team has Fox, Newsmax, OAN and Nashville-based Daily Wire, to say nothing of local right-wing outlets — and the blue team can sustain nothing like it. All true, but now the information war that matters is in the online influencer ecosystem that the right has mastered but the left still puzzles over. “Kamala should have gone on Rogan” may be reasonable as a tactical critique, but it barely scratches the surface of the challenge facing Democrats to make up ground here.

Next, political polling is, as they say, not dead yet. Yes, polls did lowball Trump’s outcome for a third straight cycle, but a relatively small systematic error in one direction doesn’t mean polling is broken, only that sampling and likely voter prediction challenges remain. We’ll get a clearer picture in months to come as better election data becomes available, but polling aggregations did fall within acceptable margins in most battleground states and for most competitive Senate races. For that matter, even while Tennessee Democrats held high hopes for Johnson, polls consistently showed her out of striking distance of Blackburn.

Polling also successfully tracked the trajectory of the race over time, with Harris’ surge after becoming the nominee giving way to an October flattening then softening that culminated in the tight (in vote percentage terms) final outcome. Horse race polling may not be as spot-on as some wish it to be — it never was — but it is accurate enough, and polls still do quite well with issue diagnosis and message testing. On the whole, the laws of probability sampling have not been repealed. 

Lastly, the Democrats really do need generational change, and they didn’t get it with the Harris-Walz ticket. Harris may come off like a paragon of youthful vigor next to senescent Joe, but giving way to someone old enough for young voters to call grandma is a rather limited kind of torch passing.

Democrats can’t and shouldn’t wait four years to get on with generational rehab. They are led in the Senate by septuagenarian Chuck Schumer, who needs to step aside. And it is exasperating that 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi in an interview after the election couldn’t bring herself to admit that her party has serious demography problems, and wouldn’t say when asked that this would be her final term in Congress. 

At least in Tennessee, House Democrats — despite faring poorly in the election — made an effort to reach younger voters with a crop of 30-ish and 40-ish legislative candidates. 

I was struck by a comment from one of those uprooted by the red wave, ousted San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who said the morning after that “the rightward shift across America last night is heartbreaking.” That’s the wrong reaction. Democrats don’t need to mourn their defeat. They need to dissect it energetically and put blame where it belongs. 

Let the games begin.