I am in general not optimistic about the Democrats’ chances next year. My rationale is rather simple: in recent decades the party that took the White House always does badly in the immediately following midterms. Couple that with Democratic-leaning voters’ tendency to show up poorly for midterm elections, and the conclusion seems foregone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Newsom’s unexpectedly strong victory against the recall in California offers the Democrats some hope, however. It shows that the Democrats can<\/em> learn how to campaign based on fear of what the other side might do. Like it or not, negative campaigning works and fear is a powerful motivator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democrats’ historic refusal to employ both tools is part of the reason why they tend to underperform in elections. If they can copy on a nationwide level what was done in California, add that to how we are in unprecedented times and something unprecedented (in recent decades, anyhow) might just emerge as a midterm election result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If so (and it is important to note that qualifier, this is all far<\/em> from certain), this would likely serve as a stinging rebuke of the GOP’s strategy of embracing the principles of fascism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am in general not optimistic about the Democrats’ chances next year. My rationale is rather simple: in recent decades the party that took the White House always does badly in the immediately following midterms. Couple that with Democratic-leaning voters’ tendency to show up poorly for midterm elections, and the conclusion seems foregone. Newsom’s unexpectedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}