Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
There are still plenty of outstanding votes to be counted in pivotal races, but I think it’s safe to say that last night was far less painful than we’d anticipated.
There’s a lot to unpack, including analysis on the biggest elections and an assessment of how Progress Report’s candidates and initiatives performed on Election Day.
Let’s start with the good news: Democrats over-performed most polls and expectations in many key races. Here are a few highlights:
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is the next Senator from Pennsylvania, providing a crucial pickup for Democrats
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly looks likely to win re-election
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto looks like she’s got a solid shot, too
Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake seems destined to be vanquished like the Wicked Witch of the West
Gov. Kathy Hochul held on in New York, as did Tina Kotek in Oregon and Laura Kelly in Kansas
Democrats picked up a number of state legislative seats and held on to a number of trifectas, including in Colorado
They also blocked supermajorities in Nebraska, one house in North Carolina, and Wisconsin
The Michigan state Senate will be run by Democrats for the first time since 1983. They could win the state House, too.
Pennsylvania’s legislature may flip blue, too.
If Republicans take back the House, it’ll be by a very slim margin
Lots of progressive ballot initiatives passed, while attempts to strip abortion protections in Kentucky went down in flames.
Whew, OK.
Now, for the negative: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to bend the filibuster for voting rights protections will likely cost Democrats the House and will definitely deny millions of Americans fair representation in gerrymandered states. Andrew Cuomo and disgraced DCCC chief Sean Patrick Maloney will also deserve their fair share of blame, as well as a lifetime of being pelted with tomatoes whenever they leave their homes.
This is why we here at Progress Report have focused so obsessively on voting rights. We saw this coming. Now it may be another two years under this voter suppression regime.
Early Takeaways
We need a paradigm shift: If you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a solid chance that you’ve spent the past six weeks obsessively reading polls and scouring cross tabs in search of signs of hope. No judgment here; I was doing the same thing.
By mid-October, it started to get grim. Hope flickered and faded as Election Day approached, with polling averages in critical races starting to trend decisively red. The Republican surge became the narrative frame for just about every election story down the stretch, creating the sense that Tuesday would be a blood bath.
For the third time in four campaign cycles, the polls got it very, very wrong. And yet, once again, the political media spent the final two months of the election filtering every story through flawed poll numbers, creating a warped reality that could have become a self-fulfilling prophesy. There has to be a point at which editors and reporters take a step back and reconsider the extent to which they focus on polling numbers to drive their election coverage.
Even when the polls are accurate, exhaustively reporting on them does nothing to educate the electorate about the issues and candidates vying for their vote. If anything, the focus on numbers obscures the flaws of extremists, racists, and serial abusers running for office. There’s no reason to continue the poll-centric campaign coverage.
Populism wins: During his victory speech tonight, newly minted Senator-elect John Fetterman provided a glimpse at how he was able to make inroads back into the blue collar parts of Pennsylvania that had previously turned away from Democrats.
Dedicating his triumph to the people living in the shadow of closed factories and mills that pepper the Rust Belt remnants that pepper the state, Fetterman shouted out the “union way of life.” He called health care a "universal right.” And he vowed to take on corporate greed.
These are not the words of a typical Democratic candidate, especially not in swing states, where the party has thumbed the scale for bland, pro-business centrists like Conor Lamb, who was the establishment choice in the PA primary. My hunch is that Lamb would not have won this race, even against Dr. Oz.
Most Democrats were also afraid to take on inflation, but Fetterman made the case that it was a product of greed, not government investment. People believed him and voted for him. Third Way neoliberalism is dead. Progressive populism wins. It is the way forward for Democrats. More on this later this week.
Election deniers got blown away: After spending two years insisting that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, fringe conspiracy theorists got beaten down in their own races last night.
Moronic GOP loudmouth Lauren Boebert is edging closer to suffering a humiliating defeat in her +6 Trump district.
Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who helped to plan and fund the January 6th insurrection, got absolutely drubbed by Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
If Katie Hobbs is able to hold on and win the Arizona governor’s race, there’s a chance that Kari Lake will wind up like Cassavetes at the end of Scanners.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson won re-election by blowing out election denier Kristina Karamo.
Report Card
Progress Report took a wide purview with election coverage this year, focusing equally on candidates, policy, and grassroots movements that would inform election outcomes.
We’ve reported on federal, state, and local elections; spotted critical trends; honed in on key ballot initiatives; and raised money for progressives candidates up and down the ballot. We took on long shots and unheralded races, up-and-comers and underdogs. And if you click through to the spreadsheet on how our candidates performed, you’ll see that we did a pretty good job supporting winners this year. (Note to substack: let us embed spreadsheets!)
I’ll have a wrap of how ballot initiatives performed later today, as well as some more thoughts about where we go from here.
Late this week, we’ll go deep on how Democrats can break through to red states and build a more durable winning coalition without sacrificing their principles.
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Analysis on target. We'd never have been in this absurdly tragic situation if the corpse dems had had the guts to come out fighting ala Fetterman. Or hadn't thrown their own progressive left flank like red meat to the gators. Lesson learned?? Here's hoping.