Democrats in many states
were counting on women to win election 2014 victories. It seems
to have been a bad bet. Liberal Senate candidates who put
particular emphasis on issues like birth control and equal pay
legislation were roundly defeated by Republican challengers last
night.
The über case here comes out of Colorado, where Democratic Sen.
Mark Udall lost his seat to GOP Rep. Cory Gardner after running
heavily
on how Gardner would be bad for women. It was a strange choice
for one of the few Democratic Senators who could have campaigned on
his record of questioning intelligence community abuses. Udall
was championed by groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the
American Civil Liberties Union for his criticism of National
Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, his insistence on
declassification of the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation techniques,
and his refusal to support National Defense Authorization Act
provisions allowing for indefinite detention of American citizens.
“He’s definitely deviated from the Obama administration on these
issues,” Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel at HRW,
told the Huffington Post.
Gardner, meanwhile, scores pretty
low on support for civil liberties. But in campaign literature
and TV ads, Udall largely emphasized his differences from Gardner
on social issues, particularly those related to contraception and
abortion. He hammered Gardner for previous support of a
Colorado personhood amendment and repeatedly suggested that
Gardner wanted to ban birth control.
Despite all this, female voter turnout Tuesday remained
stubbornly low in Colorado. This is far from unprecented—in
general, women, young adult, and minority voters tend to drop off
during non-presidential election years. But this year, Colorado
women’s turnout was
at its lowest point since 1992, according to ABC News. And
while unmarried women did lean overwhelmingly Democrat, this
much-courted cohort did so at their smallest margin in over 20
years.
In preliminary exit poll data from CNN, Sen. Udall managed to
capture 52 percent of Colorado’s women voters, compared to
Gardner’s 44 percent. But this wasn’t enough to make up for
Gardner’s 17 percent lead among men. And similar dynamics were seen
in other Senate races where Democrats had stressed GOP opposition
to abortion, health insurance coverage for contraception,
legislation meant to address gender pay gaps, and other issues
expected to rally women voters.
In North Carolina, for instance, Republican Thom Tillis beat
incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan by just 2 percentage points overall. But
he lead by 15 percent among male voters, enough to trump Hagan’s 12
percent lead with women. In Alaska, Republican Dan Sullivan won
against incumbent Sen. Mark Begich by earning just 2 percent less
support from women but 11 percent more support from men. In Iowa,
Republican state Rep. Joni Ernst won her new Senate seat with 1
percent less of the female vote and 16 percent more of the male
vote.
In Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell kept his
seat by wooing both more male and more female voters; he beat
challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes by 3 percent among women and 25
percent among men. Arakansas’ Tom Cotton came out on top with 10
percent more female supporters than opponent Mark Pryor and 24
percent more male supporters.
Exit poll data shows female voters
preferring Democratics by seven percentage points overall,
according to the Wall Street Journal. “That was a
distinctly better showing than in the latest midterm elections, in
2010, when women broke for the GOP by a percentage point and helped
propel Republicans to control of the House,” the Journal
notes. Yet the gender gap still skewed in Republicans’ favor this
year, with GOP candidates capturing male voters by 13 percentage
points more.
To be clear, it’s unlikely that focusing on supposed women’s
issues drove male voters away from
Democrats—that 13-point male lead Republicans enjoyed is pretty
standard fare for midterm elections. And men make up a majority of
the Republican party generally. A Pew Research Center Survey from
2012 found
52 percent of GOP or GOP-leaning voters were male, compared to
43 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaners.
And there’s nothing to say that Democrat’s “GOP war on women”
rhetoric didn’t motivate some female voters who may have otherwise
sat this election out. Perhaps without it, we’d have seen even
bigger margins of GOP victory in states like North Carolina and
Alaska.
But I’d love to be able to peer into some alternate reality
where Democrats like Udall had campaigned on opposition to CIA
torture and NSA spying; or had attempted to motivate their minority
bases by focusing on issues like those coming out of Ferguson,
Missouri; or had hitched their wagon to marijuana legalization in
states where it was on the ballot. These are some of the issues
that matter most right now to young voters—another group
historically absent from midterm voting, with last night being no
exception. Though 18- to 29-year-olds make up about a quarter of
the U.S. population, they accounted for just 13 percent of voters
yesterday. (The reverse is true for seniors, who constitute about
13 percent of the total population but represented 22 percent of
the midterm vote.)
Could campaigns that emphasized opposition to civil-liberties
abuses, police brutality, and drug criminalization have captured
more ballot-box love from millennials? As we’ve seen in poll after
poll—from
Harvard’s to
Pew Research Center’s to our
own here at Reason—millennials are massively dissatisfied with
traditional partisan options and more likely than any young cohort
previously to consider themselves political independents. And those
issues are ones not necessarily beholden to a natural partisan
divide. A Republican or a Democratic candidate who ran with them
could well capture post-party, post-Hope millennial passions (along
with older independents, too, of course).
Instead, both parties keep choosing to run on the most partisan
of platforms and dog-whistles. (Democrats more so than Republicans
this year, though that’s not to the credit of GOP candidates, who
largely seemed to run on nothing.) Republicans are still
relying on older white men and religious conservatives to carry
them. And Democrats keep hoping that if they just remind women and
minorities they’re On Their Side, Not Like Those Republicans, they
don’t actually have to have any ideas, do anything, or stand for
anything.
It’s a great way to turn out exactly the people and
constituencies who would vote for you anyways. And sometimes an OK
way to eek out your own party’s dominance. It’s not a sound
strategy if you have any hope of actually affecting change, or
turning politics into anything but the sad, silly spectacle it is
currently. But I suppose that’s never the real goal anyway…
Funnily enough, many on the left are now dismissing last night’s
Democratic losses as a mere side effect of more male, white, and
over-45 voters—aka more Republicans—showing up at the polls. (See
the closing paragraph here for
one fine example.) It’s an effective bit of ass-covering on their
part, I guess, but I feel sorry for the future of the left if any
of them actually believe it convincing. “The
excuse is, itself, just a restatement of the problem,” as Ezra
Klein writes.
The fact that less registered Democrats, less millennials, and
less women turned up to vote is neither random nor some sort of
natural, immutable force. It is evidence that what the Democratic
Party and candidates are doing is not working. And if the best
their pundits can come up with afterward is, “well, that’s how
voter turnout goes,” we could be in for a GOP majority for much
longer than anyone expects.
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