2024 Down Ballot Successes (and Calling Out The Clintonian Hypocrisy):

The same patterns are back from 2022. Progressive Populism is outperforming the Generic Clinton Democrat. Progressive Populism Is The Road to Success Once Again.

Feel free to check the entire blog archives from “Political Pulse” & “Salzillo Report” on the 2024 primary cycle, rural outreach, redistricting litigation, base dynamics, campaign organization, the current media landscape, the issues at stake, Project 2025, Build Back Better, the progressive movement, the 2024 Election autopsy, the true story about former 2024 VP contender Gina Raimondo, and much more.

Via Wikipedia-RIP Senator Tim Johnson (1946-2024)

Before I go into down ballot elections this cycle, …

First, it seems when the Clintons are on the campaign trail, they cause more headaches and trouble than they would if they let a new generation of the party take over.

In 2016, Bill Clinton infamously lashed out at the Black Lives Matter protesters who criticized Hillary Clinton’s very polarizing views on crime—including the time she used the racially derogatory term “super predators” to defend the 1994 Crime Bill. Whether they liked the consequences of mass incarceration or not, Mr. Clinton seemed to say, black voters had no choice but to vote for Hillary against Trump.

From there, we all remember what Hillary did later that year. She called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables,” a turn of phrase showing how much the Democratic Party had written off Trump Country.

Well in 2024, Bill did it again. At a rally for Harris in Michigan in late October, Bill made comments about the Gaza war that made some commentators wonder whether he actually wanted Harris to lose…

Well, in their discontent over the Israel-Gaza conflict, the community made themselves heard loud and clear. These are the effects of talking down to voters.

Seriously, are there not better campaign surrogates out there to use than Bill & Hillary Clinton? And Cardi B? And J-Lo? The campaign twerker? And these other folks who I never heard of beforehand? Are we that desperate as a party?

The surrogate choice in the future ought to be reconsidered. The tragedy of the union rank-and-file discontent was that it did not need to happen. Matt Stoller recently reported that one of the big factors behind the decisions of some big unions (the Teamsters notably) to not endorse Harris this year was the campaign’s failure to guarantee that FTC Chair Lina Khan would stay in her position after 2024.

And, while we all should take note of Tim Walz’s aggressive and praiseworthy campaign push with labor, the Harris campaign team should not have pushed away President Joe Biden (Blue-Collar Joe, the historic labor president) from engaging with union halls and key organized labor constituencies. That did more harm than good to the Vice President’s campaign of winning over labor skeptics.

The donor and elite classes who tried to hamstring and blackmail the Vice President and her team on the priorities of the rich and the special interests (like replacing Lina Khan) did themselves no favors in the eyes of the party grassroots and base. Never mind working-class Republican voters.

That is exactly the problem, because those same people ironically lecture that the Democratic Party has gone “too far to the left,” taking a script out of the Manchinema duo and the House Gang of Nine.

Of course, they conveniently forget how the corporate wing of the party—led by people like the Clintons, Rahm Emanuel, Mike Bloomberg, and Gina Raimondo—were the ones who led us in this direction to “the center” for the last 30 years. They don’t say how the establishment took firm measures to lock out the Sanders-Warren wing in 2016 and 2020, as WikiLeaks demonstrated.

They also forget to tell you that, since 1992, the corporate Democrats made the party lose their dominant hold on Congress, on governorships, state legislatures, and many municipal offices. It is because of leaders like the Clintons that states we used to compete in not long ago, like Missouri, Indiana, Texas, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio have been put off the table. These states were not always hostile territory for Democrats.

The pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party promised that being more like Republicans economically would cure all our electoral ills. The track record since 1992, with 1994 as the classic example, seems to show the opposite effect instead. And should that surprise us? Of course not. 

Because when you turn on organized labor, as Bill Clinton did in Arkansas by supporting right-to-work businesses, and then in Washington DC by supporting Corporate America-backed trade deals such as NAFTA, PNTR, CAFTA, and TPP, unions will abandon the party. That is the story that led to 2016, when the white working class and blue-collar industrial workers had enough of Democratic failures to confront deindustrialization, globalization, and automation.

When you turn your backs on Rural America by cutting agricultural programs, ignoring other big issues in those communities, like extreme poverty and the opioid epidemic, rural voters will leave the party. When you even fail to show up to rural communities with anything resembling a 50-State Strategy, then rural voters will leave in droves. That is true especially since 2010, and we have seen it with farm states like Iowa since 2016.

Finally, when our party bloc of African Americans and Hispanics & Latinos feels abandoned with tough-on-crime measures, feels left behind with urban gentrification and deindustrialization, and feels cast aside with wider racial inequities, they will eventually look elsewhere as well.

Voters of the Clinton era didn’t ask for income inequality, austerity cuts, privatization of government services, corporate welfare, Pentagon bloating, ballooning deficits, pure and less restrained private sector greed, bad trade deals, less antitrust enforcement, finance deregulation, mass incarceration, and special interests influence. Yet that is what the Clinton/Bloomberg wing tried to give them. They decided to make Democrats cheap imitations of Republicans on economic policies, and boy has it cost the party dearly.

An important contrast to what Joe Biden was starting to do with the help of the Vice President, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other key leaders.

So as has been discussed, the donor class and party elites (you know, the Reid Hoffman, Barry Diller types), corroded the presidential ticket campaign message. They put their personal ambitions and priorities over the nation’s (a contrast to Biden’s record of public service inside and outside the White House).

We could have got a Harris campaign that stuck to its original populist message, with the help of people like Tim Walz. But thanks to the wealthy gatekeepers, we got a watered-down message of generational change. And we lost on that message.

Yet what about down ballot?

Republicans did ride the Trump victory tide, winning a trifecta in Washington DC, and making inroads in the states. However, Congressional Democrats and State Democrats down ballot largely outperformed expectations in split-ticket voting, the most extreme example being the apparent Trump-AOC voter.

This is actually not new. Progressive and Populist Democrats have done this before. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a central leader for disability rights, human rights, agricultural market fairness, and labor solidarity for more than 30 years in DC, won election after election, many by double digit margins. Similarly, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold and Minnesota legend Paul Wellstone were iconic leaders on campaign finance reform, and in criticizing the worst parts of Clinton’s presidential agenda. The same can be said of North Dakota’s Byron Dorgan and the late South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson. All these figures were some of the last Democrats to win the rural counties, districts, and states that have gone for Donald Trump and Republicans since.

In 2004, David Sirota covered some of the successful Midwestern progressives and prairie populists who outperformed the Kerry-Edwards ticket in his Da Vinci Code take. For example, even though Bush won Montana by double-digits (59%-39%), Democrat Brian Schweitzer was elected Governor with a bold tax policy plank, and a commitment to enact single-payer healthcare and expand early childhood education. He later pursued his bold agenda as a 2-term governor.

Likewise, many old school congressional lawmakers were rewarded, from Oregon infrastructure & transportation whiz Peter DeFazio, South Dakota prairie warrior Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, and Mississippi Blue Dog free trade critic Gene Taylor, to Wisconsin giant David Obey and the late Minnesota common man Rick Nolan (who was elected in 2012). Now many of these people are not Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing policy purists; some of them were more socially conservative. Which actually goes to show how a more progressive & populist Democratic Party can still be a big tent for certain parts of the national electorate.

And we know it still can happen because we saw it in 2022, and now in 2024. For the latter, on average, whether it was a win or a loss, Congressional Democrats outperformed the presidential ticket by at least 4%-6%, as pollster Adam Carlson duly noted. Most of the time, these Congressional Democrats have been winning Trump voters regularly prior to now.

To give some examples. First, Senator Jon Tester, the seven-fingered Montana Senator who has seen it all, and done a hell of a job since 2007. While the presidential ticket struggled to crack even 40%, Tester neared 46% against Senator-elect Tim Sheehy’s 53%, boosted obviously by Trump’s coattails and $255 million in total campaign spending. Tester’s ability to survive for so long should be seen as a credit to his focus on rural issues, on veterans’ affairs, and his commitment to serve Native American voters, even when other red-state, more corporate-friendly Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp, Claire McCaskill, and Joe Donnelly struggled to follow suit.

Senator Sherrod Brown, a notable free trade critic, pro-labor Democrat, and adversary of Wall Street and DC special interests, garnered 46%. He kept Bernie Moreno to a 4-point margin, with Moreno barely clinging to 50%—even as Trump won Ohio by more than 11 points (a larger margin than his 8-point victories in 2016 and 2020). Brown well outperformed the top of the ticket despite a record $500+ million spending spree in that contest. Brown is one of the toughest politicians out there, having lost a bid for office only one other time (in 1990). He is of the same mold as Tester, winning voters and areas when other Democrats, even in good midterm cycles like 2006 and 2018, struggle to do so, with his consistent Dignity of Work message that includes retirement security and pension guarantees. His most recent Politico interview is really on point as to why Democrats have lost the working class.

In Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey Jr. has put Dave McCormick in recount territory (48.8%-48.6%). McCormick will likely still win, but only by 16,000 or so votes. Besides the family name, Casey is a well-known critic of current trade policies since 2007. He is also a pro-labor Democrat with a devotion to coal reclamation efforts, combating the opioid crisis, boosting children healthcare programs, and expanding opportunities for those with disabilities.

Senator Tammy Baldwin won reelection in Wisconsin even as Trump edged out Harris by a point. Baldwin has been a promoter of American manufacturing (especially for infrastructure), Wisconsin agricultural products, Great Lakes conservation, and healthcare reform since 2013.

Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin edged out her Republican opponent by 20,000 votes even as Trump won by more than a point. Now, in the eyes of the DC punditry, Slotkin was and is thought of as a more “centrist” Democrat. However, that broad brushstrokes characterization misses something really important. Like the Democrats who rediscovered populism in 2022, Slotkin was quick to tout bold progressive populist legislative accomplishments she worked on like the insulin price caps, renewable energy goals, Michigan semiconductor facility investments, and the bipartisan infrastructure funds.

The same is seen in Nevada (which Trump won 51%-48%) with Senator Jacky Rosen, a big $15 minimum wage supporter, tipped worker ally, and corporate price gouging opponent, and in Arizona with Congressman Ruben Gallego, a grassroots and labor favorite of Arizonans, in a state Trump won by 5 points (52%-47%).

This trend has translated to so many House races, particularly to incumbents who sought to crackdown on energy price gouging, bad actors in business, job outsourcers, utility rate hikes, opioid producers, grocery store chains, and private sector greed in general. People like Pat Ryan of NY (who outperformed Harris by more than 10 points), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of WA (who won in a Trump 2020 district) Marcy Kaptur of OH (who also won in a Trump 2020 district), Chris DeLuzio of PA (who won reelection by a larger margin this year than in 2022), and Jared Golden of ME (in a red-leaning district Trump won this year by 9 points). Add populist candidates like Dave Min in CA and Eugene Vindman in VA into the mix too.

Even House incumbents and candidates who lost outperformed the Democratic presidential ticket, sometimes significantly. Even as Trump won Alaska by 14 points, Congresswoman Mary Peltola kept Republican Nick Begich below 50% in the first round of ranked-choice voting. Likewise, Congressman Matt Cartwright was narrowly unseated this month in a PA red sweep after winning in a Trump district in every cycle since 2018. Even so, he greatly outperformed the ticket in his district (taking 56% of the vote, for example, in Scranton-based Lackawanna County to Harris-Walz’s 51%).

Down ballot success can even be touted in judicial races in Michigan, North Carolina, Montana, Arkansas, and (yes) Mississippi.

And lastly, Democrats down ballot had a good run in North Carolina. Although Harris lost by 3 points there, not only did Josh Stein clobber Mark Robinson by 15 points, but Democrats won the top offices of Lt. Governor (a pickup actually), Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Education Superintendent (also a pickup). North Carolina Democrats further seemed to weaken the GOP supermajority in the state legislature, just as Democrats held ground in Pennsylvania’s legislature, and actually picked up seats in Wisconsin’s.

Which also goes to advice I should take more too. That is, if you want to know what went right and what went wrong, go to the people on the ground who know better, like Nebraska Independent Dan Osborn, NC Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, WI party chair Ben Wikler, Arizona’s Congressman Gallego, and Ohio’s Senator Brown.

In other words, the down ballot already provides us a roadmap to future success. Although electoral success obviously will take more than just good—or even great—candidates. More on that later.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!