Democrats learned the wrong lessons from the last midterms: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, chief political analyst Chuck Todd explains why the results of the 2022 midterm elections were a mirage for the Democrats . Plus, “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker has more from her interview with Donald Trump. And politics reporter Adam Edelman looks at how Democratic governors in blue states are already starting to push back against the coming GOP administration.

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Democrats’ midterm mirage

By Chuck Todd

The biggest difference between the successes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who both got re-elected, and the failure of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris team to win four more years was their midterm experiences.

Both Clinton and Obama got clobbered, forcing them to rethink some of their policies and how to sell them. 

Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ “better than expected” performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to.  

Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging. 

The reality is that Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms for two reasons: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the GOP’s disastrous collection of candidates in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Toss in that more Democrats are now regular voters while more Republicans are irregular voters, thanks to the realignment of the two parties over education and class, and it was a recipe for overperformance by Democrats.

When Republicans were more the party of the suburban upper middle class, they had the midterm turnout advantage almost automatically. Not anymore — it’s why Democrats usually overperform in special elections, with more devoted “every election” voters right now. Presidential elections are equalizers on those midterm turnout advantages. 

Had either Dobbs not happened or the GOP nominated more electable candidates, Republicans most likely would have won both House and Senate control in 2022, simply because of backlash to post-Covid inflation and a belief that Biden’s policies extended the issue, as well as a negative feeling about the overall job Biden was doing. 

And a shellacking in 2022 for Biden and the Democrats that was more in line with 2010 (Obama’s first midterm) or 1994 (Clinton’s first midterm) would most likely have either forced a reckoning about whether Biden should run again (perhaps even inviting primary challengers) or forced Biden to course-correct more, and more forcefully, on economic and border security sooner.

But that isn’t what happened. In fact, the resurrection of Trump as the GOP front-runner for 2024 — which began in earnest in late 2022 — only hardened this (mis)belief among Democrats that anti-Trumpism, coupled with Dobbs backlash, would linger and become the easiest and safest path to re-election.

Obviously, hindsight indicates this was a giant miscalculation. 

Read more from Chuck →

Here’s what else Trump told me during our interview

By Kristen Welker

The headlines from my 15-minute phone interview Thursday with President-elect Donald Trump included his statements that there’s “no price tag” for his mass deportation plan, and that the mandate from his victory is to “bring common sense back.” 

But there’s plenty else he told me. 

Trump boasted about the size of his victory and his performance with key demographic groups: “It was such an honor to have received the kind of vote we have received, with Black Americans, with Asian Americans, the Hispanic, Hispanic population has been so incredible. Women. You know, I heard so much — women, ultimately, they wanted safety. They wanted security.” 

National exit polls showed that Trump made gains among Latino voters, young voters, women and Asian American voters from 2020, while his support among Black voters remained about the same.

He discussed his coattails, which helped some (but not all) downballot Republicans: “I’m honored that I helped all of these senators get in. … I worked very hard on the Senate. And I know certain House seats that we won that we weren’t expected to win. But what it really tells me is that it’s a mandate for the whole country, because women, men, African American, Asian American, Hispanic American. I mean, it did so well with Hispanic Americans — such an honor. It’s really an honor.” 

Trump endorsed many of the GOP’s candidates in critical Senate and House races. Republicans regained control of the Senate, so far flipping three Democratic-held seats in West Virginia, Montana and Ohio. But Democrats managed to hold onto Senate seats in two states Trump carried, Michigan and Wisconsin. NBC News has yet to project winners in the Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada Senate races.  

In the House, Republicans had a 212-201 lead, with 22 races yet to be called as of Friday afternoon.

Trump distinguished between cracking down on “murderers” and “drug lords” and legal immigration: “We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country. … I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in. We’re gonna have a lot of businesses coming into our country. … But we want people that aren’t necessarily sitting in a jail because they murdered seven people. And I think you know, part of it, somebody said it very well: It was determined that when they got into the booth that they agreed with Trump, they didn’t want murderers, they didn’t want drug lords, they didn’t want gang members.”  

And he talked about the concession phone calls he received from Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden: “Very nice calls, very respectful both ways. I got a call from the vice president and she talked about transition. She’d like to see it be smooth as can be. And I agree with that, of course, 100%. It was a very, very friendly call. And likewise, with the president. He and I have agreed to have lunch very shortly, either before or after his trip [to South America].”

Resistance 2.0: Democratic governors vow to protect their states from Trump and his policies

By Adam Edelman

A cadre of blue-state governors is already preparing a litany of political and legal moves to shield their states’ policies and residents from federal actions under Donald Trump’s new administration. 

The plans from Democratic governors across the country — including a handful of potential 2028 presidential contenders — offer both a repeat of how leaders of liberal states pushed back against Trump during his first term, as well as a snapshot of what the resistance to him from the left will look like this time around.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that he would convene a special session of the Legislature explicitly intended to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called his state “a refuge for those whose rights are being denied elsewhere,” including those seeking political asylum, reproductive health care or to avoid persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender.

 “To anyone who intends to come, take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” he said Thursday. “You come for my people, you come through me.” 

And New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an effort this week — dubbed the “Empire State Freedom Initiative” — that she said was designed to address “policy and regulatory” threats that could happen during Trump’s administration.

Read more →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

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