Nytimes election needle11/25/2023 ![]() So if I were a Democrat, I’d be looking for someone who has that combination of appeal-someone who has the ability to reach out to moderates on pocketbook issues, who has a compelling biography. They see him as someone who is fighting for working people in much the same way that Democrats have traditionally been thought to fight for working people. There are conservatives that see him as a conservative, but there are a lot of white moderate voters in the Midwest who voted for Barack Obama who don’t see Trump as a conservative extremist at all. And I think that Donald Trump is a similar candidate in his own respect. If you were a progressive, you could see him as a progressive. You know, if you were a centrist, you could see Obama as a centrist. I mean, one of Obama’s great strengths was that he managed to sort of be something for everybody. To me, it’s not all that different from what Obama did. ![]() It’s just that I don’t think there’s necessarily all that much upside if you can excite people by other means. That’s not to say, by the way, that you can’t win doing that. And so if I were a Democrat looking at 2020, I would look to the people who did best in this year, and I would say that they are young, and that they still manage to excite people without listing off every policy dream of the left. A lot of them were just compelling candidates, really talented candidates who came forward in a year when Democrats needed them to. Both to the progressive base and to moderate voters. ![]() And yet something about their biography still made them really compelling. I mean, they weren’t necessarily centrist or something, but they weren’t running as progressive firebrands. The Democrats that I saw who outperformed the most were people who were relatively moderate. There were a lot of progressive candidates who won primaries this cycle on some sort of argument that if we mobilize the base, we can transform the electorate and win places where we don’t usually win. I would point out two things about what we see in the results so far: One is that just being a progressive superstar is not enough to fundamentally transform an electorate and win a race. Obama didn’t win those counties either, even as he carried the state.ĭoes this election give you any kind of insight into the type of candidate you think Democrats should run in 2020? won Seminole County, which is sort of east, which is suburbs north of Orlando. I can’t tell you the last time a Democrat won Jacksonville in a high-profile state election. They won Duval County, which is Jacksonville, which Democrats basically never win. But what’s really striking is that it really looks to me like Gillum and Nelson did the things they were supposed to do. ![]() And I’ve only glanced at the results by county. Were you generally surprised by the results in Florida? Not just the Senate race but the governor’s race, where Gillum’s support was also overstated? I think it’s troubling that we had another wave of final polls in Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and Missouri that all seemed to overstate the strength of the Democrats. Do you have some sense of what happened this time? Polls before the 2016 election understated the amount of lesser-educated white voters. Nikole Hannah-Jones on Donald McNeil’s Resignation, Why She Was Involved, and an Exhausting Week at the New York Times If Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Isn’t Held Responsible for Murder, He’ll Take It as Permission A 24-Year-Old Finished the Military’s Most Controversial Elite “Training”-Then Died Hours Later.
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