If you believe President Joe Biden, democracy itself was at stake in the midterm elections earlier this month. This theme was more than just a new variation on the “most important election of our lifetimes” line that politicians trot out every two years. It was a cynical attempt to distract voters from the administration’s many failures on jobs, on inflation, on Afghanistan, on crime, on schools, and everywhere else they might look.
And, for a wonder, it worked.
As a party, Republicans have to look hard at these results and realize that voters saw all the problems plaguing this country, said overwhelmingly that they thought the president and Congress were doing a bad job, that the nation was headed in the wrong direction — and then voted for the Democrats anyway. When the status quo is objectively awful, how bad do a party and its candidates have to be for people not to see them as a viable alternative?
It varied race to race, state to state. Nationwide, Republicans appear to have taken the so-called national popular vote in House races. They have secured a narrow majority of House seats. But in many marginal districts, they fell short in ways that did not match the national trends. Conversely, in many governors’ races, Republicans succeeded well beyond what national trends would suggest.
Pennsylvanians know by now how that shook out in their commonwealth. The Democrats’ “save democracy” gambit worked here especially well, and part of that was because one of the victorious candidates, Josh Shapiro, sometimes acted like he really meant it.
There have been times when the nation’s fate really did hang on the results of an election. The 1864 presidential contest is the best example of this. With the nation divided militarily by the Civil War and internally by disagreements on how to conduct that war, incumbent Abraham Lincoln worked to build the strongest coalition he could, gathering people from across the political spectrum and uniting them in pursuit of that paramount goal: preserving the union. Any other disagreements were put to one side while this existential fight played out. Lincoln even ran under the “National Union” banner, putting aside the name of his Republican Party.
It worked: Lincoln won, and the union was preserved.
So if our situation now is as perilous as the one in 1864, surely Democrats would do the same, wouldn’t they? Moderating their positions to attract independents and moderates to a party that was ordinarily too extreme to win their votes — that would be worth doing, wouldn’t it, if the national fate hung in the balance?
But, of course, almost no one did that. Across the country, Democratic candidates told voters that the choice was between their own extreme views and the death of the republic. It’s not a great way to attract voters, but it worked well enough — especially against Republican nominees who were themselves fairly extreme. Where it failed, it failed against Republicans untainted by the January 6 riots.
One Democrat who defied this trend was Pennsylvania’s governor-elect, Josh Shapiro. Already something of a moderate owing to his support of law enforcement throughout his career, Shapiro reached out to conservatives by promising to continue the fiscally conservative policies he had followed as a Montgomery County commissioner. To the consternation of his erstwhile supporters in the teachers’ unions, he even pledged support for expanding school choice in the state.
On everything but abortion, Shapiro ran as a moderate. It was enough for many Republicans to take his effort seriously. Shapiro sounded more like Tom Ridge than John Fetterman, the U.S. Senate candidate who squeaked to victory by following the more typical, radical progressive playbook. Shapiro won by 14 percentage points, a crushing victory that shows his wide appeal in this closely divided state.
So: three cheers for Shapiro? Not so fast. He may have acted as if the threat posed to democracy by his opponent, Doug Mastriano, was severe, but he also helped Mastriano triumph over his more normal Republican opponents in the primary election. That was in line with another Democratic stratagem this year: interfering in Republican primaries to help select the most extreme opponents.
As a strategy, it worked like a charm in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and we should expect to see similar chicanery on both sides in the future. But as a moral matter, it betrays a deep cynicism about the electoral process and casts doubt on the Democrats’ claims of wanting to do anything to “save democracy.”
Still, in an election full of extremists on both sides, Shapiro stands out for seeking common ground. If he holds to those promises, his term as governor could be a productive one.