The party’s campaign arm made several strategic errors, leaving their majority in doubt in 2022.
If Democrats had any hope of seizing back a GOP seat in Virginia’s Trump country in 2020, it rested with Cameron Webb.
Webb — a Black doctor who served in the Obama and Trump administrations — was running against a far-right Republican who was underfunded and opposed gay marriage and birthright citizenship. But in the end, Webb’s message of strengthening health care and rising above partisanship was drowned out, and he lost by 6 points.
“My opponent only talked about three words: Defund the police,” Webb told a group of House Democrats on a private call this week, according to several sources on the line.
But it’s clear the GOP’s weaponization of left-wing slogans like “defund the police,” while important, was not the only reason that the party is on track to lose at least seven seats in the House.
Interviews with nearly three dozen lawmakers, aides and consultants reveal a growing acknowledgment that the party’s campaign arm made several key strategic errors: it underestimated Donald Trump’s popularity, relied too much on polls and failed to heed the warnings of its most vulnerable members.
The fight over policing
Top Democrats had braced for the GOP police-focused ads. DCCC polled the issue over the summer as nationwide protests over social justice began dominating the headlines, finding it “incredibly damaging,” according to a Democratic strategist familiar with the data.
Shortly after, DCCC partnered with the Congressional Black Caucus’ political arm to attempt to produce a campaign message that addressed the systemic inequalities without handing the GOP a win on the policing debate. They created some ads, including ones focused on policing reform that aired in the Black community in seats held by vulnerable Democrats.
Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Black caucuses’ campaign arm, CBC PAC, said it’s clear the party came up short. He added that it’s urgent for the party to quickly recalibrate if Democrats want any hope of winning two longshot Senate runoffs in Georgia in January, their only chance at taking control of the upper chamber.
“We want the caucus to be accurately depicted. And if you look at the Democratic Caucus, if you’re going to accurately depict it — unlike what Republicans did — we’re not for defunding the police and we’re not socialists,” Meeks said. “We’re going to be doing all that we can to make sure that we win in Georgia.”
Most endangered Democrats struggled to counter the flood of GOP ads on the issue: Republicans aired roughly 70 different broadcast ads that mentioned “defund the police,” according to data from Advertising Analytics, a media tracking firm.
Republicans were relentless as they aired 30-second attack ads that swarmed vulnerable incumbents. In red-leaning districts, such as Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi’s (D-N.Y.) in upstate New York, the “defund the police” ads emphasized violent protestors and looters. In a purple suburban Philadelphia seat held by GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who won reelection, the ads featured a mom who worried a smaller police budget would make her family less safe from robbers.
Democrats tried repeatedly to combat these law-and-order attacks. Some, like Rose, an Army veteran, vowed in a TV ad never to defund law enforcement. And money was not the issue — Democratic candidates were outspending their GOP opponents by a nearly 2:1 ratio in the final weeks. Yet they struggled to overcome the hits.
Misplaced faith in polling
Republicans’ unexpected surge also exposed polling weaknesses in unexpected places, like districts in south Florida and Orange County in California that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. It also sabotaged Democratic hopes of flipping as many as 10 seats in Texas, where the campaign arm had invested heavily and even opened an outpost in Austin
Warnings from incumbents
Still, some Democrats said there were signs from vulnerable districts that the party did ignore.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) said her biggest takeaway from the GOP’s upset in South Florida, where two incumbents were unseated, is that Democrats failed to take her warning seriously in early 2019 that GOP attacks on “socialism” were resonating with her home state’s expat community, including many Cubans and Venezuelans who fled communist regimes decades earlier.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/house-democrats-post-election-reckoning-436335