The election is about to teach us how much Americans care about the preservation of democracy.
When we recently asked two very different political thinkers — Dan McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review, and Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign — to each write a closing-argument essay about why his or her party would have a good Election Day, we didn't know they'd zero in on the same theme: candidate quality. |
Smith and McCarthy diverged in their views, of course, but I came away from both of their guest essays more certain than ever about one thing: We are going to learn something very important about the Republican Party in Tuesday's elections, particularly in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio and New Hampshire — five battleground states that will be critical to electing the next president in 2024. |
Specifically, we'll learn whether the party's turn away from experienced, conservative candidates and toward more high-risk candidates — political outsiders with far-right views such as, in some cases, denying the 2020 election result — actually has appeal across the electorate, including with sizable numbers of moderates and independents and even some Democrats. If some or all of the G.O.P. Senate candidates win in those five states, it will send a big message that Donald Trump-like figures (and perhaps Trump himself) have a future even in hotly competitive swing states, as McCarthy writes. |
"The Republican Party has nominated and is primed to elect a wave of right-wing candidates who will shape American politics in the years ahead with or without Mr. Trump," McCarthy writes. "The Republicans, in short, are taking entrepreneurial risks and have the initiative. And while the conditions of the 2022 midterms allow them to capitalize on it, the impetus itself is what matters most for our future." |
Smith argues that the quality of Democratic candidates — and the lack of quality in the G.O.P. outsiders — will help her party try to hold the line in the Senate during an election year that would otherwise go red. Her essay, too, left me questioning the conventional wisdom that mainstream, center-minded candidates do best in swing state general elections. Perhaps not when the economic and social conditions are ripe for disruptive change. |
These essays, and our recent focus groups of Georgia and Arizona voters, left me thinking that more voters than many of us realize are ambivalent about traditional American values like protecting democracy and free and fair elections. For many of them, this election is all about kitchen-table issues and how they feel about them. Their votes are being shaped by what they've heard from a friend about a mugging or an assault or read about a shooting at a school or a mall or gas prices or rent bills that are pinching them. I'm not discounting that at all. If political elites missed the intensity and scope of white working-class grievances in 2016, they may now be missing how few people are invested in what we call democracy and are willing to vote to protect it. |
The essays by McCarthy and Smith underscore that voters are not only choosing between sharply different candidates but also deciding whether to support — and, ultimately, legitimize — Republicans who would question election results and democratic norms. It'll be quite a moment of truth about American voters. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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