FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
by lodging primary endorse-
ments — an effort that will more
than double the number of GOP
women from 11 to at least 24 and
add new Black and Latino law-
makers to the party ranks.
“We are the working American
party and that’s what Trump was
able to do.... The number of
votes we got with Hispanics, the
number of Black Americans we
were able to get. We’re not win-
ning the majority, but, man, did
we improve. And it made the
difference,” McCarthy said.
Some Democratic lawmakers
and aides described frustration
this week at the failures inside
the party — including at the
Democratic Congressional Cam-
paign Committee, which pur-ties.”
Steel, too, ran a traditional
GOP campaign well-suited to the
Orange County cradle of small-
government conservatism — one
that mainly stayed away from the
hot-button topics of the Trump
era.
“I’ve been talking about lower
taxes, I’ve been talking about less
regulation from the govern-
ment,” Steel said Wednesday.
“Just giving [voters] the message
that, you know, let’s protect small
businesses.... If Republicans
just stay strictly with issues, with
common sense, I think in 2022,
we are going to be the majority.”
Steel’s district is one of three
districts that Hillary Clinton
won in 2016 that Democrats won
in the midterms but have now
relinquished. Two others are in
South Florida, where a surge of
Latino votes buoyed Trump and
wiped out Democrats downbal-
lot. Meanwhile, Republicans are
leading in two other Clinton
districts, the California seats rep-
resented by Democratic Reps. Gil
Cisneros and TJ Cox, and some
GOP officials believe they can
come back in late ballots and
beat Rep. Tom Malinowski (D) in
an already-called suburban New
Jersey race.
Like many fellow moderate
Democrats, Rouda expressed
frustrations that Democrats did
not do a better job combating the
socialism and anti-police attacks
that were the bread and butter of
GOP swing-district advertising.
“You’re talking to a guy who’s
created thousands of jobs, who
believes in smart capitalism and
good government. Yet broad
brushes were painted that all
Democrats were socialist,” Rou-
da said.
Some Democrats are betting
that the 2020 general election
represented a perfect storm for
down-ballot Republicans, who
benefited no t o nly from the mas-
sive turnout of otherwise politi-
cally disengaged Trump support-
ers but also from ticket-splitting
from traditional GOP voters who
opted for Biden.
Rouda, for one, has already
announced he will run to reclaim
his seat in 2022: “I think once
voters see what little is accom-
plished by my opponent versus
what I did accomplish in my two
years, there will be a clear differ-
entiation.”
Tyler Law, a C alifornia-based
Democratic consultant and for-
mer senior DCCC aide, said Dem-
ocrats have little choice but to
continue to compete for subur-
ban voters. And, he noted, de-
spite the dashed expectations,
the party’s suburban pivot suc-
ceeded in delivering back-to-
back House majorities and has
now put Biden in the White
House.
“Anytime an election may not
go as incredibly as you wanted,
people snipe back and forth, but
we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact
that Democrats reclaimed a mas-
sive amount of power in Wash-
ington,” he said. “Democrats may
not have flipped all the seats that
we wanted to. But the trend line
is ve ry clear.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Democratic gain. Another pre-
election toss-up, in the St. Louis
suburbs, slipped away with Rep.
Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) racking up
a six-point victory.
In a p arti cularly bitter loss for
Democrats, they failed to pick up
a vacant Texas district northwest
of Dallas that appeared to have
taken a sharp turn left after
Trump won it by six points in
2016.
In 2018, Democratic Rep. Beto
O’Rourke won the district by
more than three points in his
near miss challenge to GOP Sen.
Ted Cruz, while incumbent Rep.
Kenny Marchant held on by less
than three points.
But this year, Republican
nominee Beth Van Duyne edged
out Democrat Candace Valenzue-
la after running a campaign that
stressed economic recovery and
supporting law enforcement.
I n one ad, Van Duyne connect-
ed the 2016 deadly shooting of
five Dallas police officers with
the more recent “defund the
police” calls from the far left,
accusing Valenzuela of “siding
with radicals.”
In an interview, Van Duyne
credited that messaging — along
with a willingness to campaign
in person during the pandemic —
with her 1.3 point victory.
“Instead of hanging out in our
basement, we actually got out,
we were door-knocking, going
and having events, talking to
people where they felt most com-
fortable,” she said. “The message
that you heard from Republicans
is we’re out to fight for working-
class individuals, we’re going to
fight for working-class families.
We want you to have opportuni-of well-educated, wealthy voters
who had gone from supporting
Mitt Romney by 17 points in the
2012 presidential race to backing
Trump by 12.
The Democratic Congres-
sional Campaign Committee had
released an internal poll showing
the party’s candidate, former
state representative Christina
Hale, with a significant lead over
Republican Victoria Spartz —
one of several internal Demo-
cratic polls that showed a consis-
tent five to seven point lead.
While the raw numbers of
Democratic votes cast in the race
were strong, according to cam-
paign officials, they were
swamped by an unexpected
surge in GOP turnout that the
polls failed to predict. Ultimately
Hale won more than 191,
votes — a total that would have
garnered her an easy victory in
2016 or 2018, but le ft her more
than four percentage points
short in 2020.
“It was pretty clear that the
polling was just dead wrong ,”
said a Democratic operative fa-
miliar with the race, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity to
speak frankly about the race.
“They assumed you could marry
a presidential year with 2018,
and you could get this weird
hybrid. I d on’t know if it was
realistic, but it didn’t turn out
that way, and it was never going
to turn out that way.”
The news turned even more
dismal later in the evening as
returns came in from Texas,
where a spate of Republican
lawmaker retirements — herald-
ed by Democrats as a “Texit” —
failed to translate into a singlesued an aggressive strategy tar-
geting dozens of seats that ap-
peared vulnerable to the political
shifts that propelled the 2018
“blue wave” rather than focusing
on retrenching and protecting
incumbents.
But others simply described
being surprised and over-
whelmed by the scale of the GOP
turnout in places Democrats be-
lieved Trump would never again
be competitive.
Rouda, who conceded his race
Tuesday to Michelle Steel, a Re-
publican member of the Orange
County Board of Supervisors,
said he exceeded the raw number
of votes his campaign believed it
needed to se cure victory. But an
unexpected “Trump bump”
swamped it.
“We anticipated significant
voter turnout. I think what was
not anticipated by anyone across
the country was the Republican
voter turnout,” Rouda said.
“Honestly, I feel like we ran a
great campaign. We did what we
needed to do. I’m sure we made
some minor mistakes here and
there. But the only real way I s ee
us being able to have overcome
that outcome was to have regis-
tered more voters and made sure
they voted.”
Democrats’ suburban expec ta-
tions began to be dashed early on
election nigh t, as returns began
trickling in from an Indianapo-
lis-area district where national
Democrats believed they had an
excellent chance to win a vacant
seat that had been in GOP hands
for decades.
The ba ttlefield looked like fa-
vorable terrain for Democrats
based on the 2018 results — full— that allowed Republicans to
exceed expectations up and
down the ballot even as Trump
lost. The party occupying the
White House also typically loses
seats in the midterms.
“We have never been stronger
in the sense of what the future
holds for us — we have never
been in a s tronger position,” he
said. “We won this by adding
more people to the party. And we
won this in an atmosphere where
we were the one group that
everyone guaranteed we would
lose. And we’re the ones who
won.”
Democrats have, in fact, se-
cured the majority for another
two years, and the party did
manage to flip one longtime GOP
seat in the Atlanta suburbs. But
that majority appears on track to
be the slimmest in two decades —
perhaps as few as four seats —
thus complicating governing for
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-
Calif .) and Biden, and likely to
constrain their policy agenda as
the midterms loom.
In the aftermath, centrist
members have blamed the par-
ty’s left flank for counterproduc-
tive sloganeering around de-
fund ing the police and ending
private health insurance, while
the left throws their own darts at
party leaders.
“Many [voters], I believe,
bought into the message that
Democrats are marching in that
direction [of socialism], and that
was a f alse narrative. I would tell
you, the Democratic Party, in my
opinion, is more moderate than
it has ever been,” said Rep. Har-
ley Rouda (D-Calif.), a freshman
who reflected on his loss last
week. “We did not combat that
message as effectively as we
should have.”
In a memo released Wednes-
day, a c oalition of liberal groups
faulted party leaders for “un-
forced errors,” singling out Pelosi
for showing off the freezer full of
premium ice cream she keeps
inside her San Francisco home
during an April talk show inter-
view she gave at the height of the
pandemic.
“We need a new generation of
leadership grounded in a multi-
racial, working-class experience
and background,” the groups
wrote, calling for “sustained in-
vestments in field organizing”
and “an economic message that
connects with all working peo-
ple.”
Pelosi reminded her caucus
last week, “We did not win every
battle, but we did win the war.”
McCarthy reveled in the in-
fighting Wednesday, saying the
Democrats were in a “dumpster
fire” of recriminations while Re-
publicans have moved to expand
their coalition under Trump —
improving their margins with
Latinos and African Americans
and solidifying their appeal to
the White working class.
While more educated voters
appeared to flock to Biden over
Trump, McCarthy said the House
gains showed that Republicans
are on the march. And he touted
his own push to recruit more
diverse candidates — including
HOUSE FROM A
After GOP’s suburban stymie, McCarthy plants stake for ’
DEMETRIUS FREEMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) cites the d iverse coalition of candidates that allowed the GOP to exceed expectations.“We won this in
an atmosphere
where we were the
one group that
everyone
guaranteed we
would lose.”
House Minority Leader
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