Democrats’ Top-Secret Formula for Victory

In a Pennsylvania congressional district, Conor Lamb defies the odds to beat his Republican opponent in a bitterly fought special election and the message is clear: Democrats must hug the center. Dozens of strategists take careful note. A hundred news commentaries bloom.

In a New York congressional district months later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stages an extraordinary Democratic primary upset and the wisdom inverts: Leftward lies glory. The strategists regroup. The commentators rewrite.

Michigan delivers one verdict about Democrats’ best direction and then Massachusetts hands down another. What happens in the party’s gubernatorial primary in Florida is contradicted by what happens in its gubernatorial primaries in Rhode Island and New York. And so it seesaws, over and over, as we rapt observers yearn for a pattern and persuade ourselves that we’ve found one only to have it vanish before our eyes.

That’s because we’re staring at the wrong thing. Intent on some ideological takeaway, we miss the human moral. This year’s victorious candidates, like so many winners before them, aren’t prevailing simply or even mainly because of the labels they’re wearing or the precise points on the political spectrum to which they can be affixed.

They’re powered by their personalities, their organizations or both. They communicate effectively. They have backgrounds that make sense to voters or temperaments that feel right to them. And they’ve devised ways to reach voters that their rivals haven’t.

The lesson of 2018 isn’t novel. But it’s overlooked because it doesn’t come wrapped in fancy analytics, it can’t be integrated into sweeping pronouncements about the arc of America, and it transcends our beloved binaries of progressive versus moderate and blue versus red.

Candidates matter. Campaigns count. Voters use more than bullet points, spreadsheets and the marching orders of the Democratic Socialists of America or the New Democrat Coalition to make decisions. We use our hearts. We use our guts. (Sometimes we even use our minds, though not nearly often enough.)

I’m speaking broadly, yes, and there are exceptions aplenty. Anyone who has spent any time on Capitol Hill knows that it’s entirely possible to be both insipid and an incumbent re-elected again and again. Any full inventory of the 2018 contests includes losers exponentially more enticing than the dullards who trounced them. Democracy works in mysterious ways.

And Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, was exactly right when she responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s triumph by deeming it a reflection of that particular district and that peculiar race at that specific moment in time.

“There’s an attempt to boil everything down to a black-and-white narrative, and races are complex organisms with hundreds of factors involved,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor and publisher of Inside Elections, which provides nonpartisan analysis of political races. But always in that mix, he said, “are the fundamentals of running a good campaign and being a good candidate.”

I do think — and have written — that Democratic moderates have found more validation than progressives in 2018, a conclusion supported by the success in New York on Thursday not just of Gov. Andrew Cuomo but also of the nominees for lieutenant governor and attorney general. As James Hohmann of The Washington Post wrote the morning after, “This week’s final batch of 2018 primaries ought to temper, at least somewhat, the over-torqued conventional wisdom that a liberal insurgency is taking over the Democratic Party.”

But I also think that if a single bold thread runs through the results so far and the surprisingly strong general-election prospects of some Democratic nominees in districts and states that lean Republican, it’s not a given position on Medicare for all or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It’s candidates’ ability to connect and make the case.

Did Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for governor in Florida, win his primary because he was the most progressive of the four main candidates? That’s a less likely explanation than two others. First, his rivals, fixated on each other, competed for and split the same territory, enabling Gillum to gobble up different ground. Second, he was an impassioned, magnetic competitor with an inspiring biography, a talent for telling it and an innovative approach.

That same description fits Ocasio-Cortez and also Ayanna Pressley, whose recent victory over a longtime incumbent, Rep. Michael Capuano, in a Democratic House primary in Massachusetts was another of 2018’s big stories. Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley outsprinted, outsmarted and outtalked their opponents. So did Stacey Abrams en route to her historic triumph in Georgia, where she became the first African-American woman to be nominated for governor by the Democratic Party.

Gillum, Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley and Abrams are all people of color and all under 45. They reflect another important theme of 2018: Democratic voters’ embrace of minorities, women, youth and a diverse slate of candidates who more accurately mirror the country. But just as consequentially, they’re seriously talented candidates.

Perhaps no contest affirms the power of personality as well as the Senate race in Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office in more than 20 years. Against those odds, the Democratic nominee, Beto O’Rourke, has become a genuine threat to the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz.

O’Rourke’s secret isn’t some daredevil finessing of the issues, some razzle-dazzle camouflage of his unequivocally progressive soul. It’s sheer likability (along with a fierce work ethic) and the contrast that draws with Cruz. O’Rourke is the better candidate. And by racking up road miles, keeping a lively Facebook chronicle of his journey and orchestrating scenes that go viral on social media, he’s running the much better campaign.

The Democrats’ hopes for a Senate majority hinge largely on how personally appealing and politically nimble candidates in tough races are. If Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Jon Tester in Montana, Joe Manchin in West Virginia and other Democratic senators running for re-election in red states where Donald Trump is popular win, it won’t be because they have voted consistently with Trump. They haven’t. They’ll win in large part because they have managed, through deft interpersonal skills and dexterous campaigns, to garner the affection and respect of their constituents, and because the Republican opponents that they happen to be facing aren’t rock stars.

“Would Democrats have a chance of holding on to Ohio if it weren’t for Sherrod Brown?” asked Amy Walter, national editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, referring to another Democratic senator running for re-election in a state that voted for Trump. “If you just looked at the numbers, you’d say, ‘He’s going to be crushed there.’ And he’s such a liberal.” But he projects a rumpled authenticity that has endeared him to Ohioans, who haven’t found much in Jim Renacci, the Republican nominee, to thrill to. And he’s heavily favored to win on Nov. 6.

In races that aren’t foregone conclusions by dint of the moment or the place, the superior candidate often wins. Obvious, I know. But it’s amazing how frequently we forget that, and Democratic voters can’t afford to when picking the person to square off against Trump in 2020.