NJ-GOV 2021 megathread

[GALeftist]

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1455736858164572165?s=20

The plot thickens

Slightly off topic but Nate Cohn is by far my favorite of the Twitter forecaster guys. Pretty much nailed VA-GOV from the outset.

[GALeftist]

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1455747042366705665?s=20

I mostly agree with this take. A national environment that makes VA R+1 probably makes NJ a narrow D win, and that's where we appear heading. So any state specific issues on either side of the coin in our nationalized elections probably are marginal at best.

Yeah, I mean, to this point, look at the 2019 gubernatorial elections. Dems won in Kentucky and Louisiana when they honestly had no business doing so and kept Mississippi close at least in part because the environment was quite good for them. Candidate quality had something to do with it, sure, but parties win in inhospitable terrain when it's an off-off-year and the president is underwater by ten points. It's just what happens.

[GALeftist]

I see we're back to our regularly scheduled programming and relitigating the 2016 primary.

Listen, some places, like Buffalo, Seattle, and Minneapolis the left is getting defeated, although frankly none of that is surprising to me. Other places, like FL-20, Cleveland, and Boston, the left is doing well. Likewise, in some places centrist Democrats are doing relatively well, in others they are not. As always, there is not a single story here. Most of these races were highly local and involved complex factors beyond Atlas-brained adherence to one of two camps within the Democratic Party. These cheap dunks taking a few mayoral races and making sweeping extrapolations across the nation are not based in fact.

[GALeftist]

Murphy takes the lead on DDHQ

Whew. Going to bed now. One admittedly rather small victory of the night in my opinion was that Murphy seems to have squeaked it out (KNOCK ON WOOD) *and* Sweeney is now gone (got beat by some no-name sacrificial lamb), which will likely more the New Jersey trifecta left.

[GALeftist]

Murphy did all the supposedly super popular progressive stuff (legalized marijuana, raised taxes on the rich, $15 minimum wage, etc.) and it doesn't seem to have helped at all. Voters do not vote on policy; they vote on vibes. Seems bad for the long-term viability of democracy, IMO.

This has, of course, always been the case.

And it leaves Democrats with a problem which is at once simple and all too difficult to solve: their vibes are simply atrocious at the moment.

[GALeftist]

These state races don't always indicate much about federal ones. There are plenty of people who will vote one way at the state level but not the same at the federal level. Kentucky and Louisiana are a good example.

I think the better takeaway is that "it is not written in stone that 2022 is going to be an apocalyptic night for the Democrats." (We also have to remember that Newsom survived with minimal change from 2018.) Anyway, I think the message we should take away is that the Democratic brand is toxic right now, and if the election were held today, Biden would lose by a lot, just like Trump would lose by a lot if the election had been held in 2019 (although he probably still would have carried Louisiana and Kentucky, they just would have been closer than usual). But Trump turned it around by 2020, and there's no reason the same thing can't happen for Democrats by 2022. I won't hold my breath, but that's certainly what they should aim for.