Sweeping Democratic victories in off-year elections seem to be foreshadowing a very good midterms for the party, and one expert believes it’s even bigger than that.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to statehouses, told Mother Jones.
The plan is to create a de facto one-party state where Republicans consistently get around 20-30% of the vote.
To stay in power, the ruling party needs the opposition to be too weak to attempt a takeover, but too strong to be wiped out. By doing this, the “I’m not [opposition]” can remain the default messaging.
Historically, when a party is defeated electorally over and over again, its members either form a new party or they rebel against leadership and the party lurches left or right in the direction of the voters. This happened to the Republican Party after they lost five presidential elections in a row (four of which were won by Franklin Roosevelt). The next Republican president in office was Dwight Eisenhower, who by today’s standards would be a moderate liberal.
You can also see it happen in other countries. After being stuck on the left side of the room for 14 years the British Labour Party elected a… moderate conservative as leader and then subsequently won the next election.
Generally speaking, when a party keeps losing elections over and over again, picking a more extreme candidate is usually catastrophic to their electoral chances—see what happened in Canada and Australia.
Before anyone comments with objections or observations of this dynamic in modern American politics, do note that no party has lost 3 elections in a row in five decades.