Americana

The Americana Awards

Photo: Flickr/Office of Tom Wolf

What changed, exactly, after the most expensive midterm elections in American history?

Well: Republicans replaced the narrowest Democratic House majority in decades with the narrowest GOP majority ever. Democrats gained one Senate seat as no senator, from either party, lost re-election. The GOP expanded its legislative majorities in red states, while losing one or both Houses of the legislature in three swing states: Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

Nearly $17 billion was spent on a stalemate. Republicans started the cycle with breakneck momentum, and lost it after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Instead of a red wave, we saw the party coalitions that formed after 2016 lock in — Republicans struggling in most cities and suburbs, Democrats still hopeless outside of them. But some people had a very good year, and this is a place to celebrate them.

Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016.

This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point. He spent years developing a style and record that could appeal to non-Democrats, which the campaign boiled into “no county left behind,” sending the candidate to places where his party was toxically unpopular and spending in underserved markets like Erie.

Best gubernatorial campaign: Joe Lombardo in Nevada. He did what no other Republican could pull off this year, unseating a Democratic governor by indicting his record during the pandemic and the 2021 crime spike. Lombardo pocketed an endorsement from Donald Trump, then never talked about the ex-president, separating himself from a statewide ticket obsessed with re-fighting 2020.

Best congressional campaign: George Santos in New York. If his luck is running out now, and bizarre inconsistencies and lies about his background end his career in the House, it can’t erase what he pulled off. He ran as a sacrificial lamb in 2020, lost by 12.5 points, fashionably suggested that the election was stolen, and immediately started running again. He stayed under the radar, filed his financial disclosure 20 months after the deadline, and wasted tens-of-thousands of dollars on baffling expenses. Then he won by 8.2 points, zooming along with the Long Island GOP wave. Other candidates ran more, let’s say, sustainable campaigns, but nobody beat the system like Santos, a.k.a. Zabrovsky.

Best state party: The Republican Party of Florida. It set the standard for raising money, finding new voters, and building a flywheel for its statewide dominance. This was less of a breakthrough year than a culmination, with three long-term decisions paying off for Gov. Ron DeSantis and the RPOF.

First: DeSantis appointed conservative judges to state courts, which dramatically reduced the risk of Republican-drafted maps or voting laws being struck down. Second: DeSantis raised more money than any candidate for governor ever had, in a state where there are no limits on donations to political committees, which helped Republicans take their first-ever lead over Democrats in voter registration. Third: DeSantis took control of the redistricting process and substituted a map that had included several opportunities for Democrats with one that would give them just eight of 28 House seats.

Best return on investment: The $60 million spread across the country by the States Project, a progressive effort to flip state legislatures and deny Republicans the power to shape key election rules going forward. Progressive donors had tried that and failed in 2020, casting a pall over the whole idea. But in 2022 the strategy paid off.

Even in Arizona, where the extra money didn’t switch control of the state Senate, it helped the party win down-ballot races after the GOP picked weak MAGA candidates (a bit like what happened in the state’s contest for governor). The coalition of “America First Secretary of State candidates” nearly got wiped out, reduced to one win in Indiana, thanks in part to all the new progressive money highlighting races that voters usually pay less attention to.

Best luck: Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat whom Republicans drew into a seat designed to elect whoever got out of their primary. Two GOP state legislators battled it out for the right to face her; both lost to J.R. Majewski, described by one publication as a “novelty-rapping, QAnon-curious Air Force veteran,” who’d traveled to D.C. for the Jan. 6 insurrection and gotten some local attention for painting a 19,000 square foot Trump banner on his lawn.

Best Ad (Primary): J.D. Vance for Senate, “Are You a Racist?” They knew who’d make fun of it, and that was why it would work. Vance, who spent a whole campaign breaking the hearts of liberals who’d bought “Hillbilly Elegy,” was losing the Ohio U.S. Senate primary when he put this out. “Do you hate Mexicans?” Vance asked sarcastically, telling primary voters that they should be able to talk about drug trafficking without being canceled.

Best Ad (General): Mary Peltola, “Don Young’s Legacy.” Helped by Alaska’s new top-four runoff system, Peltola ran further ahead of Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers than any other Democrat in the country. Her memorable ads talked about her support for the fishing industry, her support for abortion rights, and her political independence, positioning her as the heir to 49-year GOP incumbent Don Young after his death.

Best pollster: We’ve got a dramatic, academic tie here: New York’s Siena College and Boston’s Suffolk University, both of which accurately snapshotted the electorate even as pundits and bad polling foresaw a GOP wave. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, for instance, Siena put Mark Kelly up by 6 points and John Fetterman up by 5 points; both won by 4.9 points. A Suffolk poll conducted for USA Today gave Catherine Cortez Masto a 1-point lead, and she won by 0.9 points.

The 2020 election was rough for traditional pollsters, constantly adjusting to lower and lower response rates. But they nailed 2022, and walked away with more credibility than partisan outfits who predicted everything breaking towards Republicans. Some pollsters saw exactly what was happening; some saw a single-digit race for U.S. Senate in Vermont, where Democrat Peter Welch ended up winning by 39.5 points.

Best campaign podcast: Steve Bannon’s War Room Radio, whose influence grew even as its most frequent guests got turfed by voters. No subpoena or criminal conviction could stop Bannon from turning his show into Radio Londres for the MAGA movement, a waiting room for the next Republican majority, embodied by characters like Blake Masters, Joe Kent, and Kari Lake. Candidates who don’t talk to legacy media, as a rule, shared their strategies and agendas (including the revenge they’d seek over the 2020 election) with Bannon. In the words of Sun Tzu, one may know how to conquer without being able to do it.

The Houdini prize for escaping potential disaster: Oregon Democrats, who did not nominate Carrick Flynn for Congress. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder and an investor in Semafor, put $27 million into the Protect Our Future PAC, which spread it to 19 Democratic candidates. Flynn, a pandemic researcher with ties to Bankman-Fried, got nearly $10.5 million worth of help from the PAC. The House Democrats’ super PAC flew in to help, signaling that the party wanted to stay on Bankman-Fried’s good side. All of that backfired, with Flynn’s rivals uniting to criticize the outside money, and Rep.-elect Andrea Salinas winning the primary by 18 points — thus sparing her party the potential headache of having to welcome SBF’s handpicked congressman into their caucus.

The Cassandra prize for best unheeded warning: The North Shore Leader, a Long Island newspaper that published numerous stories questioning the resume that George Santos was offering voters in New York’s 3rd congressional district. Its reporting on the candidate’s (very late) personal campaign finance statement asked why “a man of such alleged wealth” lived in a rented apartment and took out a five-figure car loan to drive a Nissan. Good question!

National: Jonathan Weisman and Ken Bensinger explain the “Hobson’s choice” facing members of the Republican National Committee… Ed Kilgore bids farewell to the political celebrities who got retired by voters this year… Gabriel Debenedetti gets inside the preparations for Biden 2024… House Democrats break the seal on Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Illinois: Gregory Pratt and Alice Yin ask whether Chicago voters will replace Lori Lightfoot, who won her first term as an outsider, with a new and less unpopular outsider.

Louisiana: Tyler Bridges checks in on the GOP race for governor, with Attorney Gen. Jeff Landry in command, after battling the Biden administration and fighting to ban abortion.

New York: Kadia Goba puts George Santos on the defensive about his business record … Olivia Beavers talks with the House Republicans who dread Santos showing up, preferring to “govern without distraction” … Roger Sollenberger and William Bredderman investigate whether Santos’s campaign loans were legal.

Wisconsin. Steven Walters sizes up the conservative fight for a state Supreme Court seat, with Democrats ready to battle whoever comes out of the primary.

Meet Robert Garcia, leader of the House Democratic freshmen

LONG BEACH, Ca. – There were other things to talk about, other issues he’d tackle as a freshman Democrat from a safe seat. Robert Garcia came to America from Peru when he was five years old, becoming Long Beach’s youngest mayor; then, at 45, the first openly gay immigrant elected to Congress.

But on Wednesday, when Garcia sat down at a cafe near his home, he was still thinking about George Santos, who he’d been mocking on Twitter as an embarrassment to the rest of the gay community. Garcia, whose mother and step-father died after contracting covid-19, was a rising Democratic star who got noticed after Long Beach’s fast success with vaccinations. His fellow freshman had just elected him class president, so we talked about what he was expecting, and dreading, in the job they’d all just won.

Americana: How does the House you’re joining differ from the one you thought you’d be joining? When you got into this race, the expectation was that there’d be a solid GOP majority in the House.

Robert Garcia: I expected a Republican clown car from day one. With George Santos and all the other news coming out, it’s very clear that the extreme wing of the Republican Party is going to continue to control their agenda in Congress. But people were prepared for us to be in a much worse position. We’re what — five, six seats away from the majority? That puts us in a great place in 2024.

Americana: Where does Santos fit into that?

Robert Garcia: He’s obviously a serial liar. He shouldn’t be in Congress. Sometimes people get a date wrong, sometimes people get some detail in their life history wrong. But this is a consistent string of mistruths that, I think, deserves an important look from the House [Ethics Committee]. Going from being in a tough financial spot to loaning yourself $700,000 is wild.

What probably bothers me the most is the way he lied about the Pulse shooting. It’s one thing to lie about having a college degree; as an educator, I think it’s awful. It’s another thing to then lie about the most horrific massacre for our community and say that you had employees that were part of it. No, he should resign.

Americana: When should someone actually be kicked out of Congress or removed from committees, as Republicans say they want to do to some of your colleagues like Adam Schiff?

Robert Garcia: There’s a big difference between having a different opinion on policy and being a fraud, a liar, and an anti-Semite, and continuously putting out misinformation that actually kills people. Marjorie Taylor Greene should not only not be on any committee, she shouldn’t even be in Congress.

I have no pity for folks that just continuously lie about something as simple as public health. I speak as someone who lost two parents to the pandemic, my mom and my stepdad. And my mom was a healthcare worker.

Americana: So what do you see yourself working with Republicans on, if that’s where their party is?

Robert Garcia: For me to work with any Republican in Congress, they’re first going to have to accept me for who I am, and not actually try to take away my civil rights as an LGBTQ+ person. If you’re out there bashing gay people, I really don’t have any interest in working with you, because you can’t even view us as Americans. I’m not excited at all to work with people that don’t support gay marriage or that want to talk down trans people or that don’t support gay people having the same basic rights as anybody else.

But I think immigration is a great starting place. I think there’s a false narrative out there that we’re so far apart on the issue, when the country is pretty united. This country wants a pathway to citizenship for people that are here, especially those that are in the military, and everyone wants a safe, secure border.

Americana: You say that, but after Trump, lots of progressives hear “border security” and say, “No, sorry, that means the border wall, that means giving in more when we never get what we want.”

Robert Garcia: The border wall, in and of itself, is stupid. That obviously took the whole debate in a different direction, and Trump attacked immigrants constantly. I think an immigration package has to start with a pathway to citizenship that’s progressive, and brings as many people as possible into the process.

I came to the US when I was five years old. I became a US citizen when I was 21, when I was in college. And that changed my life. That gave me opportunities. I mean, I’m going to be a congressman, I got to serve my city as mayor. Every kid should get that same opportunity that I got. I think if progressives got DACA, a pathway to citizenship, a guest worker program, and more foreign aid, there’s a path to passing this.

Americana: You co-founded Mayors for Medicare-for-All. For a few years, the idea I heard from Medicare-for-All advocates was that Bernie Sanders could win the presidency, break the filibuster, and pass it. If that’s off the table, how do you get to Medicare-for-all?

Robert Garcia: I like the approach of lowering the eligibility age. We start by strengthening Medicare, adding dental and vision care, and we lower the age. There already are bills that would do that. Look, if there was a bill on the floor that actually tried to transition us to Medicare-for-All with the infrastructure to do it, I’d vote for it. But this is more about getting to a place where people don’t depend on their workplace for health insurance.

Americana: Are you the only Progressive Caucus member who used to be a Republican? Why did you switch?

Robert Garcia: To me, this ties back to the immigration question. When I came here, when I was five years old, my family, like, loved Ronald Reagan. He was the last president to actually sign immigration reform. It is crazy to me that we have gone from someone that actually supported amnesty in the Republican Party to where we are today.

With my family, over the course of a few years, we just realized: Oh, wait, I’m gay. Oh, wait, we’re low income. Oh, wait, the Republican Party isn’t for us.

… 11 days until special legislative elections in Virginia

… 53 days until the special election for Virginia’s 4th district

… 60 days until Chicago’s mayoral election

… 95 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election

… 676 days until the 2024 presidential election

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