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You can follow along on “Speaker Notes” to read my full narrative explaining what I think happened, going along with these slides.

Speaker Notes

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51-49 Senate (+1 from 2020)
24 Governors (+2 from 2021)
213 House Seats (-7 seats)
Statehouse highlights (MI, PA, MN)

(yay!)

What Happened?: National

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There is still vote left to count, especially out west. Some of these numbers will shift. I am working from preliminary data.

But I am confident enough of the vote is in to make clear claims about both New York and national Democrats.

What Happened?: Disclaimer

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What Happened?: National

Democrats beat expectations even while narrowly losing the national popular vote

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What Happened?: National

While Democrats did not lose the turnout game by a wide margin, the election at the national level was decided by persuasion

So why was it such a good night? The basic dynamic of any election is that it’s either turnout or persuasion – either you turn out more of your base than they do of theirs, or you do a better job convincing swing voters to go with you. And I have a strong prior with national, general elections that it’s gonna be mostly persuasion. Part of this is just arithmetic – convince one person to vote you’re +1 vote, convince one of their voters to go for you, you’re +2 votes. Part of it is that in America, it’s extremely hard to rally your base without scaring theirs in a general election. And that’s what we see in the data.

Looking at completed county turnout, we see a small effect where counties that voted for Biden had lower turnout as a % of 2022 and vice versa for Trump counties. Turnout favored Republicans in fact. AP Votecast, the closest thing we have to a useful exit poll, shows the electorate was R+4 and Democrats overperformed because they broke even with independents. (In recent years, the party in power has lost independents by double digits in just about every midterm.)��So nationally Democrats won because independent voters rejected Republican extremism on abortion, democracy, and social security and Democrats maintained focus and discipline on core issues that favored them.

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Democrats outperformed their national baseline in competitive races, especially for Senate and Governor, due to a further backlash from swing voters against MAGA candidates
Democratic message discipline made all the difference: swing voters heard a clear message about the extremism of Republican candidates and voted against them

What Happened?: National

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While the national swing against the Democrats was about 4-5 points and statewide candidates generally performed better than that baseline, in New York the statewide candidates ran ~15 points behind their benchmarks

What Happened?: New York

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No state delegation ran further behind their 2020 level than New York’s candidates for House of Representatives

What Happened?: New York

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4 of the 8 Biden seats that Republicans flipped were in New York
4 of the 5 flipped Biden seats with the highest 2020 margin were in New York
NY Dems went from a state delegation of 20 to a delegation of 15, the largest loss in the country

What Happened?: New York

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What Happened?: New York

Persuasion and Turnout

(dark purple for swing from Biden to Zeldin, bright pink for Trump to Hochul, likewise for lower and higher relative turnout)

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What Happened?: New York

Hochul’s worst losses were concentrated in New York City and its inner suburbs

Why?

Because this was where we saw the conjunction of the swing voter crisis with the turnout crisis

(NYC counties in orange)

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The Congressional map could look like a “suburbs” problem but it was really a New York City metro area problem

What Happened?: New York

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At the Assembly level, the same pattern holds: Democratic losses in swing districts at the intersection of the turnout and swing voter crises

What Happened?: Brooklyn

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What Happened?: Brooklyn

Nearly universal turnout collapse, and large swings to Zeldin in Southern BK

(blue for swing to Zeldin, yellow for swing to Hochul, likewise blue for lower relative turnout, yellow for higher)

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What Happened?: Brooklyn

The Turnout Problem and the Swing Voter Problem were mostly not correlated
Very conservative areas saw higher turnout
But there is almost no correlation between turnout effects and swing from Dem -> Rep

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What Happened?: Brooklyn

It was not a candidate problem
In every district, there were more Chu-Zeldin or Frontus-Zeldin voters than there were LaBella-Hochul or Krasny-Hochul voters
Blaming the candidates would be gross even if it weren’t also false

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What Happened?: Takes

A Huge Failure

Demotivated voters in base areas across the city and state
Swing areas turned hard for Zeldin and Republicans

Notably, demobilization remained the case, relatively, in swing areas of Kings, Queens, Richmond and Nassau Counties -- but the swing went for Zeldin

Campaign failures are rarely either/or, but rather both/and

So the first thing I want to say is I that I think this should challenge a little bit the notion that a campaign either “mobilizes the base” or “courts the swing voter”. What we see here isn’t one or the other, it’s neither. ��Sometimes when you drill down into the data you find specific stories and local causes. But sometimes what you find is a much larger story that requires holistic explanations. And that’s what we have here -- an across-the-board failure centered in New York City and its metro area.�

I don’t think that what New York Democrats needed to do was either focus on mobilizing liberals with an ideological message to get them to the polls, or run to the right on crime with a message that appealed to moderates. I think what they needed was to have a campaign and then this campaign would have done some mix of those and other things leading to more support from voters.

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What Happened?: Takes

The Big Problems

Why was Lee Zeldin popular? (Quinnipiac Poll with Hochul up 4 points showed Zeldin with +6 favorability)
The Crime Narrative (NJ-03 New York media market effects)
The very things national Democrats did so well (message discipline and defining Republican extremism) were precisely what was missing in New York

So first I want to focus on the big things. You don’t lose 10 more points from the party’s baseline in the last election than the national party without some really, really big things going on. ��The first thing I think is that it’s just wild in retrospect that Lee Zeldin was popular. A good Quinnipiac poll from a couple few weeks before the election showed he was relatively unknown (13% no opinion) but +6 in popularity. Kathy Hochul and Democrats in New York utterly failed to define Lee Zeldin as a dangerous, extreme, anti-abortion zealot that he has been in Congress. What Democrats across the country did with aplomb, convincing voters that Republicans were extreme, dangerous, and risky, did not happen at all in New York. This is something a campaign can do that is both motivating and swing vote winning: base Democrats love to see the fight, and swing voters are convinced by well-targeted negative messages as we saw clearly in the national results. (Q poll: https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3859)�

The other thing is Crime. I am not here to explain the crime rates or the effects of crime rates on voters. But here’s one thing. In NJ-03, the district is split between the NY and Philly media markets. The NY section swung right while the Philly section held, and the split was enough to save Andy Kim, the Democratic representative. The effect of New York media covering crime in a different way than even Philadelphia media, and the New York mayor going on tv to tell people how bad crime was, while the Mayor of Philadelphia more or less never did that, I think you can see the effects there. (NJ-03: https://twitter.com/JoePostingg/status/1592219900969648128)

One of the reasons Dems did so well nationally was message discipline – they stayed on message on abortion, social security, health care and extremism in ways that appealed to swing voters. The leaders of the Democratic Party in New York by contrast amplified Republican messages and voters as far away as Central Jersey heard it. This helps us understand why the swing against Democrats in New York was so clearly focused in the New York metropolitan area, because that is where Democratic failures of message discipline were the most acute.

Again, these are not issues of base vs swing. These are fundamental issues of campaign competence.

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Crime

Crime increased everywhere, but political effects very different in the NYC metro area

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What Happened?: Takes

The Margins Always Matter

There are always seats at the margins that you can win or lose
The total failure of the state and county parties to provide early funding to local electeds stands out
Specific losses with particular communities of voters played a role in Brooklyn and Queens
Ground game?

While no loss this big can be explained by the marginal failures of the Party, here the costs of those marginal failures cannot be overstated. Because New York Dems didn’t do their job on big campaign issues, they put crucial House seats at risk federally and cost Democrats in New York City their hold on a number of state assembly seats. And then a lack of funding and capacity doomed those seats that had been put at risk.��I look at the success of Democratic campaigns in Southern Brooklyn, running ahead of Hochul by 3-9 points, and I wonder how much more effective those individual messages could have been with more money, early, to enable them to send more mail, get up on social media and local media, and amplify the messages that we can see were effective at boosting their candidacies. The Party has huge privileges in New York election law to raise and move money, but the Brooklyn county party moved literally zero dollars to these campaigns. The state party mobilized little, and in particular mobilized next to nothing early in the campaign when those dollars would have gone furthest. When you look at the hundreds of votes that made the difference in AD46 and AD49, it’s hard not to think they were winnable with the support of the Party.

When you look at the maps, you see losses that are clearly specific to particular communities of voters. Chinese voters in Sunset Park, Orthodox Jewish voters in Borough Park, and even Bengali voters in Cypress Hills, where Democrats lost ground. And surrounding many of them in Southern Brooklyn, conservative white voters, often Eastern European. There are larger trends nationwide that a local candidate cannot entirely forestall. But again how much would more money to target messages and outreach have helped? Money can buy translators, it can buy outreach that gets Democrats a better understanding of what is going on in the diverse communities of Brooklyn. It’s all margins, and I think clearly margins were lost here.

And this I think is my final point about the lack of a ground game.There was no support from the county or county party to put boots on the ground through the campaign, with a tiny commitment to some paid canvassers coming on literally the final day of the campaign and not targeted to swing districts. Most campaigns are not won or lost on the ground. It is usually larger dynamics that drive outcomes. But you never know -- when a campaign is close enough, everything matters and ground matters. And here in Southern Brooklyn, and out in the swing districts in the suburbs, a present Party could have helped these campaigns get over the top.

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What Happened?: Takes

2022 must be a wake up call to New York Democrats. Our party’s failures cost Democrats a possible majority in the House of Representatives.

Without a clear reckoning over what went wrong, we will put both state and national goals at risk in upcoming elections.

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Hi! Thanks for Reading

I’m Mikael Haxby, the VP of Organizing for New Kings Democrats, and this was my slideshow.

I’d be happy to talk more about this -- I’m mildly obsessed with all this stuff -- and you can reach me at organizing@newkingsdemocrats.com