Winning Senate candidates

Matt Yglesias has written a long argument for why Democrats should want candidates in some states who are a little less in accord with our most progressive stances. He asserts we cannot win the Senate with people who are completely onboard with our best positions; most states lean at least a little to the right of the big states that are reliably Democratic and our candidates would do better if they reflected that reality. The essay is challenging and worth reading. 

But that's not what I want to write about here because Yglesias includes something that political commentators usually fail to do: along with Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, he lists Nevada as a place where Democrats have been winning very narrow victories. That's true. In 2020, Joe Biden's margin in Nevada was less than in Michigan and Pennsylvania and was also challenged with crackpot GOP fraud theories. In 2016, Hillary Clinton's margin was similarly tiny, 27,202 votes.

Jacky Rosen

But Nevada is also a place where Democrats hold both Senate seats, one elected in 2016 (Catherine Cortez-Masto), and one replacing a Republican in 2018 (Jackie Rosen). As far as I can tell, neither of them vocally staked out stances that separated them from national Democratic policy planks. They may not have been screaming for gun control, but Cortez-Masto, as a former state attorney general, was onboard with regulating guns. The NRA spent heavily against her. Both Senators held a conventional Democratic women's position in favor of legal abortion.

Now perhaps Nevada is a unique place where Dems can get away with being more progressive. It's a lopsided state, consisting of two urbanish areas (Las Vegas and Reno) with 85 percent of the voters. This makes it the 5th most urban state according to the census, though for those of us in bigger cities, we might not recognize that. The rest is desert -- and everywhere access to water is the underlying issue. What Nevadans call "the rurals," the desert counties, vote strongly libertarian Republican. The entire state is heavily dependent on tourism; though Las Vegas hotels are mostly union shops, this is still a low wage, contingent worker economy.

Steve Sisolak

Yet mainstream progressive Democrats can win here, contra Yglesias' theory. I saw little of the 2016 race, but I saw Rosen's run in 2018 up close. She defeated her Republican opponent by hanging his vote to defund Obamacare around his neck and showing ads of him yucking it up with Trump. Rosen had the good fortune to be running in the same election alongside gubernatorial candidate Steve Sisolak, a seasoned white pol who looks like an old-time construction boss. He was a reassuring figure. Neither Democrat was successfully painted as dangerously liberal and both won, though not by a lot.

These Nevada Democrats did have the advantage of strong canvass operations mounted by the hotel workers' Culinary Union/UniteHERE. The urban areas are so discrete, and the overall population is also small, so that turnout work can have an impact. UniteHERE replicated that push in 2020 for Biden. 

Does the Nevada example hold against Yglesias' thesis that if Dems hope to win the Senate, they need candidates who trim their progressive sails (or never had progressive stances)? I am not sure it says much either way. Candidates do need to be good fits for their states -- convincingly attuned to their local issues. They need to be good communicators. And they may also need luck in the national environments in which they get to make their cases. With the nationalization of elections, I'm not convinced most voters ever take in the policy positions candidates are offering; they just figure out which kind feels right.

And both Nevada's experience and Georgia's Senate run-off elections this year show that on-the-ground voter mobilization can swing races that are close. Pundits poo-poo this, but we can see the results in the Senate today.