Democrats interrupt history to make their own

For months leading up to the midterm elections, all we heard from the chattering class was doom and gloom and boom and boom about how the midterms would be devastating for Democrats and President Biden.

We heard there was “no message.” We heard dire forecasts of a “red wave,” even a tsunami, coming. We heard about how history taught us there was no way we’d survive. Of course, we had heard that before.

Well, Election Day proved the chattering class wrong. They predicted a historic election, and we interrupted that history to make some of our own.

In fact, as the results dribbled in, I was reminded of how in the darkest days of World War II, when all hope seemed to be lost, Sir Winston Churchill is reported to have said, “I believe history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”

You see, just as Churchill was inundated with his own doomsayers, I wasn’t so shocked by the relentless chatter in the D.C. bubble or on social media. They’ve chattered before and they’ll chatter again. But I was shocked by how wrong they were.

Let’s be clear, these results weren’t just historic for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, they defied gravity. Here are some facts:

• The party in the White House has lost an average of 26 members in the House in every midterm election since 1934. At last count, Democrats had lost 18 but gained six — for a net loss of 12.
  
• Biden is the first president since Franklin Roosevelt whose party gained governorships in a midterm: four so far (Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland and Arizona).
  
• Democrats defied dire predictions about losing control of the Senate and actually flipped Pennsylvania. The party is positioned to expand the majority on Dec. 6 with Georgia’s runoff election.
  
• In Michigan alone, we not only flipped the state House and Senate (securing the state Senate majority for the first time since 1983), but we elected the state’s first Black speaker of the House, the first Arab American and Muslim House majority leader, and the first woman majority leader in the state Senate.
  
• We won the trifecta (governor’s office, as well as majorities in both the state House and Senate) in both Michigan and Minnesota.

• We watched Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) beat back Rick Caruso’s $100 million campaign to become the first woman mayor of Los Angeles and join trailblazers such as Mayors Eric Adams of New York, Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Sylvester Turner of Houston.
  
• And, importantly, we kept election deniers out of the Secretary of State offices in New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and Nevada.

If that isn’t enough to take your breath, we passed ballot measures to protect reproductive rights and voting rights in Vermont, Michigan, California and Connecticut, while defeating a constitutional amendment that would have eliminated the right to choose regarding abortion in Kentucky.

I don’t care who you are — that’s a big night. It just goes to show that every time they count us out, we show them they don’t know how to count.

But how did this happen? It’s really simple: All the work to strengthen the Democratic ecosystem that I’ve been talking about paid off.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), led by Chair Jaime Harrison and all our committee chairs, invested $90 million in state and electoral midterm programs, tripling its 2018 investment. In addition, the DNC made the largest-ever midterm cash transfer of $27 million to the Democratic Senate and Congressional Campaign Committees, not to mention the intentional investments made earlier than ever by the DSCC, DCCC and other committees in our most loyal and consistent voting blocs, combining the high-tech and high-touch strategies that really matter, especially in communities of color.

I’m proud of that, not only because it demonstrates how practical investments pay off, but also because it proves without a doubt that the grassroots still matter in our party. Of course, this is inside baseball. At the end of the day, all the money and messages in the world don’t win elections. Votes do — Americans voted.

Every major movement in our nation’s history has been fueled by Black folks, women and young people, and this movement was no different. Who saved America from the right wing, MAGA, election-denying, insurrection-supporting extremists who are trying to take over the Republican Party? American voters did.

The 2022 midterms marked the second highest youth turnout in three decades, with an estimated 30 percent of voters under 30 casting their ballots. Women, particularly driven by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, made up roughly 52 percent of all votes cast and an estimated 31.9 million Democratic ballots. In Georgia, Black voters topped their early voting record from 2018, driving Democratic Sen. Ralph Warnock to an Election Day plurality and setting him up to close the deal in the upcoming runoff against Republican Herschel Walker.

It turns out that I was right when I wrote that this election would be about progress or regress, that we had not just an opportunity but an obligation to vote in 2022.

Despite their best efforts, Republicans just couldn’t attack Democrats on policy, because all the major legislation passed under Biden was either passed with Republican votes or turned out to be very popular in Republican districts.

Beyond that, the GOP had few alternative ideas that didn’t involve gutting Medicare and Social Security, denying the 2020 election results, suppressing the right to vote, undoing the president’s plan for student debt relief, or instituting a national abortion ban.

They campaigned by saying “No” to everything we said “Yes” to — and it backfired, big time.

Of course, when you talk with folks who are more interested in Main Street than K Street, the results are not surprising. That’s because there was a very different conversation going on in town squares. 

American voters aren’t stupid or shortsighted. We aren’t passive-aggressive, and we aren’t vindictive. We believe in America. We believe in our fellow Americans. We reach beyond our grasp and we punch above our weight. We stand up for each other — and that’s why Democrats won.

Antjuan Seawright is a Democratic political strategist, founder and CEO of Blueprint Strategy LLC, a CBS News political contributor, and a senior visiting fellow at Third Way. Follow him on Twitter @antjuansea.