Did progressive or moderate Democratic incumbents perform better in this year's House elections?
Shrug.
Plenty of ink has been spilled since November by those seeking to provide explanations for why Democrats generally did better than expected in the midterms — and why they ultimately came up just five close races short of maintaining control of the House of Representatives. This result was a reminder that for a party to secure a majority in a closely divided polity, it must win races on tightly contested, and sometimes unfavorable, terrain.
The irritating thing about some of the post-election analyses of what made Democrats win or lose is that people cherry-pick particular examples of races, which can sacrifice big-picture accuracy in favor of more interesting articles or convenient narratives. They might also leave out inconvenient context. At one point, a recent article in The American Prospect does both, pointing out that “The six sitting House Democrats who lost general-election bids — Cindy Axne, Tom O’Halleran, Al Lawson, Elaine Luria, Tom Malinowski, and Sean Patrick Maloney — are all consummate moderates and members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. And five of the six ran behind President Biden’s 2020 performance with the voters in their districts.”
This isn’t very useful if we’re trying to understand what makes candidates win or lose seats.
Biden’s 2020 performance isn’t a great comparison because even in that year, he outran House Democrats: Biden beat Trump by 4.6% of the national popular vote, while Democrats netted 3.1% more of the national House vote than Republicans. And 2022 was a worse national environment for Democrats than 2020: Republicans actually led Democrats by 2.8% in the national House vote.
Also, knowing that the six Democratic incumbents who lost in 2022 were New Democrats doesn’t actually tell us much about the viability of different ideological positions a candidate can stake out. I’ll discuss a few reasons why.
New Democrats tend to represent swingier districts where incumbents are more at risk.
Consider the set of House races where current Democratic representatives were running for re-election. Because of retirements and redistricting, this number is significantly lower than the amount of seats held by Democrats going into 2022. Some in this group don’t belong to any of the party’s three ideological caucuses: the conservative-to-centrist Blue Dog Coalition, the center-left New Democrat Coalition, and the Progressive Caucus. I also exclude them from this analysis because a lack of such membership leaves us without a useful point of comparison. By my count, that narrows it down to 146 races in which a current Democratic House member who belonged to at least one of those caucuses sought to stay in Congress.
One tool that can help us understand how those districts tend to vote is the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI), which uses a weighted average of the past two presidential elections’ results to quantify how much a congressional district or state prefers one party to another, relative to the US at large. The median congressional district, by this metric, is Michigan’s 8th District, which has a score of R+1 — meaning that the district votes about 1% more Republican (and 1% less Democratic), than the country as a whole.
When you organize those races by their districts’ PVIs, it becomes clear that New Democrats tend to represent closer districts, and Progressive Caucus members tend to represent more solidly Democratic districts. (There just aren’t that many Blue Dog Democrats left, and several of them are members of the New Democrats anyways.) 18 New Democrats who ran for re-election represented districts with a PVI of D+2 or less. Only three Progressive Caucus members were running in such districts. All else held equal, one should have expected a lot more New Democrats than Progressive Caucus members to lose reelection because of more of the former were at risk than the latter.
When you look at the 2022 performance of members of one of the ideology-based Democratic caucuses and compare it to the others, there’s basically no difference.
We can go a step further by seeing if incumbent members of the New Democrats or the Progressives tended to perform better in 2022 by plotting their margins of victory (or defeat) against their PVIs. If there was a real difference, you’d expect to see that borne out in the scatterplots below. Again, each point represents a Democratic House incumbent, belonging to one of the three ideological caucuses, who ran for re-election. Least-squares lines are included.
In these congressional races, it didn’t matter whether the incumbent was in the New Democrats or the Progressive Caucus: the apparent relationship between PVI and the ultimate vote margin remained pretty much the same.
Focusing on incumbents only tells us so much.
The argument about more moderate incumbents losing has failed on its own terms — but another limitation is that we are looking at candidates who have previously managed to get elected in the first place. The set of progressive incumbents may actually be quite distinct from the set of progressive candidates writ large, and the same goes for moderates. In states that use party primary systems, the ideological makeup of House members representing solidly blue districts will just reflect how their Democratic primary electorates voted. One might expect that if the party were acting in line with the conventional wisdom that moderates are more viable in swing districts, it would select such candidates and support them in primaries. We also aren’t looking at the candidates who decided not to run again, perhaps in the face of potential primary challenges or due to having been redistricted into unfavorable political terrain.
If someone with immense money and power, acting in complete secrecy, was able to pull off an experiment where otherwise-identical Democratic candidates are randomly assigned different ideological allegiances, and then compete in the general elections in a wide swath of districts, that might clear some things up!
It can be really easy to seize upon a handful of races and jump to a conclusion about how Democrats should position themselves moving forward. Individual case studies of campaigns certainly have their place; Democrats seeking to win in conservative areas could learn from Jared Golden or Mary Peltola, who have managed to overperform other Democrats by a lot in their respective districts by staking out individual, idiosyncratic brands. General trends and rules of thumb, though, are more likely to be applicable across districts and contexts — and one appears to be that once a candidate has managed to get elected in the first place, the way they position themself among the Democratic Party’s three main ideological factions doesn’t actually indicate much about their chances of re-election.
This conclusion may be disappointing for those who believe that incumbents in competitive races could generally stand to benefit from aligning themselves more closely with the progressive or centrist factions of the party, independent of their particular district. It is, however, in line with the notion that candidates can have some flexibility in the substantive policy positions they take so long as voters are hearing enough about the popular positions, and not too much about the unpopular ones.