Some Under-the-Radar Takeaways from the 2023 Elections

There was lots of intrigue with low levels of drama

KY Gov. Andy Beshear | Publicly available photo

Depending on your point of view, the 2023 Election Day was a great success or crushing defeat. As most of you have heard by now, the Democrats had an overall very successful night. They cruised in just about every which way they could. Their only major loss was not really a surprise. Everything else was not exactly shocking, but there were surprisingly strong victories throughout. It was a solid repudiation of MAGA and further verification of a shift into a new era of ideological dominance (see my article: “The Stages of Political Drunkenness”).

Aside from the obvious wins, which you can easily find in others’ columns or a quick Google search, here are some useful things of note that aren’t all over the news this morning.

The MAGA repudiation was pretty severe and thorough

This may seem obvious, but not really, at least from the headline race results alone.  Sure, Dems won, but they won by comfortable margins, either bordering on blowouts or outright blowouts.

Andy Beshear, a Democrat in the deep red state of Kentucky, won by 5 points. He widened his margin of victory in 2019 significantly, when he won by .4 points, or only 5,000 votes. This is a blowout considering the circumstances. It is very notable that his opponent was fully endorsed by Donald Trump.

The Ohio abortion constitutional amendment issue passed by 10 points, a complete and total smackdown of MAGA-influenced stalwart abortion restriction policies.

But there were also many local elections that went the Democrats way, such as in Pennsylvania judicial and local council elections, and school boards across the country. The hard-right Moms for Liberty group, that successfully took over school boards throughout the nation while running on banning books and being intolerant of gay and trans children, had a terrible showing in several states that you might not expect, such as Iowa, Virginia, and North Carolina.

We’ll see what the 2024 national election shows, but these results seem like a sign that the MAGA wave has seen its best days, and its influence is waning in a big way.

CNN is coming off as desperate and it’s sad to see

Something that struck me was just how low CNN is now going. It was very evident from yesterday evening that they are now desperate. And not just from their television broadcast, but also their social media posts.

First of all, they decided to release the results of a Presidential poll on the same day as Election Day, which was weird enough. You’d think that they would get some ratings just from the fact that it was Election Day. They could have saved their poll for the next day, or later in the week, just to have some ratings fodder.

But not only did they choose to release these poll results on the same day, they rabidly touted them throughout the evening as the results were coming in. The poll results were so unfavorable to Joe Biden that they were suspicious. Basically, he apparently is grossly underperforming with most demographics including every minority and ages younger than 30. Instead of puzzling about these strange results on another day, they went all-in on them, juxtaposed against the overwhelmingly positive results for Democrats on Election Day. It was literally surreal.

During a segment with Jake Tapper and John King analyzing the incoming and outstanding votes, they shifted over to David Chalian to talk about the terrible poll results for Biden, and his analysis was that Democrats don’t have a “branding” problem, they have a “Biden” problem (I kind of wish they would have overdone the cleverness and said it was a “Brandon” vs “branding” problem, ha ha).

Jake and John (I have always liked and respected John King until this moment), nodded profusely and went along with this narrative without considering that Presidents almost always poll badly at this stage in their first term, or that the results were just weird.

And if you thought maybe that was just a quick typical on-the-air analysis, they revealed their hand by continuing to promote it on Twitter/X last night as well. CNN commentator Abby Phillip posted the following post:

I can’t be the only one that thought that forcing this poll to be discussed during a heavy news night, as Election Day always is, was just a cynical attempt at ratings-pumping. And it’s obvious more and more that anything that makes Republicans and MAGA seem better positioned than they actually are to win in 2024 is going to generate ratings, as most people will be so terrified of the prospect as to constantly tune in to get updates that hopefully show it isn’t true. And since Democrats performed so well, they couldn't allow that to alleviate the fear, so they had to keep pushing the dreary poll for Biden. 

The drama level was low

As I said, most of these races were not close, and there was little suspense. Yes, it was an off-year election, but if any of these more prominent races were very close, you can bet that would have been milked for all it was worth.

Instead, it was actually kind of quaint how it was obvious who and what was going to win, and the results were easily called within a few hours. As far as I know, everyone conceded with no harshly threatening words.

There have been some grumblings from the ultra-MAGA crowd on Twitter/X, as they seized on some scattered mishaps that occurred: a few precincts in Louisville were closed down and cleared out for 30 mins due to a gas pipe leak; and some electronic voting machines actually did flip votes apparently, in a PA Superior Court Judge race. No one said too much about the fact that the county in Mississippi with the highest percentage of black votes ran out of ballots, of course.

But these were all resolved relatively quickly, and voters were assured that their correct votes were counted. They were all so minor, low in number, and localized, that these issues mostly highlighted the efficiently mundane tasks of actually taking and counting votes, as opposed to adding fuel to any conspiratorial fire.  Any issues that may happen in 2024 will be more hysterically covered, I’m sure, but this was a good example of how, even in elections with less stakes involved, issues can and will occur – no system is perfect after all. But there are good people working the elections and they do what is needed to ensure an accurate vote count.

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Overall, the 2023 election harkened back to the days when elections were kind of fun, and not existential determinants of the survival of the country. Even MAGA folks generally accepted the loss and were interested in seeing how they can fix their problems. It doesn’t seem so far that they are going to learn the right lessons, but that’s okay, they can learn the hard way: by continually losing big.