"But We Changed Politics".... No, You Didn't

One of the wrong lessons that is going to be learned from this year's elections is that we somehow changed American politics- we did not. Democrats had a good election, and won a lot of seats back in local and state governments that they had been losing for the past eight or so years, but Democrats did not change politics. That can be really confusing and upsetting for people, particularly after the tumult of the past year- how can the existence of large scale marches and protests against the President, pre-dating an electoral victory for the opposition party, not mark a massive political change? How can you claim that the victory is not a result of all the new stuff that happened?

I'm going to stick locally here again for this article, to make a point that this was more of a solid shift than a political earthquake. I'll start with Lehigh County, where 46,831 people voted for County Executive. In 2013, 45,275 people voted for County Executive. Tom Muller got 23,413 votes, good for 51.71% of the vote on his way to victory. Phil Armstrong got 24,675 votes, good for 52.69% of the vote. Yes, turnout went up a little under 1,600 votes, and Phil got a little more than 1,200 more votes than Tom did. It's also true that Brad Osborne got more votes than Scott Ott though too. What Democrats did very well was they motivated a few more voters to turn out than they did a year ago- but not in such massive, ground-breaking numbers that we start talking differently about American politics. Call it a nice, healthy bump. Don't give it too much more credit than that.

Of course, there are some claiming that I am wrong. They say that my analysis of what happened on Tuesday was "not an inclusive list." I am talking about a certain new County Commissioner, one who ran a very different campaign than Armstrong, and to her credit, made history on Tuesday night. She ran a very grassroots driven campaign, and had lots and lots of events. She did not coordinate mailers with the rest of the ticket, and instead did her own, and largely ran her own Get-Out-The-Vote that mostly ignored the top of the ticket. She did a fine job, and deserves to be happy with her campaign, but did she break some new ground? No. She got 15 more votes than Phil in her district. That is, of course, a negligible difference. She got 108 more votes than the previous holder of that district seat, who ran un-opposed and without a major mayoral race four years ago. I guess it would be fair to say that she did a fine job, but we didn't wake up in a whole new world on Wednesday in that County Commissioner District. Perhaps for all the differences in tactics and message, the reality is that Democratic performance was virtually identical.

Let's move over to Northampton County for a moment, a place that Donald Trump won in 2016, but Democrats dominated in 2017. Did the world change here? Well, numbers definitely improved. A whopping 46,463 voters turned out in this election, compared to a paltry 39,029 votes in 2013. A difference of 7,434 is significant. John Callahan got 17,675 votes in that race, falling to Republican John Brown's 18,969 in that race. Lamont McClure rolled up 22,477, an increase of 4,802 over 2013. Brown saw an increase in his vote as well, getting 19,278, an increase of 309 votes. It would be fair to suggest turnout moved substantially in this race. This race was far more contentious than the 2013 race, and this time the candidates engaged each other in negative campaigning. This election also was held one year after Trump carried the county. Can we say that this is a "change" election?

It might be tempting to, but hang on. Turnout in 2015, the county's "mid-term" year was 41,288- a number that makes a little more sense than the 2013 numbers, comparable to 2017. Still though, the bounce seems to be a bit large- so what was different? A write-in race in Bethlehem, for one thing, probably helped turnout in both counties- especially when compared to the non-competitive general elections of 2013 and 2015 in the city. Turnout approached the 25% mark in much of Palmer Township, which had a very competitive election for Supervisor- something it did not have in 2013 or 2015. Turnout was very high throughout the Nazareth area, and the Democrats rolled in Nazareth and Upper Nazareth- precisely where Gracedale, and the entire ruckus about the prison was going on. Bethlehem Township had campaigns. Wilson, Bangor, Nazareth, and other boroughs have campaigns. Again here, there was a very animated campaign for Executive going on. These numbers are more reminiscent of the 2005 race, a year in which John Stoffa won 21,288 to 19,218- and also a year in which Democrats came out in force after a Presidential election loss. In other words, while this was a new high in turnout, we can find a similar election, and plenty of reasons for the high turnout.

None of this is to say that there were not some new methods that were tried this year that were good. None of this is to say that Democrats didn't do a really damn good job on turnout- we very clearly did. We do need to apply them to the future. What we cannot do though is start to think that the future is made for us looking forward to 2018. Senator Casey and Governor Wolf both ran virtually 50-50 in the 15th Congressional District. Nothing in these results suggests that Democrats can nominate someone crazy in that district and win next year, the ground did not change that much. Nothing in these results suggests Matt Cartwright can sleep through 2018, or that we're going to go pick up insane state house seats. It's going to be really, really hard.

I stand by my very inclusive initial analysis. We did a great job in 2017. We didn't alter the playing field for future generations though.