Dems' Midterm Victory Over Republicans 'Beyond Anything That We Could Have Anticipated': Strategist

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1:33Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is political strategist Lucy Caldwell. Lucy, thanks so much for coming back on. It's great to be with you, Brittany. It is a day after Election Day, and I want to talk about how people are describing the results of the midterms. historic, a blue wave, a blue tsunami, a blue earthquake, a landslide victory for the Democrats, a bloodbath for the GOP, a referendum on President Trump, a rejection of the Trump administration and the Republican lawmakers that align with him. So to start off the conversation, how would you describe last night's results?

2:09Yeah, well, as we all know, Donald Trump thought that the right Hail Mary in recent weeks was to tell his base to vote as though he was on the ballot. And what he meant by that is, if you love me, go out, vote as though when you tick a candidate with an R at the end of their name, you're doing it because of your love for me. And voters did vote like Trump was on the ballot, but not in the way he intended. They voted with their vitriol for this administration. They've voted with their wishes for a repudiation of MAGA. I think that it was a historic blue wave. It was beyond anything that we could have anticipated.

2:53I think there are House races where, you know, there were House races where we thought they'd be very close, where it looks like Democrats may wind up up 20, 30 points in districts with Republicans incumbents. So it was a wild night, and really, it's now up to the top of the to Democrats to see what they do with it. The swings here were just astronomical in some places. Texas flipped and Texas was a state that President Trump won by 13 points in 2024. James Tallarico won the Senate race the first time a Democrat won a statewide race by 12 points. The Democrat Gina Hinojosa, she beat, she ousted the incumbent governor, Greg Abbott, by seven points.

3:39Kansas, President Trump again won 16 points in 2024. The Democrat, Hamilton, won by nearly five points this time. This is the first time that state has elected a Democrat since the 1930s. Florida won by 13 points. And a Democrat socialist didn't win in the Senate race, but only lost by less than three points. In Iowa, we're seeing President Trump, who won by 13 points in 2024. Democrats flipped the Senate seat, the governor's office, and three out of four congressional seats. South Carolina, we're seeing, again, President Trump won by 17 points in 2024. We're seeing a Democrat win the Senate race and so on and so forth.

4:17Why do you think Democrats gained these wins, especially in red places? Was it the economy? Was it MAGA? Was it President Trump? Was it that they ran really good candidates? What did all of that look like? What were the factors there? I think it's an all of the above situation. I think that we are now 10 years into the MAGA electoral experiment. And in 2016, well, really in 2015, when Donald Trump came down that golden escalator and he said, I'm going to shake things up, there were so many voters who felt disaffected, I think, by both parties. And I think this is something that at the time, the political establishment, including Republicans, were missing, that they thought this is a guy who can shake things up for us and make the change that we want to see happen.

5:10And they gave him a lot of chances at that. But now, 10 years in, several cycles in, five elections in, Donald Trump, I guess six, arguably, Donald Trump is the establishment now. And it was one thing after he was defeated in 2020 to say, well, he's still this kind of perennial outsider. But now the entire Republican apparatus, the entire scaffolding of the Republican electoral machine is built in the image of MAGA. You know, young campaign staffers on the Republican side, those are people who came up in MAGA. They're senior people who are now senior who were enculturated as young staffers in MAGA.

5:52It is a MAGA machine. And so at this point, the idea that MAGA is somehow disruptive and that this is a protest vote against the status quo. No, MAGA is now the status quo. Donald Trump has been back in office for two years. Voters. Reports due to then meeting prep, then chronic migraine doesn't care about your to do list. For people with chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox on about to line them toxin a prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It is not approved for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. Botox prevents, on average, 8 to 9 headache days a month versus 6 to 7 for placebo.

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7:46At the end of the Biden administration, Joe Biden was pretty tone deaf on issues like affordability. And Donald Trump was saying, I'm going to fix inflation. I'm going to make groceries cheap. That hasn't happened. And it feels like the opposite. Gas prices are through the roof. We have a new endless war. Supporters of Trump think you were supposed to be stopping us from foreign entanglements. And then on top of that, Democrats seem to have finally gotten their act together in two ways. One, they are finally accepting that we are in a populist moment and they are meeting Donald Trump's populism at the gate and providing alternative vehicles in the form of new candidates, in the form of new ideas that appeal to these swing voters around this populist moment.

8:42And on top of that, importantly, they have basically said, and of course, this is not true across the board. You could look at candidates like Angie Nixon or others who had more of the DSA bent or more of the far left social bent. But many of these Democratic candidates who won last night made a specific point of repudiating the far left of the party on social issues. They said, yeah, of course, we don't want, you know, biological males to play in girls sports. We don't want, you know, gender reassignment surgeries for minors. Like, we are repudiating those things, right? And so all of the pieces of the Republican playbook that have worked, and I'm generalizing here, this is not true in every race.

9:29Of course we can find a candidate who won last night, who continued to go hard in the paint on some of these issues. But in general, the MAGA playbook, because of their weaknesses in failing to meet the moment and actually, as the party in power, relieving people of the hardships that they feel, that and the fact that Democrats got their act together and didn't just pander to the most extreme part of their base on some of these issues. It meant that when push came to shove, what was on offer from the Democratic Party last night was something that seemed sensible, reasonable, hopeful, not alienating.

10:08And what was on offer on MAGA is you just have to trust us. Democrats are bad, but we have no record to show for making things better in our last two years of trifecta Republican control in the federal government, as well as many states. One Democrat who's been really successful in pivoting back to the economy, making everything go back to affordability and how he can make life financially more feasible for you is Abdul El-Sayed. We even saw him do that with the Haley Stevens dust up, where he said something to the effect of, I don't really think about Haley Stevens, and then went on to focus on the economy.

10:45And I want to talk about what could have been the November surprise in that race. He won by seven points last night, and he is set to make history. He is set to be the first Muslim to ever serve in the U.S. Senate. But back in the summer, he narrowly defeated Congresswoman Haley Stevens in a really bitter Democratic primary. And she originally endorsed him, but tensions boiled over between the two in recent weeks. And then less than two days before Election Day, she rescinded her support of El-Sayed and she backed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. And just months before the election, she was very critical of Mike Rogers.

11:25She called him another rubber stamp for Donald Trump's dangerous agenda. A lot of Democrats have called what she did a stab in the back. What do you make of that whole thing and the fact that it could have been a November surprise? I don't know if it amounted to much, given the fact that it wasn't ultimately successful and Elsa had won by seven points. No, Haley Stevens, I'm not close to her staff. I have no particular insight into what is going on in the mind of Haley Stevens. I think that it is unfortunate that she, a person who was a bright star and a rising star in the Democratic Party, she won a red district in 2018.

12:08She has been in Congress for a long time. She is charismatic, very fun. People have been enjoying her TMZ interviews over the last few months. I think that she eviscerated her political career over the last few days. and I think it was completely unnecessary. It has the vibe of sour grapes. There was no new information about Abdul El-Sayed. The issue centered ostensibly around a single ad that had been put out by Rebellion PAC, an independent expenditure in favor of Abdul El-Sayed. She had a very big reaction to it. But ultimately, even in the days after that, when she did not like that he was not doing a more full-throated rejection of this ad by an outside group.

12:59She still was saying that she was going to continue to campaign for him, continue to be a surrogate. And it does seem like the straw that broke the camel's back for her was a conversation with Congresswoman Debbie Dingell saying, you know, you and I mean, I think her fiancé, you're no longer a positive force on the campaign and we'd like you to stay home. And it's a lesson like you don't need to be in the spotlight at every moment in time. Right. If you are the person who was defeated in the Democratic primary and you've agreed that you're on the team when the campaign says, actually, we'd like you to take a back seat.

13:37You know, you you have to accept that. You have to say we're all on the team. We're all trying to win. Like Mallory McMorrow, another candidate in that race who lost earlier, dropped out in the Democratic primary. She did a good job of doing that, right? Sometimes she was out in front when she was a powerful surrogate. Sometimes she was not. That's what being on the team is about. And it was very obvious to anyone paying attention in Michigan that Haley Stevens doing this outburst weirdness selfie car video by herself because her staff was like, we're out going to the church thing with Mike Rogers.

14:12That was not going to work. It was obvious that that was not going to work because if you are a voter where your core issue was support of our foreign policy toward Israel, and it's Sunday, November 1st, it's two days before the election. If you're a marginal swing voter and that's your core issue, you have already swung for Mike Rogers. It was obvious that this was not going to translate into electoral success for Mike Rogers. And on top of that, the backlash effect of the—we don't know, we'll know more later—of the number of voters who were so put off by that, that they then in turn turned out for Abdul Syed, especially Black voters.

14:54It is just so unfortunate that Haley Stevens made this move, comported herself in this way, And hopefully she'll get a break and be able to find a lane that is more productive because her career in Democratic electoral politics is flat out over. To that point, from interviews that I've seen on the ground, it really seemed like it fired up the base. It made Democrats more energetic and people who were praising her, calling her a maverick or calling her politically courageous or brave. They weren't voting for Abdul El-Sayed anyway, to begin with. I did not see a single interview that said, you know what, because Haley Stevens changed her mind, now my mind is changed.

15:36But we are seeing Democrats win from all over the spectrum, right? Super progressive candidates to more moderate candidates. I'm thinking about Kansas in that Senate race. Adam Hamilton, one of his ads, he didn't even say the word Democrat once. He said he's someone who's right down the middle. What do you think this spectrum shows about the Democratic Party, especially two years away from the 2028 election? I think that fundamentally everyday American voters are not highly ideological. And thank God, because if we were all walking around being a bunch of hyper ideologues, our economy would collapse.

16:11We wouldn't be able to take care of anything. Thank God the majority of people are not, you know, nerding out over politics. So ultimately, when most people are going to the polls, they're saying, you know, what is the party that does not alienate me? And what is the party that's going to make life better for my children, for my family? What is the party that is going to make me feel secure in my retirement, make me feel like, you know, next month I maybe could take a load off for a day and not be worried about whether or not we're going to be able to pay the bills? And ultimately, that was the Democratic Party.

16:43The Democratic Party made that case. And even among some of the left-wing candidates who won, I think that many of the candidates, I think it's not an endorsement of far-left philosophies. And I actually think, for example, Roe Panna, Congressman Roe Panna put out this video that was so unhelpful this morning saying DEI is back. Right. Like that lane is super, super counterproductive in terms of putting Democrats in a position for 2028 that is strong. And so a lot of this does come down to this moment in time. Don't squander it. And you hear a lot of Democratic strategists saying that and hopefully they'll listen.

17:20I think that people like Hakeem Jeffries have already come out this morning and said that they are going to make affordability a focus, right? I think those of us who want to see Democrats be successful are advising them, don't just like immediately start impeachment. Let's not go down the impeach Donald Trump over and over again lane. Like, show people you're going to make their lives better. All of, like, why, what is, yes, we need to fight autocracy. We need to fight the perception of the fascism of MAGA. But what is downstream of that? Making people's everyday lives better. Not having to be worried that you're going to be, you know, gunned down by an ICE agent in the street because of the color of your skin.

18:01Not having to wonder how you're going to buy eggs. You know, just everyday quality of life issues. I think a lot of Americans feel like it's been more than a decade since anyone focused on that. And they don't want to be part of the proxy war between MAGA Republicans and the Democratic Party. They just want to feel like government is working for them. That's it. In the past elections over this last decade, Democrats have performed the best when voters are mad at Donald Trump. So to your point about Democrats can't squander this political capital now, how do they make the most of this moment? How do they become the party that's not just the anti-Trump party?

18:44Because presumptive House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, he said that this was a change election. And House Democrats understand they need to deliver dramatic change. What do you think that dramatic change should look like? I mean, I think that there are some really core policy issues that they could start working on out the gate. I mean, one of the ways I think that Annie Andrews won in South Carolina, a race and victory that almost no one saw coming, and such a big victory that it was one of the first races called in the night, just wild stuff. She's been going around saying there actually is something that we could do in our federal government immediately to make it not so painful when you're filling up your car at the pump.

19:26And it's just suspend the federal gas tax, right? Like, let's get to it. That would help people, right? There are all these provisions of the Affordable Care Act that obviously need fixing. People are about to face massive hikes in their insurance premiums, especially people who are in states where they're buying health insurance through the federal exchange. So whether it's on health care or on the cost of gas or on, you know, other issues like reducing our dependence on foreign fuel, but also thinking about how we calibrate our own interest in wars abroad and other people's foreign policy entanglements.

20:06That impacts people at home. How we manage to fix some of this tariff policy. There are many people who live in states that, you know, in communities that feel very closely connected to our northern neighbors in Canada, repairing that relationship, getting commerce moving again within those things. There are a lot of things that Congress can do with a Democratic majority or not. Congress is not beholden to the president. That is the way that Mike Johnson has chosen to comport himself as Speaker of the House in this Congress. But there is a lot that a Democratic House and a Democratic Congress overall will be able to do to actually begin to materially change the everyday lives of Americans.

20:53And if they can start racking up some of those wins, they're going to be in a very good position heading into 2028. My last question to you is Democrats took control of the House and the Senate. Now what? Last night, President Trump was posting on social media. He was doing interviews and he was blaming a whole host of different factors for why Republicans were losing. He blamed Fox News. He blamed the fact that he wasn't on the ballot. He blamed in part the war against Iran. He blamed at least one candidate. And then he ultimately, in an interview, said that Democrats did a good job and fought hard.

21:29He said he would work with them, but he would retain veto power. He even posted on social media this image of a MAGA hat with the white lettering that said veto on it. How do you think Democrats should work with President Trump? What should that look like in the next two years? I think Democrats should send as many bills to his desk as possible. They should bear hug each other, work as a Democratic caucus to get bills out of committee, to get bills voted on on the House floor, to do what they can to pull in on the Senate side those Republicans who are willing to cross the aisle to work with Democrats to get bills to his desk.

22:16desk. Let him veto them. Let him veto them. Hopefully he signed some that are helpful to the American people, but show the American people that you are out rolling up your sleeves every day to work to pass policies that are going to make life better for them. And this goes for state legislators as well and blue state governors. Show the American people you are working for them every day. Show your constituents you are working for them every day. Don't let the veto be some talking point of like, what's the point of passing this bill because he's just going to veto it? No, put it on his desk, make him veto it, because at best, some really good policies, you know, get passed and provide people relief in their everyday lives.

23:00And otherwise, it is still electorally advantageous to be able to show a record of trying to make things work. That's what Americans want. Lucy, I will leave it there. Thank you so much for the time today. And I hope Hope to have you on again soon. Always a pleasure. Lucy Caldwell. Thank you.

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