As many statistical models and pundits predicted, Democrats took the House with ease on Tuesday night, and they made significant gains in governorships across the country. But the candidates who won didn’t ride fame from viral advertisements or hype. For the most part, those guys lost; the winners instead were relatively anonymous.
Take Texas. If “one tweet, one vote” were the standard by which candidates were elected, Rep. Beto O’Rourke would be a new senator. The 46-year-old Democrat was heralded as the Next Big Thing: youthful and charismatic, he was going to turn the Republicans’ most crucial state in national elections blue by beating Ted Cruz. He attracted unprecedented fundraising and attention. He inspired activists and the media to dream of 2020 before 2018 had passed. Yet he lost by more than 200,000 votes.
Stacey Abrams (44) and Andrew Gillum (39) were good candidates for governor in Georgia and Florida. Abrams would’ve been the nation’s first African-American woman to be elected a state executive. She had an accomplished resume—Truman scholar, Yale Law graduate, Georgia house minority leader—and major Democrats and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey stumped for her. Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, is emblematic of the party’s left wing. He could’ve become the country’s most powerful elected official advocating a Bernie Sanders-style economic program. Both individuals ran against Trumpy, white Republican men. The narratives were endless. But the final takeaway is that Abrams and Gillum appeared on track to fall short as of Wednesday afternoon. (Abrams, trailing by about two percentage points, was holding out hope that her opponent’s final tally would fall below 50 percent, triggering a runoff.)
Then there were the advertising stars. Randy “Iron Stache” Bryce, a Wisconsin ironworker who initially ran in hopes of unseating Paul Ryan, released a much discussed (and totally dishonest) commercial in June 2017. It was more like a movie trailer than a political ad. It helped him capture out-of-state donor money and media hype—but not victory. He lost by 12 percentage points on Tuesday to Bryan Steil, one of Ryan’s former drivers.
If Bryce’s opening spot made a splash, Amy McGrath’s introductory announcement to voters was a cannonball. The former Marine fighter pilot was propelled in Kentucky’s 6th District by a two-minute video that doubled Bryce’s viewership. It hit the high points for Democrats this campaign cycle: breaking barriers and preserving Obamacare. To state its effectiveness, NPR interviewed her with the headline, “Amy McGrath’s Campaign Ad Went Viral Online. She Explains to NPR Why She’s Running for Congress.” But she lost to Andy Barr, 51-48.
O’Rourke, Abrams, Gillum, Bryce, McGrath: These were the Democrats’ fresh blood, touted to replace much older party leadership like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton. None won. Granted, all but Gillum were default underdogs—a generic race for Texas Senate, Georgia governor, or House in rural Kentucky or Wisconsin favors Republicans. Democrats pumped up the challengers as potential faces of a “blue wave”; the candidates who signaled that no Republican in 2018 was safe.
The Democrats did win much of the night, but in a more boring fashion. They flipped the House by exploiting vulnerabilities in Trump country: Iowa voted for Donald Trump by 10 percentage points, but the state’s 1st and 3rd districts are not solidly red. Neither is the Kansas 3rd, even though Trump won the entire state by 20 points. Democrats turned all three places blue. Overall, they won more toss-up seats than Republicans did—and the victors were mostly no-namers. The party’s biggest upset came in the South Carolina 1st, which favors a typical Republican by 10 points. But the result was more about quirky politics—this was the seat that Mark Sanford lost to a Trumpy candidate in the GOP primary—than it was star power. The Wikipedia page of the victor, lawyer Joe Cunningham, doesn’t even a list a certain date for his birthyear.
Democrats won seven governorships from Republicans. But only one knocked off a major GOP figure: In Wisconsin, Scott Walker was topped by the state’s head of public schools, Tony Evers. It was a hot race. But Evers didn’t receive the sort of individual attention that was given to Abrams, Gillum, or Richard Cordray, who was the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and lost his race for Ohio governor.
Sinking Walker was less symbolic for national Democrats on Tuesday than it would’ve been six years ago, when he survived a recall. It could’ve been an even bigger deal if his vanquisher wasn’t a 67-year-old who doesn’t get “Evers for President” on anyone’s mind.
Political stardom can flash from nowhere, meaning that Democrats’ failure to elevate their most well-known prospects could be insignificant in the future. They now control half of Congress, and the party’s next leaders may be among their ranks already: Eric Swalwell (California), Ro Khanna (California), Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), Joe Kennedy (Massachussetts), Seth Moulton (Massachussetts), Tim Ryan (Ohio), Conor Lamb (Pennsylvania), Joaquin Castro (Texas), and Marc Veasey (Texas) are incumbents under 50 who are making a name for themselves.
These are some of the people worth keeping an eye on—the ones who were always going to be in a position to follow a “blue wave” once Election Day was over.
