Should we always be trying to win?

Recently, like everyone else, I have been frustrated by congress. The Democrats won a trifecta! We should pass stuff! It would be really nice to get a big infrastructure package through and yet there seems to be some gum in the works. And when I say gum, I really mean two senators. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, of Arizona and West Virginia respectively, are putting the whole Democratic agenda on hold.

They have various reasons for doing so from lobbying by corporations, to genuine beliefs I presume, but in this post I want to focus on electability. People argue that to hold the House or the Senate we can’t pass some laws or we have to include certain provisions. They say Manchin can only win in West Virginia if he doesn’t act like other Democrats. This certainly is true and Manchin is a lot better than a Republican alternative. However, we probably won’t have a trifecta in 2022 either way.

The party that won the presidency generally loses over two dozen seats in the midterm, and that is ignoring all the gerrymandering that is already unfolding (this page is a bit behind but will contain all of the map changes in one place soon). Our lead in the House likely not substantial enough to withstand these odds. The Senate might be a slightly different story, but even if Manchin somehow pulls out another magical win, I have to ask: what’s the point?

As someone who cares very much about elections, I don’t understand the hyper-focus on them. Winning is not an intrinsic good. Winning feels nice but that is not why I want to work in politics. I want to win because I want good policy to be passed. Electoral victories are an instrumental victory toward that goal.

The counter argument is that while passing legislation is good, preventing harm is important as well. If we had more Senate seats in 2018, we would have been able to prevent the Texas abortion law from going through by ensuring a more liberal SCOTUS. I agree that staying in power at all costs in order to prevent harm by Republicans theoretically provides a good reason to keep legislation small and constrained.

However, this story has played itself out before! We could have gone farther before the 2010 midterm on healthcare. Obamacare could have been single-payer, but we were timid and now we are stuck with what we have and we lost anyway. Unsurprisingly, Democrats were not rewarded for going small on healthcare. 2010 was famously a “shellacking”!

Honestly, I don’t think infrastructure is the biggest problem facing our country at this time of crisis, but if this is what we are going to focus on we should go big. History shows that we will probably lose anyway, and at that point it will be too late to change our minds. The point of the Democratic party should be to pass Democratic policies, not to never lose elections.