They had a dream, but US Democrats are now waking up to their nightmare

Behind the huddle of blue sweat-shirted teachers grouped round a makeshift microphone where Democrat contender Robert Zimmerman is giving a fiery speech, were another group of teachers, or ex-teachers, trying to drown it out.

“The D in Democrat is for ‘done’! We get it done. We got the infrastructure act passed, we got the reduce inflation act passed, and we saved millions of jobs,” said Zimmerman to cheers. “Until you fired them!” the ex-teachers shot back. They were vaccine refuseniks, blaming the union for failing to defend them when a New York City vaccine mandate came in.

The teachers were in blue “Hochhul for governor” sweatshirts, and cheered and applauded the half dozen speakers with discipline and enthusiasm. The protesters were ragged and a little shabby in “We the people” T-shirts, MAGA red, wrap-around shades, and that essential accessory of such forces, the sun visor. They had a zombie army energy to them, too many badges, signs too weird and hand-coloured. Lose a teaching job in NY, and you’ve been cast into the plaguelands a little. 

We were outside a school in  Bayside, a bougie burb that really marks the start of Long Island, that vast sprawl. Technically it’s in Queens, but a long way from the streets of row houses, overhead rail and 100-nation neighbourhoods that give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez her base. This is New York’s 3rd district, Democrat with a retiring member, and Zimmerman, neat grey hair, grey tie, grey suit, like an ’80s indie rocker, a stalwart for the LGBTQIA+ community is the Dems candidate to keep it. He’s on a 3% polling margin, which is not great for a Democrat in New York City, and a measure of how tough the challenge is, especially since, someone notes, the Republican candidate is “crazy”.

This was one of the last stops in a fortnight-long teachers union get-out-the-vote drive across the country, although the bus itself wasn’t here, “snarled in traffic”, and the principals had gone on ahead. The protesters were having great fun with that. “Hey, where’s your bus?” “Zeldin [Republican governor candidate] got 7000 last night! Waddaya got, 30?”

This is New York politics old skool, even in the burbs, where you have half a dozen speakers — councilman, assemblyman, congressional rep, union rep, then round again, five minute speeches saying the same thing in eight different ways: Joe Biden and the Dems did a good job, got a lot of stuff through, it’s not being recognised, go out and get the vote.

The furious energy of an American election can be appreciated when you remember that it’s all happening at once. This is an election for federal and state assemblies, for state governor, for local councils, for judges and weird offices like “supervisor” all at once. It’s a vast pile-on. The competition is huge, the best get chosen, and so the performances are Broadway quality.

The protesters shouted, the speakers baited — “It’s great you can be so loud in the attempt to drown out free speech” — and the PA gave the teachers union the edge, until union head Randi Weingarten, a small feisty woman, took the call, and the microphone died on her. The protesters guffawed, a manic edge in their baiting now, somewhere between red cordial and Kool-Aid. “You’re not going to be speaking at all come Wednesday!” which sounded menacing. They drowned her out, and so the unionists took up the call, bellowing out “Randi! Randi!” as the protesters yelled “You fired us! Fire yourself!” and passing cars honked their horns, for which side it was impossible to tell, and it carried on like this until the police came. The unionists stayed in formation, but a small crowd of their supporters started arguing with the protesters, their broad Queens accents taking to wing. “Waaaadaya gonna dooo, you gonna subhort the pebble who believe in democracy or the anni-seemytes?” “Oh so if I’m anti forced vaccination I’m pro-Trump? Orange man bad is that it?” “Do you support Trump?” “I sure do, but…”

“You’re a Democrat,” I said to one supporter, a man in a neat clipped moustache, David Axelrod lookalike. Asking if you’re a Democrat in Queens proper is like asking if someone is mammalian. “How do you think they’re going?” “Well,” he said carefully, “I’m an optimist at heart. I think we’ll get both houses.” “Oh come on, man,” I said, echoing Biden. “You don’t. No one does.” “Well I’m an optimist …” 

Party line stuff, fair enough here, but there is among Democrat and progressive circles an unmistakeable atmosphere of apprehension that is universal, but not much discussed. There’s optimism too, the optimism of the heart. But it’s the optimism that things won’t be as bad as they’re looking. But such optimism involves a fair degree of triage.

No one who’s not in the propaganda business believes the Democrats can hold the house, with their current five-seat majority in a 435-seat chamber. They will lose that many seats in two states, like PA or NY. Those in the know will be overjoyed to hold the Republicans below a 20-seat majority, and happy enough getting it under 25. They are fighting on every front they once considered rock solid, seats in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the suburbs of Philadelphia, California seats, the works.

The reason is, well everything. The sense that the Democrats have been laggard on the economy, while being preoccupied with social issues, is pervasive, and hits every Democrat. Those social issues include the right to an abortion and the survival of democracy, but that cuts no ice with many. Biden was ready to go with the inflation reduction act a year ago. Passed then, it would have had an effect they could brag about. Now, those out stumping can only say lamely that its effects are coming, and they’ll be great! Centrists blame progressives for holding out for a more transformative package, and loading equal opportunity and other measures in. The left blame nominal Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for holding it up for months. It’s both and it’s doomed the Dems in the House. They appear to care only about abortion and abstract democracy, the worst possible look.

But it’s the fact that so many Democrats are struggling in the Senate against some pretty freaky candidates that is really giving people the wobbles.

There are contests such as Nevada, where a slick Vegas type, Paul Laxalt, is running for the Republicans, that were always going to be close. Pennsylvania, where the Democrats are trying to win a seat back from the Republicans, was always going to be tough, and still might prove successful. In Arizona, MAGA extremist Blake Masters has benefited from the huge campaign by governor candidate, election-denier, and Trump in high-heel cowboy boots, Kari Lake.

But it’s four Senate races which Democrats hadn’t previously worried about, and which are now line ball, that has Democrats on edge. In New Hampshire, fixture Senator Maggie Hassan was supposed to have no trouble against Don Bolduc, a MAGA election-denier and the latest person to spruik the global “schoolkids identifying as cats” urban myth, until admitting on national TV that he had no proof of the accusation — but not before he had suggested that schools were now “hiding” the evidence.

In Washington, where Democratic Seattle has sufficient weight to heavily offset the state’s Republican rural areas, six-term Senator Patty Murray should be in no danger from military mama bear Tiffany Smiley, but it’s now in the toss-up category. In Ohio, author JD Vance was always going to be the terrible bogus candidate he turned out to be, but he is still running ahead of Tim Ryan, a working-class Democrat who has gone out of his way to distance himself from “woke”, and relentlessly push an economic message.

And in Georgia, the Republican candidate, former football star Herschel Walker, a man who has admitted to holding a gun to a woman’s head, accused of bullying two women into abortions, who has held up a toy shop police badge to show his law and order credentials in a debate, and has spoken of China taking “all the good air” as a reason for high American emissions, will hold his Democrat opponent Senator Raphael Warnock below a majority and force a run-off election.  

How was it that Democrats didn’t see this coming? The campaign they’ve run is pretty much like the political failures of Barack Obama around 2009-10, when the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60-seat majority in the Senate when the special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts saw the defeat of a complacent time-serving “my turn” Democrat candidate by a former male nude model who ran a small delivery business, and campaigned in his truck. Not learning from that, they went into the 2010 midterms having failed to sell their policies, to adjust their haughty policy discourse, and to understand the appeal and energy of the Tea Party.

Donald Trump should have taught them something, and maybe he did, and then maybe the defeat of him untaught it.

There are so many possible bad outcomes for Democrats that it’s tough to cover them all. In Wisconsin, the vote is on gerrymandered maps, and may give Republicans a permanent majority despite having minority support, and a chance to permanently set the state Supreme Court as wholly right wing. In Kentucky, the anti-abortion amendment two measure is accompanied by amendment one, which would strip the governor — a Democrat — of power and give it to the legislature, which is MAGA.

In New York, the Republican governor candidate Lee Zeldin is generating an enthusiasm that the Democrats can’t match around the charge that incumbent Kathy Hochul is responsible for a spike in crime through implementing Black Lives Matters preferred policies regarding looser bail provisions and the like. Trouble is here and elsewhere it may be true, and failing to repudiate such measures — as Ryan has — leaves candidates exposed. In California, where Democrats dominate, Steve Bannon and others have organised a drive for Republicans to get elected to school boards, coming in under the radar. There are a dozen more such disastrous situations waiting to unfold. 

“Well, I’m an optimist, but… you know I’m a Democrat, but that doesn’t mean I agree with everything they do,” Dave the moustachioed accountant said. Behind us, arguments between the protesters had broken out after a young man in black with a sign saying “Viruses Don’t Exist” had turned up. The Christian anti-vaxxers believe they do, and that the body can defeat them with God’s will, and natural supplements advertised on FOX News, and the dude had a beyond sinister vibe. “The body has a way of dealing with it…” the refrain of the right throughout.

There is no contradiction in life, no gap between ought and is, no invidious choices to be made. The publisher of Harper’s Magazine, John D McArthur, long and lanky and in a brahmin whitish-tan suit, was talking to them, reporter’s pad in palm, writing down their crazy in a looping longhand. He’d had the same idea I had: that this was where you would meet the absolute central Democrat of old, the educated worker, who would nevertheless not be thought of as progressive in our terms.

He’d got stuck talking to people who believed there were quarantine camps under the state government building in Albany (mind you, it is strange).

“I mean I disagree with a whole lot of stuff, most of it actually,” Dave went on, cocking his head to one side. Jesus. Was I actually talking this guy out of his vote? “I mean the cancel culture stuff. I think people are really sick of that… The other side cancels people too, but they don’t get grief for it. But I don’t like it.” 

The truth is, no one seems to. I haven’t met a single Democrat on this trip who thinks that everything is fine and dandy, that the settings are right. That is partly out of choosing events like this, where an older, suburban, or Midwest, or flyover or whatever sort of crowd gathers. Even so, it does suggest there’s a lot of people at the centre of the party who are progressive through and through, believed that social and cultural issues would create far more enthusiasm, and have been terribly, terribly wrong, and wrong because their perception is skewed, from being cut off in Progresso World.

We are going to find out soon, but the revelation that Democrats got the electorate wrong may occur as the means of its abolition are elected. Who will lead change in the Democrats if that’s the case? Could the unions do it? I feel an apprehension myself about the vote, because actually I don’t think anyone can, the numbers involved are too large, and the process has taken on an autonomous quality. I can’t even feel a touch of schadenfreude against progressives.

And with Donald Trump having all but announced his 2024 candidacy, this election is a little scary. At the edge of Long Island, a dose of the backstreet brawl, by people who all tumbled out of their SUVs and then tumbled back in again. As they drove off, a cry came from one of the MAGA vans: “Who wants ice cream?”