Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-Newton), like many of his colleagues, thought that the Democratic Party would have done better in the November 2020 general election.
While the Democratic Party held onto its majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, the party lost 13 seats while Republicans gained 14, as U.S. Representative Justin Amash (a Republican-turned-Libertarian from Michigan) didn’t seek re-election. As a result, Democrats held 222 House seats after the election while Republicans held 213. No incumbent Republican lost a seat in the race.
During a Zoom event hosted by the Foxborough Democratic Town Committee, someone asked Auchincloss how he thought the 2022 midterm elections would go. He said he’s optimistic that Democrats can win, but that they are in for a major challenge. When discussing the topic, he mentioned that the party was disappointed by the results in 2020 — and that the party’s messaging didn’t resonate as well as they thought.
Auchincloss said:
Start with the historical context: a first-term president in his midterm loses seats in Congress. That tends to be the way things go. The only exception to that was 2002 when George Bush and the Republicans had a wave election actually in favor of them, that’s unusual.
We’re swimming against the tide as it is. And Democrats need to be introspective about the fact that in 2020, we thought we were going to win more House seats than we did. We lost a lot of frontline seats that a lot of people had priced in as we were gonna be up by two or three points. How that is about hidden Trump voters coming out and a lot of that stuff, there’s a lot of reasons why at the end of the day, we get our report cards every two years. The report card in 2020 for House Democrats did not show that our message was really winning in all of the districts that needed to win in, so we’ve got to be introspective and candid about that with ourselves — and we are.
Auchincloss also weighed in on what he thinks Republicans will run on in their quest to take back both chambers of Congress. To win the U.S. Senate, the GOP only needs a net gain of one seat and in the House, Republicans need five seats.
“If I had to bet you, I would say that the Republicans’ message is gonna be a three-legged stool and it’s gonna be entirely cultural. It’s gonna be crime and defund the police, it’s gonna be immigration, and it’s gonna be critical race theory in the schools,” Auchincloss said. “These three issues are gonna be their three-legged stool for cultural wedge issues.”
He also said that for Democrats to beat Republicans, they will have to run on jobs and the economy.
“We inherited a complete catastrophe and even six months in, things are going a lot better,” Auchincloss said. “So we’ve gotta pass this infrastructure bill, we’ve got to secure voting rights, and then we need to go tell the American people that after inheriting a pandemic, we really have built back better. I think we win that campaign, but I am not sanguine about how hard it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be tooth-and-nail.”
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