The 2022 Midterms: A Win for the Democrats, A Loss for “Liberals” and the Left

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The 2022 midterm elections are over, and Democrats around the country are collectively sighing in relief: the feared “red wave” touted by Republicans came far short of materializing, the vast majority of Trump-endorsed candidates lost, and the Democratic Party’s strategy of pitting their moderates against the right’s extremists seems to have paid off (de Witte 2022; Siders 2022). As such, the election is being held as a win for the moderates, and “a lesson for any party that wants to succeed in 2024” (Mounk 2022). But what does “moderate” actually mean in the context of the current political environment? As it stands, both parties seem to believe the American political spectrum is inherently skewed and our “center” is not actually center, but they vehemently disagree about the direction our Overton Window (meaning the “range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream”) has shifted, to the left or to the right (Chinoy 2019; “The Overton Window”; Astor 2019; Giridharadas 2019; Robertson 2018). To try and understand the current political state of our two-party system, I dove deep into the world of campaign advertisements, hoping to find some clarity in the ways that the parties presented and referred to both themselves and their opponents. By closely analyzing a few key, nationally-followed races in a competitive purple state, I was able to create a usable case study through which I could try to piece together the strategies of both parties regarding their relationship with moderation and extremism as well as each other, and hopefully begin to assess what the long-term implications might be for the Democratic approach of responding to extremism with moderation, for 2024 and beyond.

My analysis examined the most nationally prominent Arizona races of the 2022 midterm: the gubernatorial race between Katie Hobbs (D) and Kari Lake (R), the Senate race between Mark Kelly (D) and Blake Masters (R), and several House races. I watched 127 television ads, 64 Democrat-sponsored and 63 Republican-sponsored, and coded each one. My coding instrument itself primarily attempted to measure party-based differences in extremism, issue priorities, polarization, stances on partisanship, and language/rhetoric (especially regarding extremism, references to the parties themselves, and any explicit or implicit rhetorical connections between them). Overall, in analyzing these ads, there were two clear patterns that emerged: Republicans consistently and cohesively reinforced the narrative that all Democrats (“liberals”) were inherently and dangerously extreme, incorrigibly so, and Democrats walked on eggshells around the alt-right elephants in the room in the hopes of drawing the moderate vote to their side. None of these findings were unexpected, per se, but the degree to which they were used, both in terms of frequency and intensity, was sobering.

Frequently, advertisements seemed to almost solely target conservative audiences, regardless of the party running the ad. While Democrats shied away from explicit attacks on the Republican Party (only doing so in 13.2% of all attacking ads), 1 in every 2 Republican attack ads were specifically aimed at their opponents’ party identification – in other words, at Democrats, at liberals, at progressives. This isn’t atypical or surprising – a 2022 analysis by Markus Neumann demonstrated that Republicans denouncing Democrats for their “extreme liberal agendas” works, finding that the Republican accuser stands to gain at least a 3% advantage when unjustly accusing their opponent of extremism — although, notably, this same strategy has previously net Democrats no benefits whatsoever.   These narratives are being believed by much of the country, with recent data showing that “Americans generally view the two main political parties as equivalently extreme” (Bump 2022). and even that, at present, views of the GOP’s extremism are dropping “among every partisan group” (and have been, shockingly, since 2013) while “views of the extremism of Democrats” have been steadily increasing since 2012.  While certain subsections of the Democratic Party have become notably more left-wing since 2012, the majority of the party and its elected officials haven’t actually shifted that far, especially not in comparison to their opposition: a 2022 Pew Research Center study shows that while members of Congress from both parties have moved further toward their respective poles in the past decade, Republicans have moved significantly further to the right than Democrats have to the left (DeSilver 2022). As the reporter Eli Yokley notes, the state of American politics today is “a crisp picture of asymmetrical polarization” (Yokley 2022).

This asymmetry was represented quite clearly in the campaign advertisements – it felt like the goal of the Republican ads was always either to promote themselves or attack their opponents, whereas Democrats were constantly on the defensive. Republican candidates played up their parties’ strengths while Democrats tried to mitigate the public’s perception of their parties’ weaknesses, made evident by the fact that the three most discussed political issues in Democrat-run promotional ads were inflation/economic factors, immigration, and crime – not only are these topics typically associated with conservative platforms, they’re the three most referenced political issues in Republican promotional advertisements as well. It’s unsurprising, then, that 60.9% of Democrat-promoting ads used narratives of bipartisanship, while Republicans relied on narratives of anti-bipartisanship (painting the candidate as uniquely capable of fighting against the rival party) more than anything else. 

While both parties regularly accused each other of extremism, the language used varied greatly by party. Republicans used “too liberal” as the primary accusation in nearly half of all extremism-related ads (48%), meaning the exact phrase “too liberal” appeared in 1 of every 4 ads, while Democrats kept their attacks limited to words like “extreme” (64.3%) and “radical” (32.1%), with not a single ad attacking their opposition for being “too Republican,” “extremely Republican,” or any other variation of the sentiment. In addition, it comes as no surprise that the majority (71.4%) of Republican ads referring to Democrats used the term “liberal,” given that there’s a long history of the negative connotations of “liberal; ”New York Times referred to it as “the dirtiest word in the American political lexicon” in 2004, and based on these ads, that statement seems to hold even today. Clearly, Republicans are milking it for everything they can – the Republican strategy seems to be to capitalize on the derogatory associations of the word, particularly in their more explicitly negative ads. “Liberal” is used in 85% of Republican attack ads, as well as 94.4% of ads painting Democrats as extreme. Similarly, 75% of all references to “liberals” (or, more rarely, “Democrats” or “progressives”) in Republican ads were either derogatory or epithetic – for instance, using “liberal” as a clear stand-in for “too liberal,” where the danger is not the “too” or the extremism but liberalism itself. As usual, this could not contrast more starkly with the Democratic approach – in 64 ads, only 1 ad explicitly referred to Republicans in a derogatory or epithetic way. To put this into perspective, roughly 1 out of every 3 Republican ads used some word for Democrat (most frequently “liberal”) as an insult or a stand-in for inherent extremism, but Democrats returned fire in only 1 ad out of every 64. 

While appealing to the median voter obviously worked for Democrats in many high-profile races this election (convincing many that it should be replicated come 2024), I worry that there are too many variables to say for certain how successful a repeat attempt of this approach would be. How much of the Democratic Party’s success in this election was due to the Democratic Party itself or, even better, some “return to normalcy” as multiple pundits have claimed, and how much of it was due simply to opponents weighed down by Trumpian baggage and Dobbs-induced abortion panic as the driving force for many citizens (which, knowing the media cycle, will not be the case two years from now)? It’s impossible to say. More than anything, however, the long-term implications of this strategy are what concern me. Over the course of watching, coding, and analyzing these ads, it became clear that the lopsided nature of campaign advertisements during this election cycle feels very unsustainable. It might continue to work for some years now, but as long-time voters die and are replaced with new ones raised solely on our current media diet, a decent chunk of voters will be politically disinterested young adults who might not have any real sense of what the Democratic Party actually is outside of the dominating conservative narrative. To be frank, if I watched these advertisements with no prior knowledge, it would have been very, very unclear what exactly the liberal agenda consisted of, or if they even had an agenda beyond responding to and defending themselves from Republicans. The Republican Party has been relentlessly pushing its agenda, and Democrats have been so busy attempting to stall, circumvent, or block it that uninformed voters likely have very little sense of what liberal policy actually consists of. 

John Zaller famously discussed the importance of two-sided information flows: while media has the potential to influence citizens a great deal, its power is in part mitigated by the fact that there is always information coming from both ends of the spectrum, and those opposing viewpoints tend to cancel each other out, which makes it harder for biased narratives to heavily impact the politically disinterested public (Zaller 1996). In watching these ads, I tried to imagine being a typical Arizona swing voter, someone who might leave the television on while cooking, cleaning, and whatnot, but would never purposefully seek out much political information. Because, if I were an Arizonan who wasn’t paying much attention and simply had the TV playing in the background as both Democrat and Republican ads aired, this is what I would hear: “too liberal for Arizona,” “extreme on abortion,” “outrageously liberal,” “Biden’s reckless liberal spending,” “radical beliefs,” ad infinitum. With those sorts of phrases (and only those), what kind of narrative would start to emerge for an impressionable citizen? The answer is obvious. There aren’t two sides of information being presented here, not unless you’re paying attention and know what candidate belongs to which party, which positions are typical for which side of the aisle – and most Americans don’t pay attention (Krupnikov and Ryan 2020). There’s only one narrative here: there is a radical, extreme group endangering Arizona, and they are called the liberals. When Democratic ads use the language of extremism but shy away from denouncing specifically Republican extremism, there is a lot that can easily get lost in translation. 

Yes, the general consensus is true: the 2022 election went far better for Democrats than expected, and that is worth breathing a sigh of relief over. But saying it was a win for the left or a loss for the right overly simplifies things and, more importantly, obscures the underlying theme lurking beneath the surface of this midterm. 

That message? 

No one wants to be a “liberal.”

References

Astor, Maggie. “How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/us/politics/overton-window-democrats.html. 

Bump, Philip. “Analysis | Americans Now See Both Political Parties as Equally Extreme.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 9 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/09/americans-now-see-both-political-parties-equally-extreme/. 

Chinoy, Sahil. “What Happened to America's Political Center of Gravity?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 June 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html. 

DeSilver, Drew. “The Polarization in Today's Congress Has Roots That Go Back Decades.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 22 Apr. 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/. 

de Witte, Melissa. “Takeaways from the 2022 Midterms: A Relief, Surprise.” Stanford News, University of Stanford, 17 Nov. 2022, https://news.stanford.edu/2022/11/10/takeaways-2022-midterms-relief-surprise/. 

Giridharadas, Anand. “How America's Elites Lost Their Grip in 2019.” Time, Time, 21 Nov. 2019, https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-reckoning-elitism-in-america-2019/. 

Krupnikov, Yanna and John Barry Ryan. October 20, 2020. "The Real Divide in America Is Between Political Junkies and Everyone Else." The New York Times. 

Mounk, Yascha. “How Moderates Won the Midterms.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 15 Dec. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/midterm-election-split-ticket-voting-moderate-wins/672056/. 

Robertson, Derek. “How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era's Go-to Nerd Phrase.” POLITICO Magazine, 25 Feb. 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/25/overton-window-explained-definition-meaning-217010/. 

“The Overton Window.” Mackinac Center, https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow. 

Yokley, Eli. “America Has Become Less Liberal, but Not Necessarily More Conservative.” Morning Consult, 30 Nov. 2022, https://morningconsult.com/2022/08/18/america-ideology-less-liberal-but-not-necessarily-more-conservative/.

Zaller 1996. “The Myth Revised” in Mutz et al. Political Persuasion and Attitude Change.