Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.
“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”
His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.
Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.
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Something looked kooky about your numbers. I figured it out. You’re trying to analyze 2020 as a blue wave year! That was never a blue wave year. It was just a regular election that Democrats won. Biden was a milquetoast candidate that barely beat Trump, even with the pandemic helping him. It was absolutely not a blue wave year. The grandparent post was just wrong on that point.
For a blue wave year, see 2018. In that year Democrats gained 41 seats in the House. This is more likely to reflect what 2026 will look like. 2020 was not a blue wave year. It was a pretty balanced election. Both parties had unpopular old men at the top of the ticket.