Emmanuel Macron just won in a blowout. Here’s what it tells us about the 2022 midterms.
The final polling averages going into today’s French presidential election said that Emmanuel Macron was ahead by double digits, and sure enough, he beat far right pro-Putin extremist Marine Le Pen today by double digits. There are two key lessons we need to take away from this.
First, when a candidate has a large lead in a nationwide election in a functioning democracy, they tend to win. The polls usually prove accurate in these kinds of races. If anything, candidates with large leads in polls tend to win by even more than that, because people in the middle like to vote for a winner, and they’re more motivated to go out and vote for the frontrunner if they’re fairly certain the frontrunner is going to win. We saw that yet again today, when Macron took an eleven point lead into election day and ended up winning by sixteen to seventeen points.
We’re all still spooked by what happened in 2016. But that was not about the polls being wrong. They actually weren’t wrong. Just before the Comey letter, Hillary Clinton had an eight point lead over Donald Trump in the polling averages. After the letter, her lead dropped to four points, which she took into election day. She ended up winning by two points, which due to electoral college absurdity, wasn’t a win. If the Comey letter hadn’t happened, Clinton would have taken an eight point lead into election day – guaranteeing her a win even with the election college nonsense – and because she would have been seen as an obvious winner, she probably would have won by even more than eight points.
We’ve taken precisely the wrong lessons away from the 2016 debacle. We’ve had it drilled into us by the media and pundit class that “the polls were wrong” in 2016, which they were not. We’ve also had it drilled into us that Clinton lost due to “complacency” – which is not what happened – and that we should therefore always talk about how we’re going to lose even when we’re winning.
But as today’s French election reminded us, the candidates who are ahead tend to win. The polls in nationwide elections are generally proven correct. Candidates who take a sizable lead into election day tend to gain momentum from it, and win by even more than they were supposed to. Talking about how your candidate is a winner who’s going to win – not telling everyone who listen that your candidate is going to lose – is how you drive even more people to vote for your candidate.
The second lesson from today is about turnout. The defeatists are lamenting about how 42% of French voters ended up voting for a right wing monster like Le Pen. But that’s just reality. When you filter that through the turnout percentages, it means that about one-third of eligible French voters went for Le Pen. That’s not news. In every democracy, one-third of eligible voters are always willing to vote for the worst of far right monsters. It’s always been that way.
The real story is that when an election is between a solid mainstream candidate and a far right extremist, most of the people end up staying home would have voted for the mainstream candidate if they’d voted at all. It’s why these things always come down to turnout. In a high turnout situation, the good generally defeats the extremist candidate handily.
Today’s French election saw slightly lower turnout than the previous election, but it still saw roughly 70% turnout. That’s high when compared to, say, the United States. It’s why the far right extremist candidate in the past several French elections has lost. It’s also why Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes; it had the highest turnout of any U.S. presidential election in decades.
The trouble is that once a solid mainstream candidate becomes the incumbent, too many liberals then decide they’re too good for that incumbent, and refuse to go out and vote for that incumbent over the far right monster. This is nothing short of narcissism, a desire to feel superior to the solid incumbent. It’s why the new U.S. President’s party usually loses the midterms.
But these midterms are different. The Republicans are doing every stupid thing they can to hand it to us. More and more of them are getting caught up in the January 6th scandal, which is about to get massively amplified by public televised primetime congressional hearings. This is a rare golden opportunity for the Democrats to win in 2022, even though they just won the presidency in 2020.
But we’ll have to put in the work. Turnout is the golden ticket. Sufficient turnout overcomes extremism, cheating, voter suppression, you name it. It’s just math. In high turnout elections, the Democrats tend to win. We just have to make sure November is a high turnout election. We do that by drowning out the defeatists on our side who are trying to convince us not to bother trying, shaming the narcissists on our side who think they’re too good to vote Democrat this time, and portraying the Democrats as “winners who are likely to win” because that’s what attracts voters in the middle to the bandwagon.
Today was a huge victory for France and for democracy – and not just in one nation. Slovenia voted out its right wing leader today, in favor of a liberal environmentalist. Voters are sick of Putin, sick of Trumpism, sick of fascism, sick of extremism, and just want reasonable sanity. It’s proof that the Democrats have a strong chance in the midterms. They’re doing their part. But we have to put in the work on things like voter outreach, registration, and volunteering. It’s how competitive elections are won and lost – and everything else is just noise.
