The one race that shows how Democrats beat the Red Wave

Not two hours after the polls closed on Tuesday evening, Elissa Slotkin’s campaign manager took the stage of a packed hotel event space to share some good news. Slotkin was behind in all 11 townships that had reported results so far. The crowd went wild. This was not a typical reaction to news about losing uttered from an election-night stage, but on a night that would ultimately defy so many expectations for Democrats, it made its own kind of sense. Emma Grundhauser explained to the 100-plus people stuffed into a ballroom of Graduate Hotel in East Lansing, close to Michigan State, the way the two-term Congresswoman was losing gave her reason for optimism. It was all part of the plan. And the plan was to “lose better.” Slotkin, 46, had explained this strategy to me a few days before, on an eleventh-hour door-knocking blitz through a subdivision by a lake in south central Michigan. She had flipped a Trump-district seat in 2018 and held on in 2020 — becoming the only House Democrat in the country to represent a district that had gone Republican in the last three presidential races — and now was running in slightly more favorable territory after redistricting. Biden would have won her new district (had it existed in 2020) by less than a percentage point, but it was still a district seen to favor Republicans, especially in a midterm year with an unpopular Democratic president in power and the economy in distress.

That was where “lose better” came in, and it was a Midwest-modest mantra I heard over and over on the trail with Slotkin in the last days of her 2022 campaign. It meant knocking on doors even in the reddest parts of the district — places like Howell, a former center of KKK activity in Michigan, where Slotkin’s father warned her growing up not to drive through because she was Jewish. It meant accepting the reddest regions’ unwinnability and pushing for just a few more points anyway — say, a 45 percent tally over the usual 40 percent here, or getting 30 percent instead of 29 there — because those few extra points, assuming the Democratic strongholds held, could be the margin of winning it all. In the end, Slotkin, who is part of a dwindling but still-solid caucus of moderate House Democrats with national-security backgrounds, “lost” her way to a third consecutive victory and her best winning margin yet. At a Wednesday press conference, she told reporters her victory would be around 5 percentage points, or 20,000 votes, once they were all counted, in one of the top 10 most competitive districts in the entire country. “What we saw last night,” she told us, “was a coalition that included great turnout from our one Democratic county in Ingham County, doing better in the conservative county that I currently represent, in Livingston County, where we won Brighton City by eight points.” She was especially happy about one particular proof of concept: “For the first time, a Democrat has won Howell, by 13 votes.”