HOW MANY FACTS CAN MAUREEN DOWD GET WRONG IN ONE COLUMN?

Maureen Dowd attacks a cartoon version of the Democrats:

The Democrats just got skunked four to nothing in races they excitedly thought they could win because everyone they hang with hates Trump.

If Trump is the Antichrist, as they believe, then Georgia was going to be a cakewalk, and Nancy Pelosi was going to be installed as speaker before the midterms by acclamation. But it turned into another soul-sucking disappointment.

The special House elections were in Kansas, South Carolina, Montana, and Georgia. Do you know anyone who thought Democrats could win all four? Or even three? A few people saw hope in Montana because it has a Democratic governor and one Democratic senator, but it votes solidly Republican in every presidential election and hasn't elected a Democrat to the House since 1993.

Jon Ossoff's victory in Georgia seemed well within reach, but I know of no one who thought it would be a "cakewalk." And while Dowd tacks on the bit about Pelosi being installed as Speaker by acclamation in order to suggest that the whole thing is hyperbole, what leads up to it sure doesn't read as if Dowd's kidding. She needs to portray Democrats as victims of hubris or her column falls apart. Who cares about the facts?

Dowd continues:

Democrats cling to an idyllic version of a new progressive America where everyone tools around in electric cars, serenely uses gender-neutral bathrooms and happily searches the web for the best Obamacare options. In the Democrats’ vision, people are doing great and getting along. It is the opposite of Trump’s dark diorama of carnage and dystopia — but just as false a picture of America.

Maureen, please find me any mention in the four Democratic special election campaigns of a 100% shift away from internal-combustion cars. Please find me a celebration of gender-neutral bathrooms. Jon Ossoff did campaign on attracting more high-tech jobs to his district, but it's a highly educated district, so that makes sense. He also readily acknowledged that Obamacare isn't ideal. In South Carolina, Archie Parnell ran as a self-mocking green-eyeshade guy whose knowledge of the tax code would "bore you to tears" but would give him the skills to oversee spending wisely. (Parnell came closer to victory than Ossoff.)

Dowd:

With Jon Ossoff, as with Hillary Clinton, the game plan was surfing contempt for Trump and counting on the elusive Obama coalition.

I'm pretty sure Ossoff was counting on the Clinton coalition, which nearly beat Trump in the district in 2016.

The party still seems flummoxed that there are big swaths of the country where Democrats once roamed that now regard the Democratic brand as garbage and its long-in-the-tooth leadership as overstaying its welcome. The vibe is suffocating. Where’s the fresh talent?

Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, and Georgia are "swaths of the country where Democrats once roamed"? Not for decades in the latter two states, and never in the former. And as for "long in the tooth," the president Dowd is praising for his shutout of the Democrats is 71 years old, and the youth hero for many left-leaning voters, Bernie Sanders, is 75.

Ossoff is "fresh talent" -- he was born in 1987, which means he was trying to win a district that literally hasn't elected a Democrat in his lifetime, and he almost pulled it off in the first round of voting. There's more "fresh talent" around the country -- Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Kristen Gillibrand -- but these are smart people, not charismatic frat bros, so they don't set off the right heat meters.

In dwindling swing districts, [Rahm] Emanuel told me, Democrats need to choose candidates who are pro-middle class, not merely pro-poor.

Really? This guy was running as "pro-poor"?

They have to drum up suburban candidates who reflect their districts, Emanuel says, noting that [Democrats] wrenched back control of Congress [in the 2006 midterms] by recruiting a football player in North Carolina, an Iraq veteran in Pennsylvania and a sheriff in Indiana.

The Democrat who lost the Kansas special election, is a U.S. Army veteran who literally has a daughter named Liberty. Rob Quist was a third-generation Montanan who lost in Montana to a tech millionaire originally from New Jersey.

[Congressman Tim] Ryan says Democrats need to stop microtargeting. “They talked to a black person about voting rights, a brown person about immigration, a gay about gay rights, a woman about choice and on and on, slicing up the electorate,” he said. “But they forgot that first and foremost, people have to pay their mortgages and get affordable health care.”

You know who mastered microtargeting? Donald Trump's tech wizards:

"Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven," Alexander Nix [of Cambridge Analytica] remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump's team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. "We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals."

Look, the four losses sting. And Democrats do have problems. But David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report is right about the 2018 map being favorable to the Democrats, because there are many districts more competitive than these special-election districts were:

Although it's true Democrats have agonizingly yet to capture a red district, they have outperformed their "generic" share of the vote significantly in every contest. Measured against the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voter Index (PVI), Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean of their districts by an average of eight points....

If Democrats were to outperform their "generic" share by eight points across the board in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats. Of course, that won't happen because Republican incumbents will be tougher to dislodge than special election nominees. But these results fit a pattern that should still worry GOP incumbents everywhere....

Put another way, Democratic candidates in these elections have won an average of 68 percent of the votes Hillary Clinton won in their districts, while Republican candidates have won an average of 54 percent of Trump's votes. That's an enthusiasm gap that big enough to gravely imperil the Republican majority next November—even if it didn't show up in "the special election to end all special elections."

But if Dowd had acknowledged that, she wouldn't have had a column. Why let the facts get in the way of some enjoyable Democrat-bashing?