It’s been about thirty years since James Carville could be considered an accomplished political operative, so it’s not surprising that his post-election analysis isn’t very sophisticated:

“I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that. It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

Let’s start with some basics. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post detailed on Wednesday, the movement toward the Republicans in the Tuesday elections was pretty uniform and somewhat surprisingly did not track with population density. Here’s how Nate Cohn described the numbers out of Virginia:

In a departure from recent demographic trends, there weren’t really any notable demographic trends in Virginia at all.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, won by making broad gains over Democrats in every part of the state and, apparently, across every demographic group. He gained in the cities, the suburbs and rural areas. He gained in the east and west. He made inroads in precincts with both white and nonwhite voters.

Now, overall, turnout was very high. You might argue that the Republicans were more motivated and came out to vote at a higher rate than the Democrats, but the Democrats showed no signs of voter apathy. In relative terms, we can say the Democrats lost the turnout game, but this wasn’t a matter of the left going to sleep. It was much more a matter of persuasion. A lot of Biden voters decided to cast votes for Republican candidates, in many cases no doubt reverting back to their prior pattern before Trump.

The rural situation for Democrats got worse, but the situation in the suburbs was more a return to a more normal distribution. This is exactly what I warned about in my post-2020 presidential election analysis. I noted that the Biden had relied on an urban/suburban alliance that is both unnatural and unstable.

The Democrats’ main problem is that that their urban/suburban coalition is fundamentally unstable. Typically, suburbanites choose to live outside of cities for carefully considered reasons—lower crime, better education–and they resist spending their tax dollars on urban priorities. Historically, the Republicans have had tremendous success in exploiting this wedge, and it’s not hard to foresee them making inroads in the suburbs again using messaging that’s less blunderbuss than Trump’s cries that low-income housing projects will be built next door and your life is in danger. What’s driving the cities and suburbs together is growing demographic and cultural similarities, but common economic interests are lacking.

Now, one thing I noted back in November 2020 was that the Republicans’ weakness in the suburbs was driving them by necessity into a more white identity-focused strategy designed to roll up higher margins in rural areas and heavily white small towns. The emergence of Critical Race Theory as a political theme is a reflection of this, but it’s also proved highly effective in stirring white identity among suburban voters.

Carville’s shorthand for this is the example of San Francisco deciding “to rename 44 schools named after controversial public figures, including former Presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and current Sen. Dianne Feinstein.” He’s got a point insomuch as the real potency of the Critical Race Theory backlash doesn’t lie with its literal accuracy. School districts aren’t actually teaching the theory, but there is a movement to kind of recalibrate who we honor from our past. We’re a settler nation with a history of slavery and racial segregation, and a lot of that history is now looked at with new eyes in part because the country is more diverse. The San Francisco example is extreme, but there’s an understandable discomfort with the general trend toward dishonoring the traditional heroic narrative of the Founders and our history of developing and promoting democracy and human rights.

Now the message that’s resonating is the idea that a white kid going to elementary school is getting a steady diet of information about how nonwhites have been mistreated in this country, and you know maybe that’s not the most “patriotic” message. Maybe it makes those kids feel guilty or as if there’s something inherently wrong with them. Even liberal-minded white suburban mothers can worry that their precious snowflakes are going to be damaged in this process.

I have to give the right some credit for coming up with this strategy. It’s working like a charm by riling up their racist base while also sounding reasonable to a lot of suburban parents. It’s effectiveness is confounding, but the response has been far too literal. It doesn’t matter that Critical Race Theory isn’t actually being taught in schools. What matters is that they’ve put a word on something real that people feel.

Still, the election results from Tuesday show a uniform movement away from the Democrats, so it’s not accurate to say that “woke” culture is the only, or even the primary explanation. A better explanation is that a backlash against Trump artificially inflated the Democrats’ numbers, especially by driving an unnatural and easily undermined urban/suburban cultural alliance that masked the disaster of collapsing rural support. Without Trump at the forefront of voters’ minds, a lot more people were willing to cast a vote for a Republican candidate, and that’s true everywhere and among every group, including core Democratic demographics.

Now, we might have expected this to be offset somewhat by less engagement from Trump supporters who’d be less motivated to turn out without him on the ticket, but this didn’t really manifest itself because the Republicans are the out-party, and the out-party is always more angry and more inclined to vote.

So, the basic explanation for the Tuesday results is that the Republicans had an engagement advantage and they were able to do two things. First, the continued the trend of solidifying the rural/small town vote, and second they found a message that made inroads in the suburbs. These factors combined with less of a Trump backlash against generic Republican candidates to make for a strong swing.

The Democrats could have done a better job of riling up their supporters, and passing some of Biden’s agenda might have helped in a variety of ways. The literal response to the Critical Race Theory attacks were tone-deaf and counterproductive. But, overall, the problem is that two many people do not see the Democrats as on their side. This is most acutely apparent in rural areas, and the worse this gets the more reliant the Dems are on maintaining a very difficult to sustain urban/suburban alliance.

It’s pretty much everything I’ve warned against, and I take no pleasure in saying that.