Moderate persuaders

This is very encouraging if true:

In the Trump era, Democrats have seemed to excel among the highly engaged, highly educated voters who predominate in low-turnout, off-year elections, only to struggle when more irregular and less educated voters flock to the polls in presidential years.

But on Tuesday, when Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races by wide margins, it wasn’t simply because more Democratic-leaning voters showed up to the polls while more Republican-leaning voters sat out. The Democratic candidates also succeeded at winning over a modest but meaningful sliver of President Trump’s supporters, based on exit polls and authoritative voter file records.

While it’s always challenging to nail down the details of an electoral shift, the available data generally suggests that Democratic gains were driven slightly more by flipping Mr. Trump’s supporters than by benefiting from a superior turnout, at least for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.

Out-mobilizing Republicans is very viable in many lower-turnout elections, given the nature of the respective coalitions. But to recapture the White House and have any chance of a Senate majority, Democrats are going to have to flip a significant number of Trump 2024 votes. The fact that he’s so aggressively alienating various voters who voted for an imaginary moderate version of Trump who would only deport bad hombres and bring prices back to 2019 levels is an opportunity that Democrats need to take advantage of.