Democrats feel better than they have since the day Trump won a year ago. The results of elections across the country last week prove that Americans still share many of their values and that the country can swing back their way. They’re almost giddy about the prospect of an electoral wave in 2018 that could take back Congress and put a more robust check on Trump’s power.
Now, it’s time to throw a little cold water on the exuberance. David Leonhardt of the New York Times notes that only one of the 15 House of Delegates seats that Democrats won in Virginia was carried by Trump. I was told this weekend, but have not seen the data, that Democrats won 55% of the votes for Delegate but still came up short of winning control of the chamber. The election next year is not going to be easy.
In particular, Leonhardt says, Democrats need to figure out how to reach out to white working class voters. While Democratic Governor-elect Ralph Northam won by bigger margins in cities and suburbs, he lost by larger margins in rural counties than the current governor, Democrat Terry McAuliff, did four years ago. So, while racking up big margins in the fastest growing areas may bode well for statewide candidates, they have far less impact on Congressional and legislative districts.
In North Carolina next year, Democrats won’t have a governor’s or Senate race to help them along. The fights will be in districts drawn by Republicans to give them advantages. Most Congressional districts feature swaths of rural areas that went heavily for Trump last year. That’s also true of many of the legislative districts Democrats will need to win if they hope to actually capture a chamber.
A lot Democratic operatives and strategists argue that Democrats just need to turnout more minority and younger voters. That strategy may run up margins in Democratic districts and help pick up a few in Republican-held seats in urban areas, but it probably won’t be enough to win majorities in either chamber. Democrats need to figure out how to get a larger share of the white non-college educated voters. At the very least, they need to stop hemorrhaging that vote.
Leonhardt says, “Democrats have to get the white working class to focus on the working-class part of their identity rather than the white part.” Democrats should focus on the economic struggles of working-class voters, regardless of race. Providing tools to upward mobility like better wages, better jobs and affordable healthcare appeals to everyone who has been left out of the modern economy. It can both win a few more white working class voters and offer something to minority voters, especially men, who stayed home last year.
Democrats have a lot to be happier about today than they did before last Tuesday, but they still have a lot of work to do. Yes, they need to improve turnout of their base, but they’ve also got to build a bigger tent. Half the population is white without a four-year degree. Democrats can’t win districts if they continue to lose an increasing proportion of this population.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
“that Democrats won 55% of the votes for Delegate but still came up short of winning control of the chamber. The election next year is not going to be easy.”
That last line may or may not be true but I’d infer nothing about 2018 from this year’s elections whose results basically reinforced that Dems are the party of the coasts (well, the northern half of the east coast anyway) and Reps rule the heartland. As for Virginia, it will remain contested, a blue state at the statewide office level but a red state to the extent that the Reps will retain the legislature.
If I may…
It’s sort of like US foreign policy. People the world over love Americans; they truly do. What they hate is the extra baggage that comes with accepting aid, assistance, or money from the United States because that acceptance is prefaced with contingencies.
Now apply those same parameters to the white working class as the foreign nations and the Democrat party as the US. To give the devil his due, the Democratic party (referred to as Party from here in) has given a voice to every under-represented, misrepresented, and completely ignored group and cause in the nation. The Party has in turn, turned away, superficially perhaps, but given the perception of turning away from the blue collar, working class, average educated (not average intelligence, since education is not in and of itself indicia of intelligence), small business, majority of this nation. People who do not comprise those of the Country Club set. Those people who don’t really concern themselves with the regular bowel movements of the red cockaded woodpecker. Those in the first group can’t grasp how they have been marginalized and wholly ignored by the Party that they thought would look after their best interests since the Party was built on the concept of looking out for the little guy. The Republicans have never left anyone in doubt of what segment of society it is they pander to and look after; big money and big business.
Needless to say, those marginalized masses are pissed. These are people who are, for the most part, socially conservative or moderate. They work, they raise their families, they go to church, they hunt and fish. They struggle to scratch out a life and living for themselves in a country where they were brought up on the vision and propaganda of “The American Dream.” That was true once, but today however, the blue collar working class has seen the rapid erosion of their class; not just manufacturing jobs and the ancillary support that goes with manufacturing from raw materials to finished product outsourced to foreign powers. That erosion has caused a paradigm shift in their lives and the world and nation as they understood it. So while they have struggled desperately to cling to any semblance of that world. They party has spoken to or addressed none of those concerns and misgivings. Instead all we have offered is how our economy is changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. News not well received if you were in the blue collar middle class. The Party again did little to assuage those fears and when it did, it fed them.
Seeing their chance Republican strategists began working up talking points about the institutions that were still remaining strong in that class of citizens; chiefly religion. They turned advances in and court victories in the protection of civil rights into losses for the Party. Slowly, Democrats quit being Democrats and started being ‘liberals’. A much more reviled and despised thing by anyone who was a ‘true’ and ‘patriotic’ American. See how this works? I’m sure you do since most here are very politically savvy.
Then there are the wars on terrorism and the objectification of the military; but that’s another soapbox stump for another time.
I don’t know that I’m right, not 100% at any rate. But given the evidence, and looking beyond it on both sides at what is done rather than what is said, I don’t believe I’m far off the mark. The far overreaching premise however will be how we get that entire class of people back from the precipice staring down into the Republican abyss. Because right now, the abyss still has an appeal. It’s slowly starting to shift and Thomas and Jay are right in that this is no time to rest on Party laurels and regale ourselves in victory. The war is far from being over. This is simply the first of many skirmishes to come.
To Thomas and Jay, both of whom I consider mostly correct in their analysis. The question is why either of you believes that the presentation of rational policies that improve the economic plight of the white non-college educated individual will convince them that Democrats are not Lucifer incarnate. I won’t claim that the Democrats have done a great job at articulating such policies, but compared to what the GOP actually does, decade after decade, the Dems look and sound very concerned about those left behind in this so-called booming economy. I just don’t think that rationality and policy recommendations on jobs would make the rural voter in Georgia or the unemployed of coal mine areas in WV vote Democrat at this point.
I know GOP voters who are white, well educated, well off financially, male and female, who voted for Trump. I have family members in the poor white category, lacking in education and whose jobs skills are now not really needed. Both categories seem to me to be afraid and angry. One has little reason to be either, and the other can no longer believe anything anyone running for office says. I don’t think the latter group believed Trump, but they applauded his “stick it to them” behavior and large numbers within that white group are racist. sexist, homophobic and strongly pro-military. Neither group really seems to accept the world as very complicated, nor deeply interconnected across national boundaries. They want simplicity. In a nutshell, they do not think, and neither group seems to have any serious notion of how government works. In fact, the evidence from much of the last few years, is that government more often than not does not work.
My guess is that for many of the white poorly educated voters their expectations of Trump were pretty low, and as long as he continues to rail and rant, blaming others, and creating utter chaos along the way, they will either support him or vote against anyone who is not Trump even if it means “cutting off your nose, despite your face.” (As my mother used to occasionally tell me.) Pride can be expensive, but if you are financially at the lower end of the scale and see little future for yourself or your children, it may be the only thing left that is truly yours. In that case, you vote for anyone who is not part of the ongoing, long term establishment in either party, but especially the party you once expected to help you. After all, a vote for Trump was not really a GOP vote; it was a vote against a woman (and an uppity woman at that), the Democrats who had ignored them too frequently in favor of blacks, Latinos, LGBT, immigrants, and the well educated wealthy, as well as an opportunity to show both parties they could go to hell.
When the Democrats fight the culture wars as a primary focus, they are fighting on Republican soil. Having become the refuge of racists, pedophiles, rapists, Nazis, and extremists, there is no shame left in being immoral, boorish, boastful, inarticulate, or self-centered to a traitorous degree.
There is no proof of innocence sufficient to exonerate a Democrat or a liberal when the rumors and Russian spies spin fantastical yards of alleged misconduct. The outrageous allegation is accompanied with a presumption of guilt, even when logical, fact and reason point to the preposterousness of
Obama’s foreign birth or Hillary’s complicity in the sex trafficking of children from the basement of a Georgetown Pizza parlor.
Likewise, there is no proof of guilt sufficient to change the minds of Republicans – even when clearly factual allegations of wrong-doing are supported by mountains of evidence.
Indictments, guilty pleas and firings of corrupt Republicans have to do. Criminals will take their perp walks and face courts of law, but public opinion within the Republican bubble with not be changed by evidence or facts.
Claiming that Republicans are worse than Democrats is not enough. Democrats can point out that GOP governments cannot protect the nation from an enemy that they comfort, that they will impoverish everyone but the .01% with every step they take, that they will take away health care, education, clean air and water and send our soldiers into ill-considered ignoble battles.
Republicans do not see around those corners. Climate change will become an issue for Republicans when the flood waters have entered their living rooms, when their family members perish without medical attention, when they are gagging on chemicals deposited upstream, or when their children come home draped in an American flag. Even then they may buy the propaganda from the fascist on Fox News.
To win voters, Democrats must talk about jobs, economic programs and how the middle class will prosper under the Democrats. Americans have become a jaded people. Something happened, and I do not know what, but they do not mind that Russian spies have control of their social media, that their president is a sexual predator, that a pedophile (who was disbarred and removed from the Alabama Supreme Court) will represent Alabama, that policies are being written to benefit 1,000 families. They vote for people who will harm them and hate the people who would help them. Go figure.
Talk about jobs. Morality, ethics and decency do not move the needle anymore, unless you are talking about how Hillary murdered Vince Foster.