A guest post from VidaLoca:
More on “Rebuilding the Farm System” in the Democratic Party, Part I
Several weeks ago, Zandar published an article about rebuilding the farm system in the Democratic Party. His post concludes:
I’m at least pleased that the Dems … have decided that fighting fire with sternly worded vision statements is a good way to get covered in third-degree burns, as 2010 and 2014 showed. States like Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and Florida that vote for Dems at the presidential level are under total GOP control at the state level, and dozens if not hundreds of state legislature seats across the country are being filled every two years by Republicans running completely unopposed. That’s the kind of stuff we have to fix if we want any chance at staving off the crazy.
What kind of ideas do the assembled have for improving the Dems chances where you live at the state level?
He’s asking an important question here. It is indeed troubling that while Democrats have been able to do well nationally in Presidential elections, they have lost control of so many state governments [1]. It’s even more troubling that that situation is just accepted as the normal state of things. Other than the rabble here at Balloon-Juice, nobody is much bothered to wonder why it is or how things got this way. At any rate, it matters because as Kay pointed out in one of her recent comments, if your party doesn’t control states it doesn’t really have an agenda: so much of the context of peoples’ everyday lives gets decided on the state level that control of state governments is crucial to making a party a credible force for social change. Without that control, without actual power to create the change you envision, your agenda is just a list of talking points. Control is also crucial for rebuilding the farm system. Finally, if your state organizations are weak it makes it infinitely harder to win national elections: ideally at least, strong state parties function as a power base for national campaigns. Howard Dean had that one right.
Liberals are rightly concerned about maintaining power at the national level — but if the right wing can lock up the federal government so that it can’t accomplish much of anything while they pick off states one by one, they have an answer to liberals’ hopes that demographic determinism and the distribution of weight in the electoral college will ensure Democratic presidencies into the foreseeable future. Control all of the states, even enough of the states, and it doesn’t matter who is President.
In other words we’re in deeper shit than we realize.
But before we talk about how to dig ourselves out, we need to think about how we got here. I’m going to propose an analysis of how we got here in what follows; with that out of the way I’m going to follow up in a future post with some ideas for improving the Dems’ chances. I also want to address some of the comments that people made in Zandar’s original article because many of them were thought-provoking and deserve further discussion.
Many of you will find much to disagree with in what follows, and that’s fine. One thing a person gets from living in Wisconsin, and in Milwaukee in particular, is a pretty jaded view of the Democratic Party [2]. I will admit that I’m biased and I’m aware that the conclusions I’ve come to are not completely generalizable; that’s why a discussion like this one is useful. It’s useful, that is, if you want to debate facts or offer alternative analyses. I won’t spend a lot of time debating labels. I also don’t think it’s helpful to point out that “Republicans are worse” or “Republicans are stupid” because that doesn’t contribute anything to the discussion. While it’s true that they’re both worse and stupid, they’re winning and we need to get clear on why to understand what to do about it.
A (Very) Quick Historical Analysis
It’s a cliché to point out that the 1960’s were a decade of mass mobilization for social justice. What’s less broadly recognized is that they also saw the beginnings of a broad-based reactionary movement that grew up especially as a response to the gains being made by movements for equal justice and political power for people of color. This reactionary movement met with disaster in the Goldwater debacle of 1964 but instead of giving up, the reactionaries went to war to take over the Republican Party. Their goal was to capture that organization, and use it as a vehicle to implement their program.
By the end of the decade some of the richest and most powerful people in the country were growing alarmed that the rise in social chaos of the late 1960’s meant that their control was slipping. In August 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free Enterprise System to the US Chamber of Commerce. In it he calls on the business community to go to war on both the ideological and political fronts:
But one should not postpone more direct political action, while awaiting the gradual change in public opinion to be effected through education and information. Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assidously (sic) cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.
As unwelcome as it may be to the Chamber, it should consider assuming a broader and more vigorous role in the political arena.
The Koch brothers heard Powell’s call, founding ALEC in 1973, Heritage Foundation in 1973, Cato Institute in 1977 [3]. There are lessons for us in the strategy that was used here: instead of trying to “send a message” or “discuss our ideas” or “move Gerald Ford to the right” or fight some meaningless battle for some abstract principle that had nothing to do with taking power, these guys began a long process of institution-building. A decade later, when Reagan came along, they were ready. But while they had money and influence, they didn’t have soldiers. The right-wing activists were soldiers without a lot of money. Both groups soon learned that they could work together.
Meanwhile the liberals who had hoped to dominate the political landscape after Johnson’s election in 1964 saw their dreams crash to the ground only four years later: with King and Kennedy assassinated, cities in a state of semi-open rebellion, police rioting at the Democratic Convention, they watched Hubert Humphrey lose to Richard Nixon’s reprise of George Wallace’s electoral strategy.
Reagan, in turn, perfected the “Southern Strategy” and rode it to power in 1980. His success in doing so was based on racial prejudice to be sure, but also based heavily on changes in the economy that began during the 1970’s — rapid industrial development chasing cheap labor in the Third World saw major chunks of productive assets shipped overseas or simply abandoned. Capital investment moved offshore as well. The globalization of capitalism that took off in the 1970’s meant de-industrialization at home. Combined with technological advances in automated manufacturing, globalization meant a hollowing-out of the working class at the same time that it meant a hollowing-out of the economy. The central question Reagan posed to the voters — “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” — is fundamentally an economic question, not a question about privilege or about the culture wars (though there were plenty of those as well).
The economic changes that began in the 1970’s had profoundly negative effects on the trade unions and on the Democratic Party which had historically sought (with mixed results) to be the vehicle for the unions’ political aspirations. Forced to adapt or die, the Democrats struggled (Mondale, Dukakis) until they coalesced around the “New Democrat”, “Third Way”, neoliberal political vision of Bill Clinton. That’s the central vision of the Democratic Party today, and as much as the left-wing minority tendency in the DP points to Elizabeth Warren, or Sherrod Brown, or anyone else as an alternative (or Jesse Jackson before them, or George McGovern before him, or Robert Kennedy before McGovern) these people have no power, no organization, no institutional base within the DP [4]. As for funding sources, the DP turned away from the unions (which were broke financially anyhow) and toward corporations and wealthy individuals in the tech, finance, and entertainment sectors. And, same as it ever was, who pays the piper calls the tune.
To sum up: the profound changes in the global economy that began roughly in the 1970’s have pounded the working class, both in absolute and relative terms. This pounding has taken place in the context of a political terrain defined by a two-party system in which one party has been (and is being) optimized for class warfare. That would be the Republican Party, and even though they’re torn apart by major internal battles among their divergent camps of grifters, opportunists, and psychopaths they’re slowly but surely, state by state, gaining power by beating the Democrats. It’s a very good thing for us that they are as busy as they are fighting one another, but the day will come when one faction either beats or buys the submission of the others and then we really will be in trouble.
Structural Consequences for the Democrats
Meanwhile the Democratic Party hasn’t been and isn’t being optimized for much of anything. I’ll grant you whatever you might want to say about each and every reform won by the Obama administration — as far as I’m concerned they’re all good and all irrelevant to the point: we keep assuming that the Democratic Party is some kind of a fighting organization. It’s not. It never was. It will at some times and for its own reasons offer some support to fights that other people start, but its sole purpose is to put into power candidates who profess belief in its program and it doesn’t formally care about much more than that. As such it’s more of a force for social stability than social change; the impetus for change comes from outside the party and the party mediates it. And the adaptations that it’s made since it unmoored itself from its base in the unions have made it even less, rather than more of a fighting organization.
The DP’s process of walking away from the unions has led to the development of a program and over time, a record that is not that compelling to working-class voters. It also leads to a weakening of state Party organizations (for example, it’s one of the biggest reasons why the Wisconsin DP organization is so weak right now). As a compensating mechanism, what you begin to see in the Presidential years is the phenomenon of the centrally-driven national non-Party campaign organization taking over in states where the state Party organization is believed by the national campaign to be too weak to carry the load: what might be called the “OFA phenomenon”. OFA was a campaign machine par excellence, but these “out of the box” campaign organizations are a poor vehicle for building local party groups because they tend to drive local people out, yet they don’t persist themselves after the election is over [5].
What I see here in Milwaukee is a tendency for the non-elected DP activists to skew toward older, whiter, more middle-class/(retired) professional people [6]. That brings with it all the obstacles to organization-building that you might imagine in a place like this [7]. But it’s a problem not limited to party organization-building alone — consider that a person born in the year that Reagan was first elected is now 35 years old: well out of college or tech school, married at least once, probably has children, probably has a house and a job if they’re lucky enough. The older cohort, here, are at least able to keep their heads above water although the racial disparity is huge. The younger cohort are not doing as well because they’re coming later into a more perverse job market and they have a higher mountain of school debt. They’re all more-or-less aware of the DP but not convinced that its program, and especially its record, is a compelling reason to even vote for its candidates much less participate in the organization. The people older than 35 may have some history of seeing politics turn to shit incrementally; they’re more capable of believing that it can be reversed incrementally as well. Some of them are willing to become activists. But once a kid has had the experience of seeing their parents terrified of losing their jobs, seen their neighborhood falling apart, seen the unions incapable of doing anything about any of it and the Democrats offering nothing but lip service to fixing the situation — is it any wonder that they’re a little cynical about Democratic promises come election time? They haven’t seen politics turn to shit; they’ve seen nothing but shitty politics. To them, it’s the norm; they’re not thinking of fixing it, they’re thinking of adjusting to it.
Everybody gets that the Republicans are worse, by any definition of worse you want to use. But again and again, we see it proven: that’s still not enough to motivate (enough) people to vote for something that doesn’t make sense to them. What it does is motivate enough people not to vote at all.
Once again, I’ll grant any objections you might want to make on behalf of the reforms of the Obama administration. I’m talking about 35 years of history and the cratered economy in which working-class people have to exist and the poor response of Democrats in addressing it. And in light of all that, I’m not amazed that the Democrats’ (off-Presidential) election turnout is so low, I’m more amazed that it’s as high as it is.
The key reason for the Democrats’ weakness lies in the fact that today, just as in 1980, they have not come up with a way of beating the Southern Strategy. If you find that hard to accept, consider Scott Walker. The innovation Walker brings to our current politics is precisely in the area of political program: he’s taken the Southern Strategy out of the South, peeled off some of the most racist aspects (though certainly not all of them, and he’s invented new ones), downplayed the culture war components without rejecting them, and repackaged it all for the 21st century. He’s demonstrated the ability to gather enough support for this program among working-class voters to win three elections in four years. Decisively, and by roughly the same margins in each. It’s true that in recent weeks, Walker has shown an amazing capability to portray himself as a doofus of the first degree but you should not let that lead you to believe that he’s personally stupid or that his political program will be a non-starter [8]. I’ve argued and you may object that beating the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is not a high bar to exceed but the message that Walker has used is not that different from the one used by the Republicans in the rest of the upper-Midwest states — Michigan, Indiana, Ohio. In other words, this stuff sells. So if you think that Walker is stupid but we’re smart, then you have to explain why he’s winning and we’re losing.
Program
So, you want to improve the Democrats’ chances where you live at the state level? If you live in one of the states where the situation is as bad as it is in Wisconsin, begin with the recognition that people have lost faith in your Party because your Party’s program doesn’t speak to their needs [9]. They’ve found other programs that they like better and while you may not agree with their reasoning you have to figure out how to address it.
Changing that is not primarily an organizational question although there are plenty of issues of organizational restructuring that need attention. “Improving the Dems’ chances” comes down to improving the Dems’ program. Use those improvements as wedge issues; drive the wedges into the spaces between the Republicans and the voters. If we really believe that the Republican program does not represent the voters’ interests then those spaces have to be there; if the Democrats can’t exploit them then they really have no business in this game.
What would those program improvements look like? More on this in the next article but for now I’ll just refer to something that Kay said because as usual she says it best (and in a much less polemical manner than I do). Here’s the thread — Let the Post-Mortems Begin (an apt title if there ever was one):
Working class and middle class people are economically insecure. All ages all genders all races. I’m convinced that’s the root of all the free-floating angst. Not ISIS or Ebola but the fact that they’re falling behind or treading water and they know it.
Don’t tell them to climb a ladder [this is a reference to the Democrats’ advice that people make themselves more secure economically by training up to get better jobs — VL]. They KNOW they’re on a ladder. Tell them you won’t let them fall off it and crash to the ground, again. Let Republicans be the risk party, the gamblers, the people who play fast and loose with peoples’ paychecks. Democrats should be the counter to that, not a version of it.
Give labor minimum wage and sick leave. They’re doing a better job with it anyway. Labor STARTED at $15, DC Democrats started at $9.50. In some ways, DC Democrats were under-cutting labor’s opening offer on the minimum wage. They weren’t even really helping. Minimum wage and sick leave are ISSUES, they’re not a coherent plan or theme. I cringed when I listened to national Democrats in this state. Fully one half of their message was “borrow money and go to college”. That’s advice, it’s not an economic plan. They sound like successful people offering the downtrodden advice. It’s just horrible. I don’t know why they can’t hear how it sounds.
…
Democrats didn’t make an income inequality argument, as far as the working/middle class. They made an income inequality argument as far as poor people, and poor people don’t vote in midterms. They barely vote in Presidential years.
They didn’t lose on income inequality to Republicans. They never made the argument. I think they made a conscious decision to do that. I heard it change from income inequality to inequality of opportunity.
They need their own argument. They can’t be “Republican economic ideas plus the safety net for poor people”. That’s not enough.
Preach it, Kay.
This is how you do it. This, right here, is how you go at the Republicans. You do it on the federal level and you do it on the state level and you do it on the county level. And if your state Party isn’t up to it, you need to fix it. We’ll talk about that next time.
[1] The article Zandar linked to claims 30 Republican states, 11 Democratic states. From statements from the Balloon-Juice commentariat alone, I’ve come to believe that Democrats are not doing well in Va, Fl, WVa, Pa, Il, Ky, and Tx. Mi, In, NJ, Ia as well. Wi of course. Ks sounds like an insane asylum. No good news from any of the states of the Confederacy that I have not already mentioned. Tn, Mo, Ar, Nb doubtful. Ut, Wy, Id, Ok beyond hope. It’s true there are counter-examples — Ca, Ma, Mn, Or, Hi. NY, but… Andrew Cuomo. OH maybe has a functioning DP organization even though it’s not in power. But overall this is a grim picture: Democrats strong on the West Coast and New England, plus some isolated pockets; Republicans in control elsewhere. This is the stuff we have to fix if we want any chance of staving off the crazy. Maybe we limp through 2016 although that’s not a sure thing. But 5 years out, 10 years out, if this is the trend how does it end well? [2] To be fair, there are a lot of individual Democratic elected officials here who are doing good work. It’s a farm system and I recognize the value of that. So does everybody else here who’s an activist. We spend a lot of time and effort helping good people — specifically Democrats — get into office and protecting their backs once we do. [3] As for Powell, two months after his memo was delivered to the Chamber of Commerce, he was on his way to the Supreme Court. [4] McGovern had enough savvy to take advantage of the structural changes made in the DP in the wake of the fiasco of the Chicago convention in 1968 to win the nomination — but he lacked the organization to carry any state other than Massachusetts. Nixon took the other 49. And 44 years later, the left wing of the DP still does not control a single state organization. Contrast this to the approach that the right wing began in 1964 and then think about where we are on that timeline. [5] Because the Wisconsin DP is such a basket case what we see here may be atypical but the pattern is that the campaigns bring in young people in their 20’s to “put together the local organization” (I put that in quotes because although we have differing opinions here about the Democratic Party we’re quite organized. Campaign support field work is not that hard and we’ve had some practice). At any rate these young hotshots don’t necessarily come from the Midwest much less Wisconsin but they feel quite at home in telling us how things should be run locally. And they’re often quite wrong; but they don’t work for us, they work for “the campaign”, and “the campaign” has pretty strict ideas about how things should be done. And their career depends on following those ideas. I’ll leave you to imagine the amount of wasted time spent on attitude adjustment in these cases, and it’s all for nothing: the day after the election, the hotshot is on the plane to the next campaign. Even when all goes well their knowledge base, leadership skills, and all the lessons learned leave with them; the campaign apparatus is torn down, only to be rebuilt from scratch (with brand new hotshots!) come the next election. When it goes badly, the local volunteers end up feeling burned and disillusioned; they’re not likely to come back the next time the circus comes to town. [6] The elected officials are, as I implied above, a different case altogether. But their focus is on doing their jobs, serving their constituents, trying to do what they set out to accomplish when they got elected. Their focus is less on organization-building and rightfully so — but unfortunately, a lot of organization-building needs to be done. [7] By contrast, the younger (non-DP) activists I see come from the African-American and Latino communities so by definition they skew toward being more working-class. Their activism is defined by the issues in their communities but since the DP has no relevance to those issues, the DP doesn’t even appear on their radar. We applaud the aging of the Tea Party and take hope that it will soon die off — but the age range of the DP activists that I refer to is about the same as that of the Tea Party folk. And there’s no Liberty University to replace the DP activists. So how does the DP recruit? [8] Granted, some buyer’s remorse is setting in and he might not be able to win a fourth election. So he’s moving on to bigger things, leaving the voters holding the bag of false promises that he sold them (and, it must be said, that they eagerly bought). Give the man credit, his sense of timing is superb. And still, liberals want to call him stupid. [9] And recognize that they aren’t stupid, or tribal, or any of your other labels for coming to that conclusion — because you can’t organize people you don’t respect and you can’t win elections unless you can organize people.
Howard Beale IV
Before you begin to rebuild the farm system. try to figure out how to identify and neutralize neoliberals before they get control and into power, mmkay?
jame
My theory about Republicans taking over at the state and local levels is simple: Those elections cost a lot less to buy.
Emerald
A comment before I finish reading this: getting back in control, or at least in contention, in the states might be even more important than it now appears. Don’t take it as a given that demographics will virtually ensure Democrats the presidency in the future.
The Rs know that the demographics are against them. So they’re already moving to do something completely constitutional: allocating their electoral votes by congressional district.
Nebraska and Maine already do this. It’s entirely legal. The state gets to decide how it will allocate its electoral votes.
Ergo, with the congressional districts gerrymandered by the state legislatures, just how long might it take to win the presidency on electoral votes, no matter what the popular vote might be?
OK, they’ll have a ways to go to overcome California and New York, but they can get there. And they’re already pursuing this idea in Michigan. Expect it to spread to other states before the 2016 election.
Baud
I like this
The Democratic Party has historically adopted grass roots movements, like the Progressive movement of the early 20th century or the Civil Rights Movement or the more recent gay rights movement. The party does not instigate those movements, so people who are disappointed in the DP seem to me historically unaware of how past progress came about.
geg6
Testing 123
Belafon
I agree with almost everything except the part about Democrats failing where I live. Here in Texas, like much of the South, the Democrats aren’t in power because they refused to maintain Jim Crow.
VidaLoca
@Howard Beale IV: Well, it’s not either/or. Ideally we try to build up new talent by taking out neoliberals, then it’s a twofer.
Sometimes you get overwhelmed. For example, the current Milwaukee County Executive is every bit as much a neoliberal as Rahm Emanuel. And, a Democrat. He got into office when Scott Walker left to become governor. And he ran against a foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing Tea Party Republican. No question, we took a huge hit on that one.
VidaLoca
@Belafon: So I’d really like to hear more about this from other people in the South, because everything I’ve read about the conservative counter-revolution and the Southern Strategy is consistent with what you’re saying (although I’ve also read that the Democrats were instrumental in the years after Reconstruction in erecting Jim Crow so there’s that to be said too).
At any rate, that was 50 years ago. How do the Democrats in the South (in Texas for example) get back into contention today?
VidaLoca
@jame:
Yes. Bang for the buck is much greater on the state level. Consider the point the Kay was making that I quoted in the post, too: once you control a state you define an agenda; that means you can do a lot of experimentation and development of ideas that work vs. those that don’t.
The cliche is that the states are laboratories for democracy. Depending on who controls them they can just as easily be laboratories for fascism too.
So control of states is something that can be leveraged.
Belafon
@VidaLoca: I will credit one thing about Texas: If we could get Latinos to vote, Democrats could retake the state. It would be hard, because Republicans have put up roadblocks (voter ID). Democrats have tried a number of things here, including voter drives, running Latino, black, and women candidates. They’ve tried rather liberal platforms, like running on increasing education funding.
I’m still not sure what else there is to do.
The Democrats were the party of the South until the 60s. After the CRA and VRA, and especially when Reagan ran, a lot of Southern Democrats became Republicans, which aligned them with national Republicans.
Botsplainer
As I mentioned just this morning, I saw some daylight in an ad.
Gubernatorial GOPers in Kentucky’s primary are savaging each other over who is MOST conservative and pro-life (the D side has a solid candidate with organization already, so it is noncompetitive – he’s holding his fire). While all this genuine nastiness plays out and “he’s the same as Obama” flyers hit GOP mailboxes, the Democratic candidate for Treasurer is running ads where he says he’ll be a watchdog against bad Tea Party ideas.
Utterly refreshing.
Baud
@Botsplainer: Great news. Hope it pays off.
Corner Stone
@VidaLoca:
Two main things:
1. Current corrupt Old Boys D Party leaders die off.
2. Somehow overcome the apathy in the Latino community(s) and get them consistently to the polls.
We’re slowly overcoming 1., but I’ll be damned if we’ve been able to crack any new ground into 2.
Cacti
@Howard Beale IV:
Because Dems only lose when the candidate isn’t liberal enough.
Hence Russ Feingold never losing to a teabagger.
fuckwit
This is fantastic. If more people on the left get on this page, it’ll all work out. This is exactly what we need.
I love this post very much. Looking forward to the next in the series.
Baud
So I’ll quibble with this:
The programs that the Democratic Party puts forward is, to my mind, greatly affected by how it is organized, and vice versa. Political leaders aren’t going to put forward better programs if the organization isn’t there to make sure that those proposals translate into election day (and re-election day) victories. Likewise, the visible presence of progressive organizations in a district or state will encourage Dem politicians to take new political risks. It’s a feedback loop that needs to be created.
My two cents.
JPL
Michelle Obama gave the most amazing commencement speech at Tuskegee and my local news and network news praised it. Unfortunately, the ones on Fox and on the whacko right wing shows didn’t. They hear rants or as Michelle would say, just noise. That noise influences a lot of people.
Cacti
I have feeling that without Obama around to drag them across the finish line, the Congressional Dems are going to have a disappointing performance in 2016.
While the Clintons have always been good at getting themselves elected, they never had much in the way coattails for down ticket races.
KG
I think a large part of the equation is that for most of my life (I’m in my mid/late 30s), it seems as if the Democratic Party has been terrible at explaining why it’s programs/policies are good for people and society. Republicans running on tax cuts have an easy sell, “we’re going to cut your taxes, which means you’ll get more money in your paycheck.” Trying to explain that you have to raise taxes (which means a smaller paycheck) to pay for this or that is a helluvalot harder – especially when times are tough economically.
raven
The last white congressman in the South was finally beaten this time around. He was a yellow dog and a jerk but people in the Dem party kept pushing him.
Corner Stone
@Belafon:
There are a lot of pockets where we’re just going to have to suck it up and support a 2nd Amendment loving Democratic candidate. Or a Death Tax opponent, or etc.
The ultimate problem is one of the topic here – a viable bench. After years of corrupt leadership we simply ran out of young and/or competent candidates for a lot of low to mid level spots.
I’d like to fill those with women (binders full!), preferably women of color, but it’s a long stretch still to get those people to commit to a kind of purgatory in the state leg, or local school boards. Always facing the nuttiest of opposition to get anything rational done.
The TX leg is about to pass legislation saying local officials can’t issue licenses for same sex marriage. Would you rationally want to give up several months every so often to show up to debate shit like this, knowing how it would go?
raven
@JPL: This shit happened over here:
The Athens man and military veteran who broke a car window on Saturday to save a distressed dog likely doesn’t want anyone calling him a hero.
Baud
@KG:
FWIW, I feel that’s a problem with liberals more so than “Democrats.”
WereBear
@KG: Lying is always easier, too.
Corner Stone
@Cacti:
Like 2010, 2012, 2014?
Baud
@Corner Stone:
And do you really want to vote for somebody who wants the job?
Baud
@Corner Stone:
2012 was a good year for Dems.
VidaLoca
@Belafon:
One thing I’ve noticed about Democrats here is that they never seem to sum up the lessons learned from their campaigns. Ever. They will instead come back 2-4 years later and run essentially the same campaign, same program, get the same result (although I note in your comment that the Dems in Texas have tried some different program ideas and good for them).
Anyhow, the buzz about Wendy Davis made its way all the way up here. She was, supposedly, something new and different. If that’s true, I’d want to really understand, where she did well and why she did well, down to the precinct level. How was the campaign organized? How was the platform developed? She was trying to reach out to the Latino voters — does she speak Spanish? Did many people in the campaign speak Spanish?
Looking back on it, how do progressive people in Texas sum Wendy Davis up?
geg6
PA is actually an interesting case, at least where I live. It used to be a bastion of the DP, due to the strength of unions here. When the steel industry died, so did the unions. And the Southern strategy found a home here as economic uncertainty sent racial relations into a downward spiral. The population got old and crotchety as most young people with skills and education got the hell out as soon as they could. The DP in my county has become little different from the GOP and is run by people and running candidates who are all eligible for Social Security. At the same time, young people are moving back or newbies discovering the area or natives staying because the cost of living, job opportunities and cultural and recreational opportunities are all excellent now. The disconnect between what is happening politically and what is happening economically and socially is pretty much complete. These young people only vote for national elections and tune out on the assholes who run in local, congressional and statewide elections because there is no one running from either party who speaks to or for them. The one exception I’ve seen is our new governor, who seems to have a message that resonates with them (and me, I must admit). And some of us at the local level have noticed and we’re trying something in the upcoming primary for municipal offices here. We’re running people who aren’t the same old pols who have run the county for the last forty years. A slate directly opposed to the establishment DP here and younger, even if “younger” still is old compared to the youngs we’re trying to attract. We’re pointing out how stale their ideas are, how they stall progress here and how corrupt they are. We’ll worry about the GOP during the general, but we really are trying to get these young people engaged in local government. I don’t expect us to win it all, but I am hoping that next week’s election shows we’ve made just a little bit of progress. If one or two of our candidates can get the nomination for one or two county row offices, we will consider that a rousing success and use that energy to build on those small successes. Wish us luck!
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
In 2012 the Dems gained seats in the House and Senate.
In 2010 and 2014 they got wiped out.
Now what was the difference among the 3?
I’m sure I don’t know.
Cacti
@Baud:
The GOPers held the House by virtue of the gerrymandering from their 2010 wins.
They received 1.4 million fewer total votes when the Obama coalition turned out for the Dems.
Corner Stone
@VidaLoca:
She ran a campaign that was about as progressive as it was possible to be. She waffled on some things I wish she had held firm on and stayed on message. But that’s as much as an outcome of the state party and available TX advisers as the elctorate.
We’re just not at a stage of the game where a female firebrand is going to be successful. Our Juliette P. Long moment hasn’t returned just yet.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: They also had a pretty good couple turns in 2006 and 2008.
Was Obama on the ticket in 2006?
Corner Stone
@Baud: Obviously, yes.
WereBear
I think reaching out and explaining How Things Work can be cheap and incredibly rewarding. I’m appalled at how people of all ages no longer “get” how bills and laws work, how policy actually affects them, and that our President is not a king.
We should do more of what Elizabeth Warren does, which sums out how the regular person get shafted. THAT people understand. That is motivating.
Baud
@Cacti:
I thought I read that Dems also got more votes in 2014, just not in the right places. But I may be confusing it with 2012.
fuckwit
@Corner Stone: No, but Howard Dean was in charge of the DNC and running a 50 state strategy. It works.
fuckwit
@Cacti: And they got the gerrymandering wins by dominating the statehouse governments, which is who draws the district boundaries, which reinforces the whole point of this post: the states are everything.
Baud
@WereBear:
Agree, but Warren is uniquely skilled at that. Most Dems will never reach that level.
Belafon
@VidaLoca: I don’t have the maps, but I suspect Davis won in the four big cities – Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin – like all the Democrats do. I don’t think she won much outside typical Democratic areas. Texas has already done the female governor thing, so that doesn’t buy you much here. Her difference was that she showed some fight, but it didn’t really translate into success.
One thing we do need in this state is more Democrats running in lower elections. I see a lot of elections with a Republican running unopposed.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Yes, the Dems had a good showing in 2006 after Bush was toxically unpopular, and he spent the previous 6-years handing them their ass at every turn.
So in all, yes, the Dems have mustered one good Congressional election performance since 2000 without Obama on the ballot.
Corner Stone
@WereBear:
But they sometimes just won’t hear it. I’ve had running battles here over the ACA and how the people here were going to be losing jobs and money because of it.
It just didn’t matter what I said, they had their minds made up and didn’t need to hear any facts.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: I just find your coattails comment to be specious and capricious.
So, yeah.
fuckwit
@Corner Stone: Maybe start out by not calling them “those people” and that might make some headway.
Actually my great hope of the moment for 2016 is that Hillary mobilizes young women in numbers that have never before been seen in this country. And the DNC and DP rebuild a lasting50 state strategy and a bench based on that.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
See Zandar’s post from earlier today for an example of what we are up against.
Belafon
@Baud: Especially with redistricting. The reason Democrats win the presidency is that they haven’t gotten started yet on gerrymandering the presidential election, though they are trying.
Cacti
@Baud:
Warren won 53.7% of the vote in deep blue Massachusetts.
I’d question whether she could even win in a purple state.
Kay
75% of voters support an increase in the overtime threshold, and we don’t need Congress to do it.
No one will pay any attention to whether it’s state or federal (it’s federal). State Democrats could run on it too.
They should start now, because the new federal rule is tee’d up.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/OvertimePollingMemoMay2015.pdf
Belafon
@Corner Stone:
I’ve heard coworkers, who should be intelligent, say without pausing that Obamacare has failed. And you can’t give them any facts otherwise.
VidaLoca
@Baud:
You make a valid point and I agree that you can’t look at program vs. organization in isolation from one another. Let me offer an example for the emphasis on program that I was making. Right now there’s sort of a wind of change blowing through the Wis. DP. After three huge losses in four years they’re waking up to smell the coffee and realizing that something is wrong. But they’re focusing (almost solely from what I can tell) on restructuring and reorganization. And that’s valid both for the points you mentioned and because the structure they had was driving people out faster than they could recruit new people in. So they need a new structure. But they so far are seeming to pay little attention to the fact that their last candidate for Governor was basically Michael Bloomberg in high-heeled shoes. And she ran on essentially the same program in 2014 that lost in 2012 and 2010. They don’t see how self-defeating that is.
I hammered a little on that quote from Kay at the end of the article because I think that if the Democrats are going to have a chance in Wisconsin (and I’m speculating, elsewhere as well) the crucial changes are programmatic ones to bring the organization more into the mold of something that fights for working-class people’s economic interests — and drive that as a wedge into the Southern Strategy.
fuckwit
@Baud: We can learn.
I’m not a big believer in the bully pulpit, but I’m a huge believer in lead-by-example and teach-by-example. I have learned a lot by watching Obama. I’ve learned a lot by watching Warren. More people in politics nationwide can do that: copy what she does, and implement it on a local level.
Why, maybe she could even start a PAC that trains local politicians in how to campaign “The Warren Way”! I’d donate to that effort, for sure.
Baud
@Cacti:
Right. She finished almost 20 points behind Obama. I like her, but I’ve never bought into the liberal love affair of her electoral chances. But she is very good at explaining things.
WereBear
@Baud: Fine. They can say what she said.
Mike in NC
@Cacti: Elderly, conservative white people nostalgic for the 1940s and 50s follow predictable behavior. They watch a lot of TV (especially FOX News). They like to play bingo and poker. They make sure they vote in every single damn election.
How to motivate the other people to give a rat’s ass about voting? Don’t have a clue. I try every two years and it just gets more depressing.
fuckwit
@Cacti: Against an incumbent who was a very skilled local campaigner and who had just been elected by a good margin, and his whole team was practically still in place. MA seems to have been trending red at a state level, i.e. governor, for a long time, but I guess locals could speak to that better. Warren’s economic-populist approach was still new and untested too, and the media for sure was not on board with it.
WereBear
@Corner Stone: It’s a handicap; Dems have a tendency to want to change things, and some people are so afraid of that they can’t see the upside.
Minstrel Michael
@Baud– Massachusetts isn’t all that blue. Five of our last six governors have been Republicans.
One thing Democrats should do is stop hiring losers to run campaigns, like the chowderheads working for Martha Coakley.
VidaLoca
@geg6: Remarkably similar to what we have in Wisconsin, especially Milwaukee. Among younger people here particularly, the DP has lost almost all of its credibility. Even though the County has been controlled by Democrats and nominal Democrats since WWII.
Baud
@VidaLoca:
That is disheartening. That real problem is that we can’t know for sure what works until something works.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
I know it chaps your ass that this POTUS has helped Congressional Dems electoral fortunes in a way that they’ve shown themselves almost wholly incapable of duplicating themselves since 1994.
Corner Stone
@fuckwit: Jeebus Cracker, really?
Corner Stone
@Cacti: I, uh, yeah tough guy. I really enjoyed massive wave elections and losing the Senate.
That worked out well for everyone.
Listen, if you want to try and claim the mantle then you have to take a look at everything that happened.
Baud
@Minstrel Michael:
Then we’re toast nationally.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Uh yeah, Obama on ballot, Dems win. Obama off ballot, Dems couldn’t find their butt with a bell on it.
Total coincidence, I’m sure.
JPL
@Minstrel Michael: The local representative has been pretty blue.
Minstrel Michael
Republican message discipline is effectively absolute, and has been since Gingrich, which allows their prevarications to dominate political discourse. Most people know “death panels” was hooey, but still, most people don’t understand how PPACA is supposed to work, or even that it’s working. (The so-called liberal media doesn’t help.)
We do best when we can tell jokes with a point to them. I really like the one about the plutocrat, the union worker, the tea bagger, and the plate full of cookies. If our candidates all told that joke, we’d get more votes. But I suppose the big donors wouldn’t like that.
gene108
What we are seeing now is in many ways the inverse of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Republicans won every Presidential election, except 1976, from 1968 to 1992. Democrats had control of most state governments, a strangle hold on the House and except for a stint from 1980 to 1986, control of the Senate.
I do not believe the decline of the Democratic Party, at the state level, has as much to do with playing to the Southern Strategy as people assume, i.e. the Civil Rights Act passed and Democrats lost all control of white voters. The process for changing took decades and may not have happened, if not for the savaging of Bill Clinton, which led a very skeptical electorate, in the early 1990’s (Ross Perot got 20% of the vote), to turn against incumbents.
The problem Democrats face is multiple.
One they were utterly unprepared, at the state, local and Congressional level, for the backlash of 1994.
One result is Republicans started to starve Democrats of campaign cash.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/campfin/stories/cf112597b.htm
The result ended up being the unraveling of Democratic Parties across the South, where into the beginning of the Bush, Jr. Administration, Democrats held state wide offices in South Carolina, Georgia, etc., where you’d think it impossible for Democrats to compete.
The second hammer to drop on Democrats was the Citizen’s United decision, which Republicans immediately took advantage of via Operation REDMAP, to have local, rich, Republicans bank roll down ticket races, which otherwise rarely got any sort of attention at all other than a few mailers to voters in October.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/10/state-for-sale
As much as we debate what ideas will win, the reality is the Democrats have been monetarily crushed by Republicans over the last 20 years.
Barack Obama, thanks to his never before seen fundraising prowess, effectively killed any hope of public financing of campaigns by refusing the Presidential matching funds in 2008, because he raised so much money on his own and could keep raising it right up until the election.
Now we’re in an era, where the rich literally buy candidates on the Republican side, have tons of money to throw at down ticket races through third party groups and have a strangle hold on business contributions.
As long as the money involved in elections keeps going up and up and the people with the big bucks to throw around are Republicans, all the ideas in the world will not help Democrats overcome their structural disadvantages.
If Al Gore had become President, in 2000, he would have become the first President, since they started tracking campaign contributions in 1976, to have won but did not raise more money than his opponent.
The one common thread every winning President has had over the last 40 years is raising more money than your opponent.
Money talks in politic and until state and local Democratic parties can start to muster the funds Republicans have it will be an uphill battle, no matter how good your ideas are.
Because ultimately all voters will see are 30 second attack ads from Americans for Prosperity, showing how the Democrat is going to raise taxes, spend money irresponsibly and worse.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: And if I’m not mistaken then 2006 was after 1994 but pre Obama.
Cacti
@Baud:
Massachusetts is all that blue. It has a Cook PVI of +10 Dem. Warren underperformed it by more than 6 points.
The political chops of Elizabeth Warren are a myth of the internet left.
VidaLoca
@Kay:
Yes. Or to cite another example, you mentioned in a comment several months ago that Democrats could make a big issue about wage theft — make sure the laws that exist are enforced, try to get tougher laws on the books. It’s a great idea, it addresses a different but complimentary demographic from the minimum-wage issue. It’s a problem in state after state.
Yet the Democrats just let issues like these sit there. You’d think that ignoring this kind of stuff would be political malpractice, but there it is.
OldDave
TL;PHO.ML (Too long, Playoff Hockey On. Maybe Later.)
:-)
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Yep, after 6-years of Bush having his way with the country with barely a pulse from the Congressional Dems, he’d finally mucked things up so badly that they couldn’t help but win.
JPL
@Cacti: IMO, she needs to pay attention to her state. She seems to be running a national campaign to nowhere.
Minstrel Michael
@Baud: The cities are deep blue– not just Boston and Cambridge, but Springfield and Worcester too, fairly rust-beltish places. But then there are all those suburbs, and a lot of them trend red. Belmont, where Mitt had a house when he was governor, also happened to be where the John Birch Society had its headquarters when I was young.
gene108
@geg6:
When you are trying to win votes by being the Party of “good government”, you cannot afford the sort of stretch-my-back-I’ll-stratch-yours stuff that plagues local governments because you are trying to get people to believe, for the first time in their lives, that “government is NOT the problem.”
Whereas Republicans just have to keep showing “government is the problem” by governing poorly and causing sporadic voters to become disaffected and stay home, while their legions of rabid mouth breathers faithfully go to the polls.
NobodySpecial
@gene108: Yep, this is the key. The money barrier is what prevents us from representing at the national level. Neoliberals (Or basically pre-Reagan conservatives) have figured this out and decided the way to beat it is to suck up what they can of the plutocrat cash that’s left over. That probably won’t change until the country goes majority minority and someone can reliably get the proles to the polls.
chopper
@Cacti:
a year after katrina, so ‘unpopular’ is putting it mildly.
Cacti
@JPL:
I think she’s content with her role as queen of national progressive purity.
If she’s running for higher office, it’s pretty much now or never. She’ll be 67 in November 2016.
VidaLoca
@gene108: The reason I disagree with that line of argument is I think that if we accept it we might as well give up. But look at geg6’s comment at #29 — I read that as a case of a party rotting out from the inside. She’s hopeful that things are turning around and if they are it’s terrific. But that’s not a story about Citizens United — it seems to me that it’s a story about a party putting forward a program that people can get excited about supporting.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: Bush wasn’t on the ballot.
Minstrel Michael
Warren is the anti-Gingrich. When Gingrich was speaker, you recall, he handed out to his caucus lists of insults and accusations that he wanted the Republicans to use to describe their Dem opponents. They did, have done ever since, and they win (yes, with Citizens United cash to drive the message home). Warren wants her caucus to speak the language she speaks: professorial in the best sense. I don’t think she wants a political career, I think she wants Democratic candidates to learn to say things like “Here’s what the Dodd-Frank language says. Here’s how it keeps you from getting screwed.”
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
True, they’d have probably lost again if he was.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: So he was so toxically unpopular that the D’s had no choice but to win in 2006, but if he was on the ballot the toxic unpopularity would probably have worked in the R’s favor that election.
Gotcha.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Which somehow proves your point that Dems haven’t needed Obama for Congressional wins, because 1 of their 3 successes since 1994 happened when he wasn’t on the ballot.
Baud
Obama will never be on a ballot again. It’s a moot point IMHO.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: It belies your entire argument. Or should I say, false argumentation.
“In the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections, Republicans lost Congressional seats but still retained control of the House and, more narrowly, the Senate.”
Turgidson
@Corner Stone:
It took Katrina, a comically corrupt and vile House GOP majority getting caught in multiple scandals, the Iraq War turning so shitty that no amount of flag-waving bullshit could cover the stench, and Bush pissing off his own base by nominating Harriet Miers to create the conditions for the Democrats’ 2006 victory.
It seems to me that in the current status quo, Democratic wins in midterm years are only possible when some braindead GOP fuckup has been in charge a while and made such a mess of things that there’s no choice but to turn him out. And in places like Kansas, even those conditions aren’t necessarily enough (Brownback), especially post-CU when the Kochs can bury the state in rightwing nonsense whenever the fuck they want.
I dunno, it’s grim. Getting Hillary elected, replacing a few SCOTUS judges, and figuring out how to funnel a case to a liberal SCOTUS to overturn CU seems essential. And figuring out how to bottle and export what Dayton is doing in Minnesota would be helpful too.
gene108
@VidaLoca:
Too enforce “laws on the books” you need government employees capable of enforcing those laws, in the face of what will more than likely be better funded private opposition, i.e. State sues the Mckie D’s franchise owner for wage theft, but he lawyers up and wins.
The money needed to hire people to make things change will be an issue.
Where will the money come from?
As much as we can snark about the Republican platform, people just have a reflexive dislike of paying taxes. Even fairly reliable, if not the most politically engaged liberal / Democratic voters, are happy to get a bigger refund check in the mail, when Republicans cut taxes at the state level; trying to get them to understand the extra $500 bucks you got back will cause thousands in the state to suffer is a harder sell.
People are busy and feel bad for the poor and want them helped, but “hey, I just got an extra $500 back I didn’t have last year, so I’m better off.”
The work can be done but it is going to be a generations long slog to get people to change their thinking with regards to their relationship with government.
For example, when Reagan first started talking about restructuring Social Security, in 1983, he proposed benefit cuts, The Reagan administration was relatively eager to address the problem. However, a presidential trial balloon proposing deep cuts in benefits for early retirees proved highly unpopular—so much so that it was repudiated by the GOP-controlled Senate by a vote of 96-0.
Today, I bet a good chunk of Republicans in the Senate would be more than happy to gut Social Security benefits.
Edit
Anyway, I do not know how to get people to buy into “less corruption” because you will be walking a pretty thin line, where any perceived benefit you get from the job – such as an expense account – will result in third party attack ads about how you’ve abused your position for personal gain.Edit: Above was me losing my train of thought and does not apply to the post I was responding to.
Sorry, if I do not have anything more positive to bring up, but the deck is really stacked against liberals.
mainmata
I think we need to reflect on the fact that hate-driven politics, which is pretty much the sum total of the R’s program (economic hatred/greed and socio-cultural hatred) is not actually any kind of political platform. R’s win because they are capturing the electoral system on behalf of a wealthy oligarchy. That the Republican and Tea Party rubes don’t realize they will be equally screwed by the Oligarchy means that it is all the more important to do serious organizing at the local level. Because the US political system will crater pretty rapidly with an all GOP team in place.
Bobby Thomson
@jame: this. The more local you get, the more corrupt the government and the more accepting/fatalistic people are of corruption. Short of death on the SCOTUS that allows Citizens United to be overturned, we are well and truly buggered.
Kay
@VidaLoca:
Wage theft is good. THEFT. OF WAGES. I loved that they used the word.
Here’s another good one:
That’s best at the state level. It could be great. Ask people “do you know what your work schedule is next week? My goodness, how on earth do you plan around that chaos?”
chopper
@Cacti:
bush was so unpopular by then even his ability to campaign well probably wouldn’t have helped. but it’s true that in 2006 bush basically won the election for the dems. it was less a motivated opposition showing well inna low-turnout midterm as much as it was huge swaths of the country throwing up their arms and saying “oh for fuck’s sake with these guys”.
Germy Shoemangler
@Turgidson:
I agree.
Has anyone mentioned the intimidation in local politics? I mentioned it a few threads ago, and various people came forward with their own stories. One commenter said he wrote a letter to his local newspaper advocating sensible gun laws and received hate mail and obscene phone calls. Another mentioned getting death threats.
I mentioned a friend who gave up her blog after being harassed and stalked by a RWNJ.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
Because they won 1 out of 7 Congressional elections from 1994 to 2006 without Obama on a the Presidential ballot?
I know you have a giant hate-on for the guy, but the electoral fortunes of Congressional Democrats have overwhelmingly been the dog’s dinner without him on the Ballot. 11 elections, 3 wins, 2 with Obama on top of the ticket. Thems the facts champ. Hate them if you like but they are what they are.
Bobby Thomson
@Turgidson: and this. Very much this.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: “In the 1996, 1998, and 2000 elections, Republicans lost Congressional seats but still retained control of the House and, more narrowly, the Senate.”
Cacti
@Baud:
That’s what I’m worried about.
Obama was the most individually successful Dem politician of the last 50 years.
Without him as team captain, I’m decidedly less confident about the near future of the party.
Cacti
@Corner Stone:
So you’re counting moral victories now?
chopper
@Turgidson:
exactly. 2006 was a perfect storm for the dems. and that was still the best they did. imagine if a democratic president was in bush’s situation then, the GOP would have won the biggest majorities in generations.
Corner Stone
@Cacti: Nope, Net R losses means the D’s did better in those elections than the R’s did.
Germy Shoemangler
@Cacti:
He can campaign for people. If they’re smart enough not to run away from him.
Baud
@Cacti:
I get that. But confidence seems irrelevant to me when we have no other options. We have to move forward.
Mike in NC
@Minstrel Michael: Go outside of Route 128 and you basically are in “Pennsyltucky”: lots of white people who think Those People are getting a free ride from the government. No different than any other fucked up state.
CarolDuhart2
Where to start?? First of all, start paying attention to your minority voters more often than at election time. Too many white Democrats refuse to communicate with these communities more often than after nomination time and then wonder why their most reliable voter base doesn’t turn out during midterms.
Do something more about the media machine. I believe for a long time Democrats had that aversion to what they felt was unseemly “hucksterism” so they never built up a communications branch equal to the Republican media group. There are low-cost radio stations for sale-there should already be an internet radio presence for the party that could reach all over the place without running into issues about licensing or area coverage. But some Democrats don’t thinks something is serious unless it copies the Republicans precisely, so it’s left up to a few intrepid people to keep the liberal message going.
Stop chasing the white working class vote as if it’s still 1960 and the most dominant voting group in the country. Obama showed us the way to win without doing that. But some older Democrats feel that if we somehow won this diminishing group over, this would be the way to win. Yes, we need to connect with working class voters, but the working class is browner and blacker and more immigrant than 1960.
Cacti
@Germy Shoemangler:
Yeah, good luck with that.
Matt
Meh. From where I’m sitting, there are two possible outcomes over the next two decades:
* we somehow wrest control of the levers of power from the assorted Kochheads and actually do something to get carbon emissions under control. We MAY manage to avoid the extinction of our species and/or the collapse of our civilization.
* we don’t. In that case, it doesn’t fucking matter. The gun nutz, the racists, the assorted wingnuts: they’ll all be on the slip-n-slide to oblivion with the whole rest of humanity. Let them accuse the oncoming desert of “a Marxist anti-growth agenda” or the rising water of “alarmism” and see how it works out.
Note that 20 years isn’t how long it takes to destroy everything, just my guess at the outside edge before we trip a positive-feedback loop (pick one: ocean acidification, permafrost melt, Gulf Stream collapse). We’ll have a lot longer, but at that point nothing short of a crash program of planet-scale geoengineering will even have a shot. You’ll recognize the tipping point when all the “there’s no consensus” voices simultaneously switch to “OMG why didn’t you hippies warn us things would get this bad!”
Germy Shoemangler
@Cacti: I’m not feeling lucky.
Minstrel Michael
@Germy Shoemangler: Not enough of them are smart enough; most of them ran against PPACA.
We can’t just say We’re not as bad as they are, we have to explain what it is about their policies that’s bad. Which is why if we have any future, Elizabeth Warren has a lot to do with it.
Cacti
@CarolDuhart2:
This times eleventy brazillion.
Obama showed the Dems in 2008 and 2012 that their winning coalition is women, minorities, educated whites, and youngs. The current generation of olds and working class whites is a lost cause, barring some sort of black swan event.
gene108
@NobodySpecial:
Obama showed Democrats are fine at the national level. The state and local level is where Democrats have run into problems in the last 20 years.
Read somewhere, and I am not able to find the link, that Republicans basically told the business community, after the 1994 elections, if you want to get anything done in the state stop giving to Democrats.
@VidaLoca:
Sorry for being a downer. I am just not in a good mood tonight.
I am not much of an organizer of groups of any size.
Doing more than being a Devil’s Advocate is out of my league.
I think one thing working in our favor is the democratization of information decimation, because the world can see how fucked up shit is at a much faster rate and the pressure can be kept up and examined beyond local incidents.
I think one way forward has to be to optimize social media to reach people, who are not turning into TV anymore and will not be sitting around watching a Prime Time line-up in a generation, i.e. the kids today (6 to 10 year olds, the older of which will be voting by 2024) get all their entertainment from streaming content on mobile devices; the era of a family huddled around the T.V. to watch the same thing at the same time will soon be a relic of an earlier age.
VidaLoca
@Kay: Agreed again.
Everyone else: look at what we’ve got here. Just in the process of the conversation tonight:
— overtime limits
— wage theft
— contingent scheduling (“just-in-time”)
These are basic working-class issues. No telling how many more we could come up with if we tried. That’s the beginning of a political program.
Now it’s a valid question as the quote from Kay that I put at the end of the original article suggests, whether the unions or the politicians should be taking the point on these. You can argue that the Democrats should be out in front, or you can argue that the Democrats would screw up a ham sandwich so the unions should be out in front (and the correct answer probably is that it varies from state to state and DP to DP) but the point is that if nobody is out in front then we need to start asking why. And what do we do about it.
You can be active in the DP in your state, if yours is a state where that can work. In Wisconsin it’s a fool’s game, the DP is pretty much shot here and it will take a generation to rebuild it if it can be done at all. Here there are many more people active outside the DP than in it and you don’t need to be in the DP to be active in elections or anything else for that matter.
Germy Shoemangler
@Minstrel Michael:
Ryan Lizza wrote a profile of Professor Warren.
This is how the article ends:
chopper
@Cacti:
it’s like having jordan come and play on your college team. everybody’s all “shit, he’s leaving, isn’t he? we’re fucked”
Baud
@Germy Shoemangler:
Warren, like Jesus, seems better than some of her most vocal supporters.
gene108
@CarolDuhart2:
On the national level yes, but how do you win in a state that does not have a large minority population?
Our blog hosts home state of West “by God” Virginia is 92.7% white, not Latino or Hispanic.
There are plenty of other predominantly white communities, states, districts, etc. in this country, where you have to appeal to white voters to win.
I think the issue at hand is how to win at the state and local levels and in many places, which are really, really white, you must find a away to appeal to white voters, or else you will not be able to win state offices.
Kay
@Germy Shoemangler:
We had a brick thrown thru the window at the law office during the Issue Two fight in Ohio. Well, not “thru”. It was a double pane in a side door and they weren’t very good…. throwers so it broke the outside pane but not the inside one :)
I came in and thought it was a frost pattern on the window so the intended terrorizing effect was lost on me. That;s what it looked like in the darkened early morning room from the inside- an elaborate frost pattern. The paralegal had to tell me “the window is broken”. I found the brick, and oddly enough, manicure scissors outside by the door. I don’t know what the scissors were for.
Davis X. Machina
Movement conservatism is deeply anchored in a model of voters volunteering standing at Armageddon and doing battle for the Lord. The final conflict. The ultimate Manichean battle. Next to that, even wage theft pales…
Progressive politics are insufficiently visceral — until the cops shoot someone in the back. Then, for a minute, you can see the power boiling up below. But is it available to be harnessed over time? By a coalition-based party? That I am not sure about.
America’s social-democratic moment, such as it was — the 1930’s and ’40’s — came when everyone, farmer and city-dweller, workers, small business, north and south — had an economic boot on their neck.
Since then, the advances have come in narrow thrusts, not broad waves. Cumulatively, the accomplishments are not negligible, but they make up a mosaic, and not a landscape.
It might be doomed to always be this way, absent our own, over-arching, Manichean, narrative.
Germy Shoemangler
@Kay: Most folks don’t have the desire to subject themselves to that level of intimidation. Asking democrats to run for local office and stand up in small towns and proudly declare their liberalism in front of people who have devoured a steady diet of angry talk radio and faux nooz shouters is like asking my cat to approach a pack of dobermans.
Elizabeth Warren has balls. Remember when her speech was interrupted by the angry nutbag?
I am in the Charlie Pierce camp when it comes to Warren. She can have more influence right where she is.
Minstrel Michael
CarolDuhart2 is also right about our lack of media. I dream of a major media market newspaper that not only consistently leans Dem, but also keeps putting context into major news stories. Every story about dodgy bank behavior might have a line in paragraph six saying “This sort of activity wasn’t legal before Gramm-Rudman, but it is now.”
chopper
@Davis X. Machina:
movement conservatism is also deeply wedded to the idea that democratic governance is illegitimate, like an illegal military occupation that must be resisted. that singular attitude is something the dems just can’t compete with.
Mike in NC
@Turgidson: As I posted in a previous thread, the 86 year old billionaire prick T. Boone Pickens has declared that JEB! will be elected in 2016. Who could possibly argue with that?
Germy Shoemangler
@Minstrel Michael: But who reads a newspaper? There are plenty of progressive places online.
I was going to suggest a broadcast television station, a left version of Sinclair (they’re more subtle than faux nooz, and they’re in a ton of local markets) but then does anyone watch broadcast tv either?
Mike in NC
@gene108: 99% of Republican ideas are pure shit, and most people known that, but at the end of the day promising tax cuts (“a riding tide floats all boats”) works for them every time.
Germy Shoemangler
@gene108: On the national level yes, but how do you win in a state that does not have a large minority population?
Davis X. Machina
@chopper: The durability of the ancien regime was both irrational, and remarkable. We’re all born monarchists.
Self-government is against the grain, hard work, and, basically, not much fun. (Serve on a school board or as a selectman, and find out…)
CarolDuhart2
@gene108: Gene, in even the whitest states, there are some minority or immigrant or other parts of the Obama coalition. While in West Virginia, they aren’t that large of a group, could white Dems at least not join in the denigration, or stand up for them?
I imagine the real issue in a lot of those red states is the city/country divide. As the younger folks move to a city that will actually hire them with the degree they have earned, it leaves older and more vulnerable people behind. I believe if Democrats at least has a program to improve rural life and bring some of the “city” amenities there, they could at least get some legislative seats. In West Virginia, which isn’t very urban, the “enviromentalism” of the city people seems to threaten the few good coal mining jobs there are left.
Yes, I think fracking, which doesn’t require a large crew of miners, and which can be done anywhere, and doesn’t require expensive transport either (pipeline vs coal train) is the real culprit for the coal mine issue. But scared people don’t find out the truth of the matter.
VidaLoca
@CarolDuhart2:
@Cacti:
Unfortunately I have to agree with gene @ #115 here. For example, Walker won his last three elections in Wisconsin by (very roughly) 55%-45%, each time out. There just are not enough women, minorities, educated whites, and youngs here, or at any rate the candidates the Dems put up and the programs they ran on didn’t inspire enough women, minorities, educated whites, and youngs to get out and vote. I suspect that this is the case in many other states as well.
Two things can change that here:
— the DP puts forward a program that convinces between 1/10 and 1/5 of Walker’s supporters that they should vote for the Democrats. To do this they have to solve the riddle of the Southern Strategy.
— Walker’s supporters start to realize that they will pay some costs for the Republicans’ policies, they won’t just get the benefits while the costs are externalized onto someone else.
Kay
@Germy Shoemangler:
I don’t have day to day angry confrontations with wingnuts. It just gets very heated around elections and some people are unstable. I went to a “meet the candidates” event in 2012 and this old man in coveralls came up, picked up a piece of lit, leaned in and spit out “the President is a Muslim“. His hands were shaking he was so mad. I was standing next to the Democratic candidate for sheriff, a nice guy, and I felt him go on full cop alert. I could feel his tension and quality of attention, just all of a sudden. An event for senior citizens! You would think you would be safe :)
Minstrel Michael
@Germy Shoemangler: The reason we need a newspaper is that David Brooks is also on radio and TV all the time, just on the strength of his NYTimes sinecure. Media is a monopoly, sure, but just as much in the sense that, other than Fox, TV tends to seek validation from the comparative solidity of ink on paper. Also I think a nationally recognized newspaper that was partisan on our side would open the Overton window wider.
Davis X. Machina
Dupe .. see below
agorabum
@KG: Bull Clinton does a fine job of explaining dem policies. So does Obama. But in the last 35 years, there have only been 4 when dems held all the levers of Government. So some of the jibes that dems just pay lip service to the poor is just not accurate – just look at the ACA.
if we want the working man, we need to wage some class warfare. I think we are finally getting there…meanwhile the Rs wage race war (all gov spending is for minorities, etc) – we just need to fight the right enemies. Not others on the left, but the fatcats.
Davis X. Machina
@VidaLoca: Walker and his ilk have re-cast the social contract, in such a way as to postpone the day of ballot reckoning almost indefinitely.
“I’m not even going to pretend to promise that together, harnessing the power of a democratic State, we can make our lives better.
Instead, I’m going to promise that, harnessing the power of a democratic State, I can make someone else’s life worse, and let you watch.”
There’s a majority for accepting that deal.
(NB State is big-S, democratic is small-d)
VidaLoca
@chopper:
Have they ever tried? I mean, if it’s truly hopeless then how do you explain states like Minnesota where the Dems are at least holding their own?
VidaLoca
@Davis X. Machina: Well put. What we’re beginning to see here is the end of “I can make someone else’s life worse, and let you watch.” and the beginning of “hey guess what, surprise! you’re fucked too!”
Germy Shoemangler
@VidaLoca:
In my most paranoid moments I’ve suspected that some dems took a fall, like corrupt boxers who were paid off. I know it makes no sense, but if they’re all taking money from the same millionaires… “sorry kid, it just ain’t your time”
chopper
@VidaLoca:
i don’t think the dems know how to see the world through that kind of lens. it goes hand-in-hand with the sort of orthodox religious views that are part and parcel of the conservative mind, not that of democrats.
Davis X. Machina
@VidaLoca: If you keep amping up the show, I figure you can string it along for the rest of my lifetime (I’m 58). Scapegoats aren’t exactly an endangered species.
Cf. the state legislature who’s now mandating some special indicium be on the insurance cards of people who purchased policies with ACA subsidies.
sdhays
I want to push back a little bit on one minor point: the Republicans do NOT control Virginia. They control the House of Delegates and the state Senate, but the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are all Democrats. The 2013 election was closer than it should have been (and your points are valid here), but the Republicans still lost in an off-off year. The main reason the Republicans are so strong in the legislature is 1) most of the Democratic votes are packed together where most of the population is and 2) horrible, corrupt Democrats who can literally be bought cheap (this is how we lost the state Senate). Also, both US Senators are Democrats.
The legislature is certainly a problem, and I don’t disagree with your arguments, but it’s simply wrong to say that Virginia is completely controlled by Republicans.
CarolDuhart2
@VidaLoca: While the gap might not have been enough for Walker, there are often lesser seats on the ballot where a few hundred or a few thousand can carry the day. Which is often true of those legislative seats-the ones we want to carry. Also, the size of the margin often matters. Would Walker have been so arrogant if he had won by say, 1% instead of 10%? Winning by such a small margin might have greatly impeded his Presidential ambitions. Yes winning is everything, but coattails are important too, and looking a world beater is very important in whether or not you get to the next level.
GxB
Ah, VidaLoca, it is here! I just read it over once so far, but there is a lot to digest both in the post and comments. I’ll thank you for getting to the meaty issues that underlie our problems. From just skimming the responses, it looks like you’ve knocked one out of the park here.
A bit late to the party so I can’t add much, but just wanted to pass along congrats.
Davis X. Machina
@CarolDuhart2:
Yes. You have to believe in the fundamental legitimacy of the democratic process to worry about such things. He doesn’t.
Republicans are monarchists. The strangest thing that’s happened to political terminology since the days of John Stuart Mill isn’t what happened to ‘liberal’. It’s what happened to ‘republican’.
El Caganer
I don’t follow politics here in Pennsylvania very much, as I live in Philadelphia and it’s run by a none-too-competent Democratic machine (it also doesn’t help that the state legislature is run by Republicans). Wolf might be a decent governor, but it’s too soon to get much perspective since the governor he replaced was basically a human doorstop. The current government official who interests me most is the auditor general, Eugene DePasquale – from what I’ve read, he’s both pretty smart and pretty liberal, which is amazing since he comes out of York, and York is very, very red.
Cacti
@VidaLoca:
In the case of Wisconsin, I’d say it’s the latter, because Obama carried the state twice. In other words, there had to have been people that voted for Obama AND Walker.
I agree that it may not be the case in every single state, but there are enough of them that it put a previously solid red state like North Carolina in play twice. It also helped him to essentially run the table in the purple states.
The above coalition is the future of the party nationally.
Davis X. Machina
@Cacti: In local and state/off year elections, the Democrats are on the wrong end of F=MA.
They’ve got the mass, but not the acceleration, going for them.
Presidential-year elections, especially ones laden with symbolism, provide the missing A.
Which is why I’m pretty confident about 2016, and flipping the Senate.
Minstrel Michael
@Davis X. Machina: Have you read Robert Altemeyer’s book about authoritarians? The corporatists, the Koch snorters, the anti-choicers, they’re all wedded to this idea that there are certain people who deserve to be in charge, and certain other people who don’t and never will. We have nearly become two distinct species, we liberals (in the John Stuart Mill sense) and the do-as-I-say types. And the supreme irony is, there are just about 27% of them!
VidaLoca
@CarolDuhart2:
He’s right about that. Walker is nothing if not a total ball of self-serving ambition; he has no concerns about what anyone else thinks or who he has to ruin to reach his goals. Maybe if he had not had control of both houses of the Legislature and the Supreme Court too it would have forced him to moderate his plans.
MomSense
@Cacti:
Having been a grunt in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014 I will say that the nuts and bolts of how the Obama team runs a campaign are just far superior to what the Dems do in the midterm elections. I’ve also traveled to enough states to campaign and have a wide enough network of grunts in other states to hear the same kinds of complaints.
Cacti
@Davis X. Machina:
I think we’ve reached kind of a chicken or egg point with off year elections. Do the Dem candidates not work harder for minorities, youngs, etc. in off year elections because they won’t show up, or do they not show up because Dem candidates don’t make a better pitch for their support?
ksmiami
@VidaLoca: I would add that GODDAMIT Infrastructure in this country needs to be brought into the fucking 21st century. Yes it costs money, but it adds jobs, prepares us for the future and keeps America number 1. – or something like that. Bridges don’t fix themselves and all the GOP offers is hate, greed and decrepitude. We are better when we look and build for the future, not when we are looking ass back on some mid 1850s fantasy that was pretty bad for most people
THERES YOUR DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE
MomSense
@Cacti:
Messaging is abysmal in midterm election years–truly awful.
Brachiator
A past issue of the New York Review of Books noted how the GOP is not that great in using tech and social media to reach voters, but have been tremendously adept at using computers for gerrymandering, carefully carving out districts which will always deliver Republican majorities. And they end up with more districts than Democrats, which has helped insure a majority in the House. This is also a slick way to deal with their demographic disadvantage. Through in a little voter suppression here and there and you create a formidable obstacle for Democrats. If you cannot redraw bad districts, you have to do much more to try to get voters to switch from GOP to Democratic Party. The article also noted that deeply committed Republicans can more often name their representative than can Democrats, suggesting that some Repubs may be happy with a Republican in a lesser office even if they vote for a Democrat for the Senate or for president. Lastly, the article praises Howard Dean’s strategy of fighting for every seat, even those in safe Republican districts. It costs money and works best with dedicated people on the ground, but it gets results.
Coming in late and quick here, and would be happy to see that these points have been noted by others. Will review the entire thread when I get home.
Mike in NC
@sdhays: Lived in Virginia for 20 years and it was a pretty fucked up place. Scumbag Governor George “Macaca” Allen was pitched as the next Reagan. Thank God that never happened.
Davis X. Machina
@Cacti: It’s a durable phenomenon. The original decision to have, e.g. most gubernatorial elections not in presidential years goes way back. 36 states elected governors in 2014.
Loosely-attached voters were loosely-attachted a century ago, , though perhaps to different parties — and giving them less incentive to turn out is an old game.
VidaLoca
@Cacti:
Yeah, there had to have been some. Partly this goes to the difference between OFA and the campaign organizations the Wis. Dems put together in the off years. Swear to God, the DPW could not organize a sleepover for a bunch of third-graders much less a sophisticated campaign. Meanwhile, Walker’s campaign people are very good at what they do.
VidaLoca
Folks, I have to get up early for work tomorrow so it’s time for bed. Many thanks for the comments and feedback.
sdhays
@Mike in NC: I’ve been in the DC suburbs for the last 6 years and have no complaints. However, I will say that one of my neighbors has license plate “MAC ACA” which I desperately hope has some personal reference to the person’s name (as in s/he has Scottish roots and his/her last name is McAca)…
Baud
@VidaLoca:
Thanks for a thoughtful post.
sdhays
@ksmiami: This is something particularly visceral for people who have spent any time outside of the US, particularly in Europe or Asia, I find. American infrastructure is pretty pathetic once you see how others do it. I think a lot of people are used to roads being crappy and bridges falling apart and trains being slow and infrequent with lots of delays and just assume “that’s just the way it has to be”.
Morzer
@sdhays:
I remember the shock of going to Sapporo (4th largest city in Japan) and finding how clean, well-organized and generally pleasant it was. Public transport was readily available, clean, affordable and staffed by people who were competent, polite, willing to do a little bit extra to help out a foreigner. It made the best cities in America look dirty, mediocre and unpleasant. Japan isn’t free of problems, but I know where I would rather live and which society I would bet on when climate change turns up the heat another notch.
Another impression I’ll share is that the news in Korea and Japan is a damn sight more substantive than anything the US has offered for decades. They even have university professors discussing issues with the news anchors and doing so at a fairly high level of detail and intelligence!
brantl
The Democrats need to differentiate themselves from the Republicans in this kind of manner:
There needs to be a basic set of tenets that everybody can ascribe to, and then add to, to show their solidarity and their individualty,both.
Somehow, the Democratic Party, has ceded the miserable situation of the poor to the Republicans, as a gimme, I can’t understand for the life of me, why? This needs to stop, we need to go back to being the party of George McGovern, and Adlai Stevenson, and liberals like Al Franken, who can make a cogent, impassioned and obviously fair argument for fairer, achievable policy, that lifts up the disenfranchised in a way that enriches their towns, counties, states and countr(y/ies) (what we do enriches and detracts from other countries, as well as ours).
I can’t wait for a Democrat to say: “Why should we tax the rich, instead of the poor, and middle class? They can afford it, they won’t really miss it, it won’t hurt their bottom line, and historically, when they were taxed like this, before, in our history, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, our economy has done just great! You want me to trot out the history? I[‘ll be happy to do that, if you’d like!”
And we need to establish research operations to make just those facts as available and prevalent as Frank Lunz’s talking points for the Repukes have been. (I’m so sick of the Estate Tax being called the “Death Tax” without it being answered as: “You mean the Paris Hilton Inheritance Tax? That only applies to estates worth more the 5.whatever-the-hell-it-is million dollars, and only 0X% of people ever pay that, and none of those family farms or family ranches have ever been lost to that tax.
We’ve been involved in a war of ideas, and we have been fortunate that theirs are so lame, otherwise we wouldn’t be winning the presidency, and they would have both bodies of the national Congress and most of the states completely sewn up. We’ve got to do a shitload better, on the marketing of the Democratic Party. We don’t advertise. We’ve just been lucky that our competitors are trying to sell a shit sandwich. And they still sell it, pretty well.
Ian
In fairness, the WI dp has been so inept and incompetent for so long I don’t think it is accurate to blame it on the national party.
Looking at you, Wisconsinites.
Kathleen
I think one of the major problems with the Democratic Party is that it is led at the state and local level in a lot of places by people who are not that unhappy with being a minority party, so long as they get to be the people in charge.I mean, recruit “those people” ( outsiders, youth, soccer moms, whoever) who just don’t understand how things are done?
Don K
MI is a good example of all of this. When Lon Johnson was elected chair of the MDP, he promised to work on turnout in the 2014 election. Well, they got the turnout, evidenced by the fact that the Dems won 7 of the 8 elections for Board of Education and the governing bodies of UofM, MSU, and Wayne State, which are pure generic D-generic R elections, and got more votes for the state house of representatives than the Reps (gerrymandering accounts for not getting more seats), but still Schauer lost to Snyder, I’d say because he never attacked the Reps where they are weakest (RTW and roads). He tried on education funding, but the allegedly liberal Free Press tortured the numbers to say that K-12 funding had increased during Snyder’s term, and Snyder just quoted that during the debate.
The MDP brought out the voters, but Schauer never made the sale on why they should fire Snyder, so Schauer lost 51-47. And that’s the story of MI Dems: in general no instinct for the jugular. The exception was Peters running for Senate. Terry Lynn Land was an epically inept candidate, and Peters pressed the advantage, successfully made the Koch brothers an issue, kept his nice-guy persona intact, and won 55-41. More of this, please, especially at the local and legislative levels!