Democrats entered the year hobbled and broken, still divvying up blame for Donald Trump's unthinkable win and squabbling not only over messaging but also fundamentally whom the party should even be appealing to.
That debate now has a much clearer answer that wasn't provided by Democratic consultants or some party overlords, but by the voters themselves and, in particular, voters of color. Thanks to real investment in turning out particularly black and Latino voters Democrats leave 2017 newly energized, with a surging blue Virginia (where recounts continue), a Senate seat in Alabama, and a roadmap for capitalizing on a political environment in 2018 that already favored the minority party based on historical trends alone.
Maligned as a party purely of the coastal elite following 2016, Democrats now have a foothold in the heartland after Doug Jones' victory in Alabama. And perhaps most importantly, party officials now seem to actually realize that the wins in Alabama and Virginia were people powered, a product of door knocking and grassroots organizing rather than just lavishing millions upon millions of dollars on the airwaves.
After the Alabama win, I worried that pundits would obsess over the Republican crossover votes for Jones in the suburbs rather than the turnout of people of color. That's exactly what happened following Hillary Clinton's loss—the loudest pundits and many Democrats fixated on the tiny sliver of white working class voters who defected to Trump rather than the enormous number of black voters who weren't inspired enough to go to the polls. In Wisconsin, for instance, Clinton underperformed Obama by about 240,000 votes, while Trump overperformed Romney by as little as 1,500 votes. As a Boston Globe piece noted last year:
The fact that [Clinton] received 40,000 fewer votes than Obama in predominately African-American Milwaukee was particularly problematic. She lost the state by 27,000 votes.
Clinton's loss was more fueled by the black votes she left on the table rather than white crossover votes and yet pundits obsessed over Democrats losing their mojo with the white working class. Lots of national media space was given to people like Columbia professor Mark Lilla, who told us in The New York Times that liberal "obsession with diversity" was to blame for encouraging “white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored." The lesson of 2016, Lilla concluded, was that explicit mentions of African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and women, was "a strategic mistake."
Lilla was also given attention in the New Yorker and, during an interview on NPR, he identified "the whole issue of bathrooms and gender" as one of the reasons Clinton lost. (As I quipped at the time, if only Hillary hadn't given "The Bathroom Speech.") Most of his observations were as ignorant as they were offensive, not to mention misguided and baseless.
And yet, I feared that those focused on this analysis would win the day. The mostly white Democratic consultants in Washington have traditionally been obsessed with winning white votes to the exclusion of appealing to voters of color. As The New York Times noted this week:
An analysis three years ago found that 98 percent of the money the major Democratic committees spent on consultants went to those who were white.
That, among other factors, has produced a blind spot in how national Democrats approach elections.
But Virginia was the first big step this year to proving that real investment in reaching voters of color matters. It increases awareness, engagement, turnout, and the probability of winning. And in Virginia much of that investment came from outside groups during the final weeks of the race after concerns grew that the Northam campaign hadn't done enough to engage voters of color.
Local and national Democrats built on that lesson in Alabama and guess what—56 percent of the voters who propelled Doug Jones to victory were black. As Steve Philllips, who has been beating this drum for a while, writes in the New York Times:
African-American voters were a decisive force in the election, showing up in huge numbers and casting nearly all their votes — 96 percent — for Mr. Jones. They made up a larger percentage of the electorate than they represent in the state as a whole (29 percent versus 27 percent). Overperformance by African-Americans — in an election decided by about 21,000 votes — amounted to 38,000 more Democratic votes than would have been cast had African-Americans been just 27 percent of the that side’s total.
It's true that Roy Moore was a crap candidate of epic proportions (my personal thanks to Steve Bannon and Mitch McConnell, who respectively elevated Moore and throughly sullied the reputation of Washington Republicans among GOP primary voters), but even the depressed turnout among Republicans wouldn't have resulted in a Democratic victory without black voters. The mostly female white suburban crossover voters were a part of the story—and it matters, they helped provide the margin. But I have been relieved to see that a good deal of coverage has focused on black voters and, in particular, black women.
As the Times wrote Thursday, “Democrats Draw Vivid Lesson From Alabama: Mobilize Black Voters.”
“I think the writing is on the wall about what the path forward is for progressive politics in this country, and the path forward is through communities of color and women,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, which engages black communities politically.
BlackPAC invested more than a million dollars in Virginia in both digital advertising and canvassing efforts. It's unclear what the group's overall investment in Alabama was, but importantly the Democratically aligned Senate Majority PAC contributed $600,000 to BlackPAC's Alabama outreach.
And not only did Senate Majority PAC specifically invest in black outreach, it also devoted a significant portion of its funds to turnout efforts.
All told, the Senate Majority PAC spent $6 million on the Alabama race, $2 million of it on turnout, said Chris Hayden, the organization’s communications director. It was a departure from the traditional role of “super PACs,” which spend primarily on advertising, Mr. Hayden said.
“I think we continually need to look at better strategies about how to reach voters,” Mr. Hayden said, adding that working with community groups was crucial. “This definitely has to be more a part of it than it was in the past.”
Compare that to some $9 million the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund pissed away flooding Alabama airwaves to convince GOP voters to vote for Luther Strange in the primary.
These contrasts in approach provide the Democrats’ path forward for 2018—it's local, inclusive, and powered bottom up by the people rather than top down by Washington.
For a year, Washington pundits have been bellyaching about Democrats' lack of an overarching national message. I have said this before and it bears repeating: Democrats don't need a national message for 2018. What they do is need strong local candidates who care about their communities, combined with investment in local infrastructure that includes specific outreach to voters of color and door-to-door engagement.
That was the key to the Virginia sweep, it was key to the once unimaginable win in Alabama, and it's the key to taking back the House and even the Senate (yes, the Senate!) in 2018. If anyone has a messaging problem on their hands, it's Republicans.
Happy Holidays, folks!