[T]o put more House districts in play means the Democrats would have to successfully harness a populist economic message to reach constituencies that haven’t lately broken Democratic—lower-middle-class white families, rural voters and the like. “By definition, if you want to go from the minority to the majority, you want to win over a group of voters from the other side,” says Michael Lind, policy director of the New America Foundation, a D.C.-based think-tank. “You can win over the pro-New Deal creationists, or the socially liberal Christian conservatives. But by definition, those people are not going to agree with you on your own personal issues.”
That the Democrats should be this far away from homing in on any sort of majoritarian message is an unusual situation. Historically, midterm cycles have been crucial for shoring up power on the Democratic side of the aisle. In 1982, for example, a resurgent House Democratic majority fresh from major gains in the midterms passed the Boland amendment, forbidding American aid to the Nicaraguan Contras—and thereby laid the groundwork for the Iran-Contra scandal that hamstrung the Reagan administration and came close to endangering the presidency itself. Similarly, the 1974 “Watergate class” of reformist Democrats passed the first wave of campaign-finance legislation to curb the uglier abuses of the election system by moneyed interests.
Over and above such signature reform movements, Democratic Congresses were integral to the New Deal and Great Society eras of lawmaking, whose popular initiatives in turn solidified what became known as the Democratic majority—the coalition of union members, movement liberals, and urban white “ethnic,” black and brown voters that comprise the backbone of the Democratic Party. These voters sustained and nourished the later Democratic Congresses that extended the basic terms of New Deal governance via landmark legislation such as the GI Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and the raft of workplace and environmental protections legislated into being from the 1970s onward. The voting majorities behind the postwar Democratic domination of Congress should have, on paper, continued to expand in tandem with the vital expansions of income supports and civil-rights protections that these Congresses managed, however narrowly, to enact. […]
Of course, Democrats face other obstacles in advancing a winning strategy to reclaim the House in November—the factors that election wonks call “structural,” such as the gerrymandering of safe Republican districts by Republican dominated state legislatures. But structural forces are, by definition, the very factors that effective majoritarian strategies are crafted to overcome. The GOP overcame much the same set of obstructions in its successful takeover of the House in 2010—the year that the Tea Party, and its corporate backers, stepped into the political limelight.
What’s more, gesturing at the implacable power of GOP-run state legislatures raises the question of just how the Democrats—the historic grassroots party of the people, operating with the enormous advantage of a crippling recession occurring on the Republicans’ executive watch—have been unable to summon their own majorities in so many state legislatures. (That answer—yet again—resides in a decided GOP tactical advantage rooted in long-term conservative organizing initiatives at the state and grassroots levels.)
Meanwhile, when it comes to the allocation of resources within the party, the top-heavy nature of Democratic campaign funding once more distorts the party’s priorities. [...]
If this complaint sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Before the 2006 Democratic wave, the head of the DCCC, Illinois House member Rahm Emanuel, was locked in battle with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean over Dean’s ambitious “50-state strategy.” The Dean plan sought to put Democratic candidates into competitive play everywhere, as opposed to the traditional coastal, urban and upper-Midwestern strongholds of Democratic congressional power. Emanuel, a member of the investment-banking fraternity who had been charged with shepherding in bundled big-money donations, contended that such far-flung organizing efforts were unrealistic—and thus a strain on the party’s bulging campaign coffers. He got the better of the argument, and after the 2006 cycle, the 50-state strategy was shelved—and Dean was sent packing.
Eight years later, it’s hard not to conclude that the party would be far better off if it had followed Dean’s lead and pressed its already formidable advantages in 2006 into districts that now look like nearly permanent “red state” power bases. A 2013 study in Governing magazine found that even the partial implementation of the Dean plan yielded quite encouraging results for the Democrats. In the 20 red states covered in the survey, “Democratic candidates chalked up modest successes, despite the difficult political terrain,” the Governing team found. “Then, after the project stopped, Democratic success rates cratered.” In other words, in heeding Emanuel’s counsel to follow the big money, Democrats are getting exactly what they paid for.
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