I know this is hard to think about right now, as many of us remain grief-stricken, but we have an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically reshape our nation’s politics in the next four years. 2018 was going to be brutal for Democrats, not just because of the usual first midterm problems virtually all new presidents face, but because it’d be an effective third term midterm. We’d get walloped in statehouse and state legislative races, lose ground in Congress, and head into the critical 2020 redistricting year hobbled and in an even deeper minority. I’d still take all that for that single Supreme Court seat, but regardless, we we were going to get slaughtered, losing state legislatures and the House for yet another decade.
But instead of that, today we have energy we haven’t seen since … 2006? People—young and old—spilling into the streets, vowing resistance. Pantsuit Nation has real traction. Students—our lowest performing future voters—have taken to activism like I’ve never seen before, making it an imperative. Here at Daily Kos, our email activism list has grown from 2 million strong to 2.7 million in just a week, and that new growth isn’t slowing down.
Daily Kos traffic this past weekend was higher than it was on Election Day. I’m sure our allies are seeing similar growth and engagement.
We all have friends and family members coming up to us and desperately asking, “What can I do!” And while I want to snap back, “Where the fuck where you two weeks ago?” the fact is we are where we are, and we can sit in a funk and withdraw or hurl recriminations, or we can embrace this incredible emerging opportunity to finally engage our low-performance base voters. And we can do so around an agenda that includes expanding the franchise and eliminating the rigged levers of power used by Republicans to retain control.
The Democratic National Committee isn’t an all-powerful institution, capable of anointing candidates of its choosing (just ask Barack Obama). It cannot set a message and enforce it on its candidates. It cannot single-handedly change the course of public opinion. In fact, the DNC's role is quite limited: It builds infrastructure. BUT, it can do so in ways that dramatically maximize this four-year window of opportunity. So here’s what I think the next DNC chair should do.
But one last point before we get to my proposed agenda: Candidates are still stepping up for the job, including NARAL’s (and formerly, MoveOn’s) Ilyse Hogue. So we should all wait and see what the final field looks like before choosing sides. Looks like we’ll have a great field to choose from. Hopefully, more than one will adopt much of what I propose below.
GOALS: A 50-STATE GRASSROOTS PARTY
Everyone focuses on the presidency. Had Hillary Clinton won, we would’ve continued getting decimated lower down the ballot, but it all would’ve been masked because too many people think that the presidency is the be-all, end-all of politics. IT’S NOT! So the next DNC chair should not be judged on whether we take back the White House in 2020, or even if we hold our ground in the Senate and make gains (or even retake!) the House. The next DNC Chair should be judged by one metric:
How many state legislatures do Democrats recapture.
Republicans control both chambers of the legislature in a whopping 32 states (and control 33 states, since Nebraska has a single chamber). Back in 2010, it was just 14. That doesn’t just mean Republicans can wreak havoc at the state level—including crafting restrictive voting laws, breaking unions, restricting reproductive rights, you name it!—but it provides a deep bench for federal office.
The DNC should be building up state parties in ways that help capture state legislatures. It’s the first step toward national domination. Republicans have shown the way. We need to mimic. So, DNC candidates, don’t talk to me about Congress and the White House. Talk to me about how we will recapture those state legislatures.
Yes, that’s a 50-state strategy. And it’s more needed than ever.
VICTORY AGENDA
The national party has a platform, but it is ignored. Really, a national party with myriad constituencies will never be able to enforce its agenda on everyone. But if the party is focused on winning down to the lowliest office (and it should be), there are two major agenda items it can promote to that end:
1. Head the resistance
Nevermind nominal Democrats like West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin (he’ll be gone in two years anyway)—we have Democratic leaders like Sens. Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar normalizing Donald Trump and his merry band of bigoted assholes. Eight years ago, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell greeted the election of an incredibly popular Barack Obama by declaring him a one-term president, and laying down a marker to his base that the GOP would oppose the president every step of the way. And they did! Even when Obama adopted GOP policies like Obamacare. And while they weren’t able to make him a one-term president, they swept pretty much everything below the presidency. And now they control everything (including, soon, the Supreme Court).
We need a party head that can rally the troops and lead that resistance. We don’t need a party that only communicates to its rank-and-file when it needs money (what we have now), but one that is keeping us appraised of the fight. And of course, that chair must be relentless in her or his attacks on the GOP, and relentless in the promotion of our best candidates.
2. Rigged system
The Republican Party cannot win without a rigged system keeping it in power.
The Electoral College is rigged, and Republicans have now TWICE won the White House in 16 years despite having lost the popular vote.
The Senate is rigged, when small states get the same number of Senators that California, New York, and Texas get. If Wyoming was a city in California, it would only be its fifth largest, barely ahead of Fresno.
The gerrymandered House is rigged, when Democrats would have to win the House national popular vote by over 7-8 points just to have a chance to lead the chamber.
And even with all that rigging, Republicans still need to suppress the individual Democratic vote in order to win! So even voting is rigged!
The DNC should be laser-focused on rectifying the worst of that rigging. The National Popular Vote Compact would address the worst of the Electoral College problems. Fighting to admit DC and Puerto Rico in the union would somewhat balance out the Senate. Heck, split California into two states! Winning the 2018 and 2020 elections—at the state level—would allow us to deal with House gerrymandering and maybe, hey let’s dream, give ourselves an advantage over the next decade.
And we gotta fight the hell out of voter suppression efforts—from legislation and ballot initiatives, to lock-in compulsory or same-day registration, to litigation to undo the worst of what Republicans have passed.
PRIMARY REFORM
The DNC didn’t elect Hillary Clinton just like it didn’t elect Barack Obama. That said, it was a clusterfuck from the beginning, virtually designed to breed resentment, contempt, and anger. The process needs to be thrown out, and a new one built from scratch.
1. Kill the Iowa-New Hampshire duopoly. Neither state is representative of the nation, and neither state prepares Democratic candidates to appeal to our party’s diverse coalition. There are several competing alternatives, from starting with more diverse states (Illinois best mirrors our nation’s demographics), to rotating regions, to starting with smaller states and going bigger, and so on. I discuss some alternatives here, all of them better than the current system.
2. Kill the caucuses. Objectively, caucuses are anti-democracy. The highest-attended caucus got lower turnout than the lowest-turnout primary. In general, turnout in primaries was three to four times higher than for caucuses.
We cannot, as a party, argue for less restrictive voting rights while at the same time giving caucuses a free pass.
There is a problem, however. Caucuses exist in large part because parties can schedule them independently of the state electoral calendar. They are party-run affairs. And really, why should states pay for a party’s internal deliberations? So that leads to…
3. All-mail primary voting. I’d love to say “internet voting”, but we’re not there yet. And with Russia now actively undermining our democracy, there’s even less reason to to go that route when mail works just fine! It provides universal access, particularly if the voting period spans several weeks. It is relatively cheap to administer—mail your ballots to party HQ, where ballots would be securely stored until it came time to count them on primary day.
That wouldn’t just get the taxpayers off the hook for paying for the election, but would also allow the party to enforce calendar dates.
As a bonus, collecting email and address information would give the party (both national and state) valuable contact info for further communications, including fundraising and GOTV-volunteering appeals. This would make a true 50-state strategy much more feasible.
4. Close primaries. Democrats should choose the Democratic nominee while also making it as easy as possible to sign up for the party. In places where it’s easy to register officially, that would be sufficient. In places like New York that have more onerous restrictions, it might be as simple as creating an account at the state party website (if not already registered as a Democrat). Either way, if someone wants a say in how the party is run, she or he should be required to join the party in some capacity. As long as the process is simple and easy, it’s not asking too much.
5. Reform the superdelegates. No one is saying deny them credentials. They should get to attend the convention and have a say in committees and platform and whatever else party delegates do. Those mostly-elected officials worked hard to get to where they are! They absolutely should have a say in the nuts-and-bolts governance of the party.
But their ability to overturn the democratic results of the primary is an affront to the primary voter, and that superpower created bad blood in both the 2008 and 2016 primaries, as the losing candidate dragged out proceedings, looking to them to bail them out.
One of the pro-superdelegate arguments this year was, “What if we nominate someone like Trump, wouldn’t we want the superdelegates to bail us out?” Well … Trump won. And in any case, you either trust your party’s voters or you don’t. I prefer a party that trusts them. So let superdelegates have every power they currently hold except one—the right to vote for the presidential nominee at the convention.
CONCLUSION
This DNC Agenda gives us a real 50-state strategy, focused on both vigorously leading the resistance to the Trump regime, while also building the infrastructure necessary to win at the lowest levels, in red states as well as blue. It’s an agenda that would increase participation in our primary process while simultaneously using that process to help build a genuine 50-state infrastructure.
I didn’t discuss everything possible. There are continued investments in data, in community outreach, in organizing, in voter registration. The party is already doing that, and just needs to do it better. That’s a boring bullet-point: do those things you already do, but better. Rather, I want to focus on those things that the party doesn’t already do, or that it should do differently.
As noted above, we still have candidates jumping in daily. I admit, I’ve even kicked around the idea of jumping in. But I’m more and more satisfied with the field we have, and looking forward to supporting the one that best speaks to the issues I’ve identified above.