This week The New York Times printed columns that seem to imply that the secret to resuscitating the beleaguered Democratic Party is to single-mindedly chase the rising demographics of the South and West and forget the Industrial Midwest where Trump eked out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and earned more substantial ones in Ohio and Iowa.
The news from California, of course was great. Hillary carried each of the thirty-nine districts now held by Democrats as well as seven of the fourteen still represented by Republicans. Nearby Nevada flipped two seats our way along with both Houses of the State Legislature and an impressive new Latina United States Senator. There were also encouraging favorable trends at the congressional district level in parts of Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia that bolster the cause for optimism.
Our mindless Democratic campaign committees in Washington have never been known for strategic genius, so perhaps it is logical to raise the caution flag before we find ourselves careening pell mell in yet another senseless direction.
The most rational way to learn from the Democratic debacle in 2016 is to compare Clinton’s performance by Congressional District with that of Barack Obama in 2008 (recalculated to reflect the new post-2010 districts) as The Daily Kos website has done.
After calculating the winning or losing margins between the Democratic and Republican standard bearers by congressional district in both races, then ranking the former President’s performance in 2008 with Clinton’s last November, we find that the overwhelming majority of districts where Hillary’s performance exceeded that of Obama’s eight years earlier were in the southern and western states mentioned above, and that 96% of the fifty districts where her performance lagged his by the greatest margins were in the Midwest or in adjacent states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
None of this of course was surprising considering the shellacking Clinton took in rural and blue-collar areas, but the Democratic Party would be making a major mistake to write off white working class voters in the Midwest and patiently wait for the magical demographics of 2040 to render it a genuinely competitive national party again.
The temptation is strong in Washington to use the 2016 election as a recovery model for the entire country instead of recognizing it for what it clearly was: an aberration election between two terribly flawed candidates. Hillary was unable to credibly present herself as a candidate who favored campaign finance reform or someone who would take on Wall Street, fight the unfair trade deals so reviled in the Midwest, or check the oligarchs of the fossil fuels industry. Remarkably, it was Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton who spent the most time attacking the out-of-control and quite unpopular pharmaceutical industry that had so bedeviled the Clinton’s healthcare dreams a quarter-century ago.
It is fair to speculate that another Democratic candidate not so encumbered, might have been able to achieve the kind of success Obama had had in the two previous Presidential elections. He twice carried six of the eight largest Midwestern states, missing a clean sweep of all eight in 2008 by less than five thousand votes.
So as we fight to reclaim our historic strength in the Midwest, let’s look at those 2008 numbers as a floor and a place to start. The explosive grassroots reaction to the Trump promises electoral opportunities we could only have dreamed about six months ago.
It won’t be easy, but let’s get to work.
Today, the Democratic Party is in ruins in two of the four large regions of our country. Among the twenty-six Southern and Midwestern states, only three: Illinois, Minnesota, and Virginia can in any stretch of the imagination be fairly described as “Democratic” states and none of those three can even claim to have both a Democratic Governor and a Democratic State Legislature.
Furthermore, as the 2020 Census looms on the horizon, Democrats must somehow reclaim Governorships in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri and replace term-limited Democrats in Virginia, West Virginia and Minnesota to even have a place at the table in the next round of redistricting, so vital to winning the House of Representatives and state legislatures.
In the twenty-six states of the South and West, only in Illinois is there any prospect whatsoever of actually controlling redistricting, and there only if Democrats can unseat an incumbent Republican Governor.
So what is the best route to rebuild a political party that has the ear of the American People perhaps more than it has had since the Nineteen-Sixties, but is weaker electorally at the local, State, and Federal levels than it has been since the Nineteen-Twenties?
I believe that the Democratic Party is capable of “walking and chewing gum” at the same time. We can sustain and re-energize our proud war against discrimination of any kind even as we recommit to an all out battle against economic inequality. And we should joyfully exploit the emerging demographic-driven advantages that Hillary Clinton exposed last year in the South and West even as our fight for economic justice helps us reclaim the Midwest.