Remember December 2004 and January 2005? I do.
No sooner had we seen the last ballot tallies of an election that was more mandate-confirming than this one ever will be, than the Republicans immediately started to act on that perceived mandate and took dead aim at Social Security and Medicare.
We all remember how that turned out, don’t we? With Social Security coming out alive and well — and Nancy Pelosi being sworn in as Speaker in 2007.
The good news is that we don’t have to screw everyone else to get enough whites to win in the midterms. We just have to do what we did in 2005, when whites were more dominant in the electorate than they are now:
1) Make sure they and everyone else know that the Republicans are coming for their Medicare and Social Security (as well as Obamacare), and that the Democrats are set to defend all of these things.
2) Have enough people running at state and local levels to take advantage of the GOP’s O-care/Medicare/SocSec overreach as well as Trump’s neverending foulups, much as Bush’s foulups in Iraq and elsewhere helped to sour the electorate against Congressional Republicans.
We’ve already got started on the first part. Nancy Pelosi knows full well what made her Speaker in 2006. Now we have to work on the second part, which is insuring that we have enough people running at the state and local levels to take advantage of the already-shifting political winds. And that’s something that many key Democrats, including Keith Ellison (who has the backing of Chuck Schumer) and Howard Dean (who has pulled out of the race for DNC Chair) agree strongly upon.
Just as in 2005, Republicans are already freaking out over the political costs of going through with the agenda they touted. They want to play Operation Hide Behind the Democrats — and the Democrats, just as in 2005, are saying “Nope. You broke it, you own it. We’re not helping you avoid paying for your own mistakes.”