(crossposted from my Sassy Democrat blog.)
We democrats brought ourselves to the brink of permanent minority party status by competing in politics without first reading the rulebook. In politics the rulebook is the constitution, which grants inordinate power to sparsely populated rural states. The republicans read the rulebook and built a rural powerbase, buying up “obsolete” AM stations on the cheap and linking them by newly cheap satellite time. They built a whole culture of resentment out of rural america’s losses. And in a manner reminiscent of the Nazis and the worlds other totalitarians they built and weaponized intolerance. We even helped the republicans by labeling center left democrats that could win in rural areas as “Democrats In Name Only (DINOs)” and abandoned them to defeat.
Thus we now find ourselves with a pretender president who lost the popular vote and not by a little, a house so gerrymandered that we need at least a 6% lead in the generic ballot to win a majority, and less than 10,000 North Dakotans will probably decide control of the senate in a nation of over 300 million. Clearly our democratic party needs to reinvent itself before we can become a majority party. That means welcoming and supporting moderate rural democrats and investing the same efforts and $$$ in rural areas as we do in the big cities.
Some of the big D democratic institutions are with us- The DNC is funding organizers in Indian Country in South Dakota and D-Trip is strongly supporting our candidates in even “lean republican” districts like Kansas 2. But some of the Democratic Party establishment still hasn’t gotten the message… Here in Minnesota our Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party leadership seems to be perfectly happy to lose the rural democrat held 1st and 8th congressional districts while celebrating flipping the suburban 2nd and 3rd districts. Same with the state house races, where the DFL needs to flip a dozen or so republican held districts to win back the majority… They’re seriously targeting only 16 or so while the republicans are targeting the few surviving rural democratic representatives.
We complain, and rightfully so. The party leadership responds by paying part of the rent of a cheap campaign office and maybe a grant or three in the thousand dollar range. The party officials from the cities pay us a few more visits. But it takes six figure campaign spending and paid staffers to flip a state house district, and any thing less is tokenism.