Look forward to 2018, there will be Senate races in Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana and Ohio—all states that have less diversity than the national average. And so this nonsense that it’s a zero sum game —we either talk to African-Americans or Hispanics or we talk to the white working class, which is how the choice portrayed up until this point, in terms of the post-game analysis of the election—is extremely defeatist.
The party needs to take a cold hard look at the Clinton campaign and many other ‘data driven’ campaigns of this cycle which have turned us into a party that tries to use data and analytics not to expand the universe of voters we’re talking to but to shrink it down. We have to appeal to a larger, broader base and stop trying to win elections on the margins.
This doesn’t mean we have to walk away from our ideals. We can still be the party committed to combating racism, we can still stand up against homophobia and not to walk away from our commitment to reasonable and compassionate immigration reform. However, all of that is for nothing if we can’t rebuild trust with people who don’t trust the government and don’t trust the politicians in this country to speak up for them. None of these ideals matter one bit if you don’t have control of any levers of power. The Green Party and the Libertarians are full of idealists, fat lot of good it’s done them.
That message of ‘’they’re not listening to you” is the core of what Trump was peddling, it was also if you recall much of what Obama ran on. Hillary was absolutely the wrong candidate to combat that mindset to any degree because she looked like the ultimate insider. Her and Bill seemed to have been in politics forever and managed to turn that political involvement into a multi-million dollar fortune. Her then running in a year when so much of the country has given up on trusting the government made this election a real heavy lift. It’s what gave Bernie’s message I think to some degree legs, because even though he was a lifetime politician, because he was a lifetime independent he seemed like an outsider.
I believe it is possible to have a compelling winning message that connects to working-class voters, regardless of whether you are white or black. It doesn’t mean that African-Americans do not face a different set of circumstances or that women do. It does mean that we should not dumb ourselves down with an endless set of polling data and analytics to come up with the 17 policy positions that live on a website some where and expect that to win us elections. We should speak from a position of moral strength and figure out a way to communicate our message in a simple way that appeals to working-class voters, period.
I do think there are parts of the electorate we’ll never be able to win. Those hard core culture warriors who look at the ballot and decide based on what their evangelical pastor told them about gays and abortionists, they’re a lost cause. But, among them I believe there are many voters who could easily be won back to the Democratic Party. Not by denying the theory of evolution or deciding we’re on the side NRA, but simply be presenting offering them a competing message that is easy to understand and focuses on their economic issues, appealing to them on their class interests.
Democrats need to figure out what that economic issue is and how to pitch it in an elevator ride. Trump certainly had his elevator pitch nailed down. “She’s crooked, immigrants are stealing your jobs, I’m going to drain the swamp and build a wall.”
We need to get back to understanding what is happening in small towns in rural America. The businesses are all gone, the kids leave as soon as they can, the family farms are dying. But, as a Democratic what do you do about that? What economic issue could you possibly sell to these voters?
I think you start going after Wal-Mart, which has massively eroded local business in every small town across this country. You go after the big agricultural monopolies — which in many cases elements of the left already have problems with. Every small farmer I know locally hates the companies and what they’ve done to the industry. But they’re also extremely reliable Republican voters right now, because what exactly are Democrats offering? Nothing. I think you campaign on target the big businesses that are hollowing out rural american through anti-trust cases and legislation.
I think voters are more fickle then the data driven analysis would believe, white working class union voters were extremely reliable Democrats, so much so that big data analysis said you didn’t have to invest time in the upper midwest. Well, that was before Trump upended decades of GOP messaging on free trade. When both the GOP and the Democrats stood on the same side on trade, Democrats could at once rely on organized labor while stabbing them in the back on a core issue and say, “Tough, you’ve got nowhere else to go.” Trump gave them somewhere to go.
It’s time that we find people in the rural areas who vote GOP and find an issue that will give them somewhere else to go. We have a year to figure it out. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats have to defend 25 Senate seats, 10 of them in states that went for Donald Trump. Furthermore, if we can’t gain ground in state legislatures and governorship's, then 2020 redistricting process is going to make 2010 look like a fair redistricting option by comparison. And we’ll all be right back here in 2020 wondering how it’s gotten so much worse.