It’s another Sunday, so for those who tune in, welcome to a diary discussing the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up any time: Just visit our group or follow the Nuts & Bolts Guide. For years, I’ve built this guide around questions that get submitted, hoping to help small candidates field questions. I’ve been grateful to so many campaign managers, field directors, communication directors, and volunteers for sharing their experience, which has continued to be a big part of the story presented every week in this series.
The 2020 Democratic convention has ended. The 2020 Republican convention is about to begin. Nuts & Bolts isn’t just about the practice. It’s about the pride, the purpose, and the causes that unite all of us. The Democratic convention offered a vision of the future with hope, progress, diversity, inclusion, and a belief that we, as a country, have our better days ahead of us. It is strange that it was Ronald Reagan in 1984 who told America “our best days are ahead of us,” and today, the Republican Party tells its members that the future is “doomed” and that our best days are behind us. Unlike Reagan, though, the Democratic message isn’t that “the best days are ahead” on the hope of a failed economic idea; the Democratic message on hope is the idea that we can continuously work to be better tomorrow than we are today. This week, I want to talk about just that, and what that means in every race this year.
At every level, in every race, the Democratic message is a better America
I want you to seriously consider how we think about and treat each other. Throughout the Democratic convention, words you heard frequently were “love,” “hope,” and “faith.” One of the messages that started this column, years ago, was that the surrender of deep red states could not be who the Democratic Party would be in the future. The reason for that was simple: People cannot control where they are born. Not everyone has the privilege or means to just “move” to where things are safer or better. A gay man in Wyoming. A woman needing health care in many states in this country. In blue states, Trump has called on cities to “die” and asked for Americans to hate each other, to blame one another, to rely on the worst of their own feelings.
The Republican message is this: “You will feel better about yourself as long as you know, every day, that someone is far worse off than you, and they deserve it. They deserve to be worse off than you are, and I’m going to get on stage before a national audience and say it out loud.” This has become the Republican message on health care, on immigration, on environmental issues, on trade, on racism.
Now, having watched the Democratic convention, ask yourself: What is our key message? The key message for Democratic candidates is consistent: We believe in the future. We believe that everyone deserves to be better off, not at the expense of anyone else, but for the benefit of all. We are not living in a world of limits where if someone does well, it means that I have to do poorly.
We convey this message everywhere in the country—both in races that Democratic candidates should win and races where the Democratic candidate is unlikely to win. The candidates don’t run just because they’re counting on winning; they run because they’re giving a voice to people who feel, often, that they have no voice. Some of the favorite candidates I’ve had send me emails or participate through Nuts & Bolts ran in districts they knew, from the beginning, they could not win. Still, they shared their story and they let others know that they were not alone. In Kansas, we see it in the Big 1st, a district that is unbelievably Republican—it’s one of the most Republican-skewed districts in the country. Yet when Laura Kelly, our Democratic governor in Kansas, prevailed in 2018, it was not ignored, and her margins improved in district after district. Since then, more than 10,000 new Democratic voters have been registered there. What made that possible was the belief in the community.
Next week, here is what the Republicans will tell you
The Republican Party of today is built on this driving force: cynicism and paranoia. They will devote night after night to telling Americans how pointless the future is for all of us. How desperately we need to go back to the past. But what past is that? Women confined to the home without access to credit? What in the past do they wish to replicate? No one can ever answer that question. It is a difficult question when you’re scared of the future.
That message is one of fear: “Be afraid of change. Be afraid to cast a vote. Doubt the fact your vote or your belief matters. No change is possible—we can only go backward, not forward.” You will hear stories of bad people—bad guys. You will hear stories of punishment and accusations. You’re going to hear a lot of puffery about how great a single man is, as though he is a savior.
The Republican convention is not a celebration of hope, it’s an attempt to scare the bejesus out of people, and to gin up distrust.
The terrible truth is, far too many Americans believe this. They believe this because the role models around them have been this way. Rather than challenge these points, many walk away. They pass these ideas on to their children, and the ideas stay. The Republican convention appeals to those voters who are scared about the future because all they can see is a future that is different. Different is not okay.
What is required of all of us?
It’s too easy for Democratic faithful to look at polling data and say “we’ve got this,” and take it easy. I believe Joe Biden will prevail. I also know this: We have to work as hard as we can, not just for Biden and Kamala Harris, but for candidates at every level. Sometimes just appearing in a community and letting them know it is okay to believe in a better future helps people feel less alone.
I can’t tell you how often I have heard from candidates running in deep red districts tales of finding a Democratic voter who had never once been contacted by another Democratic volunteer. Some of these stories are powerful, filled with tears and hope. Some of the stories are funny. All of them, though, continue to remind us that we are in this together. We are working together to help build better cities, counties, states, and the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate, and the presidency.
This year is a transformational year. This is the time for Democratic voters in red states to vote en masse, saying to themselves: “I have to be on the right side of history. I don’t want Joe Biden to win by 3 million votes—I want him to win by 8 million votes. I want to be able to tell my children I did something.”
It’s exciting for Democratic volunteers to say “we want a chance to build a better future.” To do that, we have to say to each other: “I really don’t care what the poll says. We are not playing a game. We are not rooting for a win by the polls. We aren’t going to let up on the gas. We are going to urge each other on. Your state is in the bag? Or unreachable? Make your protest getting people together to send a powerful message that resounds with hope, not fear. Don’t believe that there aren’t people in your state who will embrace fear. Who do not want the future we see. They are afraid of it. They will mock, ridicule, and deride those who see a better future that isn’t built on running backward to the past.”
This is the tale of two Americas. One is an America of hope. The other is an America of fear. Offer our fellow Democratic voters hope that we can get through this, and that we can show our young people role models who believe in the future.
