Tag Archives: Democrats

Make sure people can vote, and want to

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Always remember that in US electoral politics there are two axes: How people vote and which people vote. Rethinking how we talk about the latter – and making sure we talk about them at all – will be key in the months ahead. This post doesn’t point fingers specifically but raises some concerns many of you might not have considered.

Winning elections is not always about converting voters, as this low turnout election – like so many low turnout elections before it – has proven. Sometimes it is about persuading people to show up – and making it possible for them to do so in the first place. We should always work to make it easier for people to vote in our democracy and many states have taken steps in recent years to make it substantially easier. (Oregon Gov. & Former Secretary of State Kate Brown, for example, oversaw the addition of universal automatic voter registration to the state’s existing 100% vote-by-mail system and she made it easier for people with various disabilities to cast special ballots if needed.) On the other hand, many states, especially in the South, have permanently taken away the voting rights of hundreds of thousands – even millions – of minority voters, not to mention purging voter rolls. The Democratic Party should be fighting to make sure all voters can vote. But in addition to people not being able to vote, we didn’t lose this election because we failed to convert reactionary or hateful voters to our worldview, but more because many of their neighbors in those states chose to stay home this year. This was a big drop from 2012, which itself was a sizeable drop from 2008.

I’m not telling you to “listen better” to incorrigible racists; I’m telling you to listen and figure out why several million people felt so much despair about the state of the country and the competing visions being presented to them that nothing motivated them to make the trip to the polls. You can complain that the stakes were so high they should have voted anyway, and you can complain until the cows come home, but it won’t change what happened and it won’t prevent it from happening again in 2018, 2020, and beyond.

Michigan, to focus more narrowly for a moment, has a number of communities, cutting across many ethnicities, facing distinct existential challenges (i.e. challenges that literally threaten their lives on a daily basis), and Democrats have increasingly just looked away as Republicans tightened the screws (when not actively helping). The Michigan Democratic primary was a huge upset and featured issues of not just trade or manufacturing jobs (a multi-racial issue contrary to media narratives) but also Flint’s austerity-driven water poisoning crisis (primarily impacting Black residents) and the United States’ ongoing military activities in Middle Eastern countries where many voters have family. The general election featured no promises to end the wars, no discussion of Flint at all, and no real plan to repair the lives of (solidly Democratic) Black or White working class families impacted by trade laws and union-busting. Forget for a moment the people who jumped to do press interviews about voting for Trump – we let down a lot of our most reliable voters and they decided it wasn’t worth it to go vote if it meant just voting in someone who wasn’t talking about how to end the misery they’re already in every day. And President Obama, while personally popular still to many people, made a lot of promises on trade, environmental safety, and the Middle East that he didn’t fulfill for the people of Michigan, if we’re honest.

Sure, I’m upset with people who voted for Donald Trump, but I wasn’t expecting or trying to win them over in great numbers – nor am I now. I’m trying to make sure our own voters have a reason to believe it’s worth voting and will make a difference. I’m trying to make sure we run on and deliver on an agenda that makes a noticeable difference in the lives of people who have a hard go of it, so that voters can see not just why they should vote for us but why they should vote at all.

Building toward 2018 and 2020

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In July 2014, I wrote that “Democrats need to focus on state legislatures (or stay doomed)”. Here’s what I argued at the time:

Democrats aren’t focusing enough on taking the steps necessary to correct the districting imbalance that’s hurting them so badly. That would boil down, essentially, to investing a lot of money right now into the state parties of every Democratic-leaning state, swing state, and Republican-trending-Democratic-demographic state in the country to recruit, train, and finance candidates in state legislative races and governor races in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

If executed well, Democrats would be in a position to reasonably expect in 2020 (barring some catastrophic political wave against them that year) to win a lot of majorities in state legislatures all over, to prevent Republicans from extending the post-2010 maps that have been so weighted against Democrats in Congressional races. At the very least, Democratic-led legislatures could implement fairer, nonpartisan redistricting systems that take away the self-serving bias of having legislators redraw their own districts.
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We’re going to panic in October 2020 — right before the election that will determine the next round of post-census redistricting nationwide — when we suddenly realize we needed 3-4 cycles (e.g. starting 2014 or 2016) to ramp back up toward legislative majorities in a lot of states by election night in November 2020. That year will be a presidential year when the Democratic base really turns out, unlike in the 2010 non-presidential cycle. But it won’t make a bit of difference if the state parties all over the country haven’t recruited electable legislative candidates. They’re going to need consistent national Democratic support for the next six and a half years to make that happen.

Without that effort, Democrats can look forward to another ten years of Republican domination on multiple levels or full-stop obstruction of all Democratic agenda points.

 
Some further reflections from the vantage point of a couple years later, for legislative and other races:

For maximum effectiveness, we need open seat primaries in heavily Democratic areas plus primary wins to nominate challengers in Republican areas. Only social democrats will recruit winnable candidates. The Clinton wing is uninterested in downballot and always has been.

The Democratic party institutions’ recruiters are also, unfortunately, terrible at assessing true electability. If we keep recruiting multi-millionaires with political last names to run on bipartisan budget cuts & entitlement reform, we will lose 2018. Democratic candidates who run as Lite Republicans in 2018 will lose to the real thing 90% of the time. We can’t faceplant again.

Federally, legislatively, and gubernatorially, all post-November 2016 energy has to be on recruiting Dems with a new message that turns out the existing base heavily plus turns out new votes from people who might not otherwise show up. Our only shot is bold progressivism (social democracy) in Dem areas and low-income economic populism in poor Republican areas. (These are similar or the same policies prescriptions but somewhat differently messaged.)

Opposition Leadership

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We need someone speaking every single day to the media and other party members, without apology, for progress and for our values. This is important in any context, but it is of even greater importance with a conservative Republican governor and with Democrats taking on an opposing role.

We, the progressive core of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, are not merely right on the issues in idealistic terms; our solutions are actually more realistic and more grounded than the other side’s solutions. And when the other side occupies part of the space of our party and blurs the lines on critical issues, it becomes harder to win elections than it should be, rather than helping to retain seats in swing districts. While there is room for disagreement on policy specifics, there should be a broad alignment of values on the major and contentious issues of our time.

Voters want bold, clear, and courageous leadership in their officials. Leadership sometimes means leading the voters toward one’s point of view on the issues. We have to make our case, in plain terms, as to why we are correct on those issues.

We can only offer the voters an informed choice in making their decisions at the ballot box if we argue our case to them for our preferred positions on the issues.

Baseline goals

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

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“Bernie Sanders invokes FDR in explaining socialism as ‘foundation of middle class'” – LA Times:

“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist,” Sanders said, “remember this: I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own means of production. But I do believe the middle class and working class of this country who produce the wealth of this country deserve a decent standard of living, and their incomes should go up and not down.”

 

Should USPS be empowered again to offer banking services?

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

Speaking of underbanked Americans without access to safe, low-cost services for cashing checks and saving money…

Don’t miss “Bernie Sanders’s Highly Sensible Plan to Turn Post Offices Into Banks” – The Atlantic:

…only about 7 percent of the world’s national postal systems don’t offer some bank-like services.
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The reason why this would be so useful in the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services, which in some places charge usurious rates that send people into spirals of recurring debt.
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…in 1910, William Howard Taft introduced a postal-savings system for new immigrants and the poor that lasted until 1967.

 
Low-grade localized socialism we can believe in! (And a new revenue stream for our constitutionally mandated postal service.)

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Why did Hillary Clinton bring up the big climate talks failure?

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

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I reacted very negatively to Secretary Clinton’s bizarre debate anecdote about the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks, but I couldn’t quite remember all the details, other than my generalized and deep disappointment about the results of those talks at the time. This post filled my memory gap in…

“Hillary Clinton Is Living in a Climate Change Fantasy World” – Slate.com

About midway through the [first 2016 Democratic presidential] debate, Clinton staked her climate record on what’s widely perceived to have been one of the biggest diplomatic failures in recent history — the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. After years of anticipation, the meeting of world leaders ended in disarray, with Obama and his aides famously wandering around the convention center, looking for the leaders of China, India, Brazil, and other key nations. The toothless deal struck at the last minute was called a “grudging accord” by the New York Times the next day. Yes, Obama—and Clinton, then his secretary of state—were instrumental to that deal, but it’s hardly something Hillary should be proud of.

So it was pretty strange to hear her comments on Tuesday night. In her first answer on climate change, Clinton said, “I have been on the forefront of dealing with climate change starting in 2009 when President Obama and I crashed a meeting with the Chinese and got them to sign up to the first international agreement to combat climate change that they’d ever joined.”

In reality, the sour legacy of Copenhagen has haunted international climate negotiations ever since. It’s now widely believed that the U.S. never wanted a legally binding climate deal in Copenhagen at all—even though the Democrats controlled the Congress at the time and may have been able to successfully ratify the treaty—opting instead for a mostly empty pledge of billions of dollars in aid to developing nations. Among environmentalists, Clinton has retained only a mediocre reputation on climate change as a result.

Her Copenhagen comment wasn’t just a poor choice of wording, because she brought it up again later in the debate.
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In her expanded version of the story, Clinton and Obama were roaming Copenhagen “literally … hunting for the Chinese.” Once they found them, she said, “We marched up, broke in, and said, ‘We’ve been looking all over for you. Let’s sit down and come up with what we need to do.’” That all sounds very Jason Bourne, but it’s not a good substitute for effective climate policy.