Ossified?
Regarding how these elections were managed, I understand the party leadership's reasoning, even though it hasn't been winning. First of all, let's list the seats we're talking about here: Montana as a whole, southern Kansas including Wichita, portions of Los Angeles, South Carolina farm country, and Atlanta's affluent suburbs. How many of those areas sound "traditionally Democratic" to you, just right off the bat? Just the L.A. district, right? Well, in that contest, the Republicans didn't even make a showing (their candidate, in fact, secured less votes than the Green Party nominee). It fell to a contest between a Hispanic Democrat and a Korean Democrat, which the Hispanic Democrat won. And the district is majority-Hispanic, so, no surprise there.
Here's an overview of how the other races sussed out:
District: Cook PVI: 2012 Results: 2014 Results: 2016 Results: 2017 Results:
MT-AL R+11 Romney 55.4% GOP 55.4% Trump 56.5% GOP 50%
KS-4 R+15 Romney 61.6% GOP 66.8% Trump 60.2% GOP 52.5%
SC-5 R+9 Romney 55.1% GOP 58.9% Trump 57.3% GOP 51.1%
GA-6 R+8 Romney 60.8% GOP 66.4% Trump 48.3% GOP 51.9%
(Sources: Daily Kos and Wikipedia. For those of you who don't know, the "Cook PVI" is the Partisan Voter Index of a district as evaluated by The Cook Political Report. Cook takes the partisan vote of the district in the past two presidential elections and compares it to the nation's partisan vote as a whole. So a district with a score of R+8 voted for the Republican presidential candidate by 8 more percentage points than the country altogether.)
In these races, the party leadership was not taking huge risks with their money. Most of these districts have not elected Democrats recently. If they have, the Dems elected have been moderates (as in Kansas until 1994), or state institutions (as in South Carolina until 2010). Democratic leadership, likewise, had higher hopes for moderate candidates in closer districts than for progressive ones in more long-shot districts. And in all these districts but Georgia's 6th, Trump did better than Romney did in 2012 (he didn't pull a higher total than Romney in KS-4 but had a bigger edge on Clinton than Romney did on Obama). He's blown a ton of voter goodwill in just five months for these districts to swing so violently against his party. In addition, Hillary Clinton swung Georgia's 6th her way by quite a bit. Given that she's widely seen as a moderate, it would make sense for someone running there to also espouse moderate views to try to win. Jon Ossoff distanced himself from progressive causes, and his opponent, Karen Handel, still tried to paint him as having "San Francisco values" - which is both a jab at Nancy Pelosi and code for "gay." Handel also distanced herself a great deal from Trump, which was a wise move in an area that, like DuPage County, opposed the GOP presidential nominee in 2016 while re-electing GOP members at most other levels.
Also, you can't forget that all politics is local; you can't win a Congressional race by betting on national trends. The party gambled on a traditional bet in one of these districts and came close, but still lost. The frustration among Democrats is twofold: one, they're mad that voters don't equate the whole Republican Party with Donald Trump; and two, they're mad that their party leadership isn't willing to fund more boldly progressive candidates. There's really no way to know if progressives would have fared better in these races if they were given more money. Progressives certainly have never won in these districts. But let's compare each race.
Rob Quist was outspent considerably in Montana as the GOP pumped a ton of PAC money into their candidate, the guy who assaulted a reporter. Quist was widely viewed as a progressive who earned Bernie Sanders' support and raised a lot from small donors out-of-state, but did not get any national party support. James Thompson was outspent in Kansas and garnered no national party support; he ran as a Berniecrat but didn't raise a lot of money from outside the district. South Carolina's Archie Parnell garnered some national party support, though not nearly as much as Jon Ossoff. Parnell is hardly a progressive because of his ties to Goldman Sachs and his eschewing of single-payer healthcare. He didn't raise a lot from outside the Palmetto State and was also outspent by his GOP rival. Ossoff was definitely not outspent, but his fundraising strength was not from leadership-driven PACs, unlike Handel. And though he did garner millions of dollars of national party support, he raised a boatload more from out-of-state small donors - as a moderate. It was these outside forces feeding his race that Handel turned against him, despite her being way more guilty of taking outside money.
Did national Dems try to tip their party's nominations in Kansas and Montana toward establishment candidates? No. James Thompson actually beat out a former Kansas State Treasurer and House Minority Leader in a Democratic party convention for the nomination. In Montana's convention, Rob Quist beat out Amanda Curtis - a state representative and previous nominee for U.S. Senate who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 - and Kelly McCarthy - another state representative, county party chair, and member of the Montana party's executive committee. No fingers on the scale there.
Were there better, more progressive candidates in South Carolina and Georgia that the national party could have stepped in and boosted during the primaries? Well, no. In South Carolina, Parnell very handily won a three-way primary where no candidate took definite progressive stands or garnered progressive endorsements. In Georgia, there were four other Dems besides Ossoff running in the April 18th "jungle primary," but together they amassed a whopping 0.79% of the vote. By contrast, there were ten other Republicans besides Handel, who got about 31.23% of the vote combined. (Add those votes to Handel's base of 19.77%, and Republicans got 51% of the vote in April, which is pretty much what Handel won in June - even though 67,000 more people voted in the June election.)
Are the Dems eating their own, then? It doesn't look like it to me. You've got two progressives and two moderates who ran in very Republican districts. The districts were made vacant because Trump nominated people from them to his Cabinet - on advice from GOP leaders who didn't want to lose seats in the House by putting swing districts into play. The moderates running got national Democratic party support, yes, but the one in Georgia got about 18 times as much national money as the one in South Carolina. Montana and Kansas were longer-shot races than South Carolina and Georgia. And Georgia was the only race where Hillary Clinton had swung the district substantially. Like I said, I get the leadership's strategy, but still, everyone lost. Ossoff got the highest percentage of the vote out of the four: 48.1% (there were no third-party candidates). Parnell came next at 47.9% (third parties took 1% of the vote together). Next came Thompson with 45.7% (a Libertarian took 1.7%), and finally Quist finished his race with 44.4% (the Libertarian there took a startling 5.7% of the vote).
The only conclusion I'm content to draw from all this is that Dems have come close in areas we never have before, but Trump's low approval ratings alone are not enough to give us districts with Cook PVI scores over R+8. The verdict in a lot of the media seems to be that if Dems ran on a "bold new message," and not just against Trump, that might have tipped us over the edge. What that message is, and how progressive or left-leaning it is, seems to be the intense debate within the party. Now, I might be wrong, but the Democratic Party has a message, though it might not be very new. Healthcare reform has been on the table since the '90s. College debt relief has been discussed at length since at least the 2004 election. Common sense, non-imperialist foreign policy was a focus of campaigns in 2006 and the Obama years. Protecting the environment was brought to the forefront by Al Gore in the '80s. Growing the economy is the hallmark of Democratic administrations. Trade unions have been our backbone for over a century, and supporting them is good for workers. These are the issues that make me a Democrat and that draw people to the party, and to liberalism and progressivism. We run on them a lot, and we work to make them reality. Why do they have to be "new?"
And how do we make them "bold?" We could take these ideas to the next level, I suppose, and swing further left like many advocate. The Sanders Revolution was mainly based on turning Democratic values up to eleven. Single-payer healthcare and free college tuition are the "louder" versions of Obamacare and interest-free loans. I like both ideas quite a bit. I've supported single-payer healthcare since the first discussions of Obamacare. Is that an issue that wins, though? The reflex I have is "who cares, it's the right thing to do," but it's hard to do the right thing if you're out of power because a majority of Americans disagree with you. Do most Americans support free tuition at public universities? So far it doesn't seem so. We can try to move the needle on these issues, but I tend to think that's a more long-term job, and not something that will win us elections in 2018, 2020, or perhaps even 2022.
Another part of the progressive manifesto has much broader appeal: green initiatives. Most Americans are on the same page when it comes to climate change. I'd argue that protecting the environment isn't so much a solely progressive issue as a wholly Democratic one, really - how many Dems do you know that are climate change deniers? Hell, even DuPage Republicans are on board with green construction, energy conservation, and aggressive recycling programs. The problem is, can we make the environment a strong enough issue to sway solid red districts our way? Climate change doesn't hit people as hard as healthcare costs. By the time the voters really do feel it, it'll be too late.
Fair trade is more amorphous an issue, but definitely characterized both the Sanders and the Trump campaigns. Many voters don't understand it fully, and those that do seem resigned to, or even supportive of, globalization. I'm not necessarily one of them. I believe that international corporations should not have more legal or financial freedoms on the global scene than nations or individuals. But I've had this conversation with some of the most liberal folks I know: "You can't put the genie of free trade back in the bottle," they tell me. "Tariffs penalize consumers. Protectionism would damage us far more than free trade." They're right. The costs of tariffs do ultimately get passed onto the people buying the goods.
But politicians on all sides have been banging the drum to "bring American jobs back" from overseas for decades. Democrats need to look at the economy on a much more broad scale than the Sanders platform of 2016. We can easily delude ourselves into thinking Trump's fair trade stances helped him beat Clinton, and thus if we'd put up Bernie, who disavowed TPP and owned fair trade, we would have won. The issue is job security and not free trade. Automation is what's killing American manufacturing. Skilled trade jobs are in demand, but no one seems to want them. Unskilled labor jobs have a similar problem, and policy regarding them is tied more to immigration than anything else. What we have left in the job market beside those sectors are service jobs, which make up nearly two-thirds of our economy. These include customer service and "gig" jobs, retail and non-retail sales, professional services, and jobs in healthcare and education. Retail jobs are on the way down because of the Internet and, again, automation. They also pay notoriously poor wages. (The good news here is that most Americans support increasing the minimum wage, though a majority don't want to go as high as $15 per hour.) Healthcare and education jobs will always be in demand, so no need for protectionist policies there. Customer service and "gig" jobs are reliant upon service that can only be provided in person, so there's not as much fear of outsourcing or automation there. Non-retail sales industries like real estate, insurance, and energy pay mostly or entirely through commission, so they appeal either to hobbyists or motivated entrepreneurs. The global market doesn't affect the job security feelings of those kind of folks very much.
Which brings us to professional services. Most of these jobs are in management and administration, which are fairly secure unless your company gets bought. Research and development is a pitifully small field, but Democratic policy is very favorable to it because of the desire to spur innovation, which in turn promotes job security in innovating fields. My personal experience with folks going into computer science or engineering is that not many of them are genuinely innovating. Local publicly-funded "business incubators" are great for public relations but pretty under-utilized, and jobs grown there are definitely not secure. Most people with innovation skills are applying them to writing software used only by the companies they work for... or to, ahem, video game design. Small businesses that innovate tend to get assimilated by big businesses that only do a good job of marketing themselves as innovators. Mergers and takeovers are the biggest threat to professional service jobs, whether they come from foreign companies buying American ones, or American ones eating each other.
So what do we do to increase job security? Well, we could break up some of the largest monopolies or near-monopolies, for starters. "Trust-busting" was once a progressive cause. I don't just mean breaking up the banks; I mean breaking up the Amazons, Apples, Comcasts, Facebooks, Googles, Krogers, Microsofts, and Wal-Marts of the world, as well as the entertainment and food conglomerates. A broader marketplace would mean broader competition in the highest-producing industries of our day, would create demand for jobs at all levels, and would encourage businesses to lower prices and innovate to get a leg up. Most folks on the left love to diss Amazon for supporting Trump, or Comcast for its Mafia-like territory deals with other cable providers. But I haven't heard a word about reining in companies like Apple, Google, or Microsoft. (Remember when we thought Microsoft was a monopoly?) Wisely, these behemoths have cultivated liberal bases for their products and services, and have taken liberal stances on political issues like net neutrality and the environment. So long as they're "one of the good ones," they'll continue to dominate the mobile technology, Internet service, and software industries. A new ethos on the economy that takes on market domination instead of globalization might be the "bold new message" that could give Dems an edge against the GOP. The problem is that it might involve slaughtering some of our most sacred corporate cows. We can't run on growing our GDP or lowering unemployment anymore; thanks, Obama, for doing both those things. We must run, instead, on promoting job security, providing comfortable income, and boosting consumer choice in spending.
Wealth inequality factors in here. Bernie kept talking about the top one-percent. His tax proposals were aimed at narrowing the wealth gap. The trouble with this cause is that in the past it has been successfully defaced with conservative graffiti. "Wealth inequality... you really mean class warfare! Don't hate the rich for doing better than your lazy ass! Work sets you free, so do a lot of it and you, too, can be a millionaire!"
Why has this argument worked? Because it's the most American thing about America. My own paternal grandparents lived the American Dream. They came to this country from war-ravaged Italy, worked their tails off, and lifted their family into the ranks of the college-educated middle class. My mom's side similarly kept the nation running smoothly by serving in the military and working in the service and infrastructure sectors. They worked hard enough to send some of their kids to college, too. None of my family are millionaires, though. I'd bet most of my family aren't even several-hundred-thousand-aires. Most of us are comfortable, and pretty secure should the unforeseen befall us, but we're not a bunch of Warren Buffetts. We're middle-class and we worked to get there. The myth of the "class warfare" argument is that more work equates to more income, so that everyone can be Warren Buffett. I have doubts that we'll ever be able to dispel that myth. Most Americans don't want to admit that hard work doesn't always pay off, and they definitely want to be a millionaires. That's why we have online gambling, casinos, game shows, state lotteries, stock markets, multilevel marketing businesses, and a slew of magazines that cover the lifestyles of the rich & famous.
Wealth inequality can be re-framed by Democrats in a different American perspective - one of power. The Founding Fathers designed our government to prevent political power from accumulating too much in any one branch, body, or office. Wealth is power; it's the most corrupting form of power. It runs rampant in our own politics, and in the developing world, it's the only power that really matters. Wealth trumps state power or cultural power in dozens and dozens of nations. We should view wealth as we view political power, and keep it, too, from accumulating too much in any one sector of our society. But the moment you invoke wealth "equality," you turn Commie red. You cannot fight America's long-inculcated fear of an ultra-egalitarian dystopia. Any step toward "leveling the playing field" is a step toward 1984 in many Americans' eyes. This is not an issue Democrats can win by championing the word "equality." Taking wealth away from people is against the nap of the American fabric. You can tax millionaires, yes - but you can't de-million-ize them. That's when you become Lenin, not Robin Hood. This is not to say I disagree with the idea of taxing higher incomes at a greater rate. Absolutely the wealthy should pay their fair share. But we've been saying that for a few years now, and it's not been winning for us. It's also played into the tried-and-true "tax and spend liberal" label the GOP has stuck on us.
The winning tactic may be to fight the power with protections, not to spread the wealth with taxes. We can champion campaign finance reform all we want; that's a narrow view of things and no matter how much we talk it up, action has yet to be taken on it. I'd love to see Democrats in Congress regularly bring it to the forefront of discussion, of course (especially given just how much money was spent in 2017's campaigns thus far). But more broadly, we could frame our defense of the American Dream as preventing the powerful from dominating the weak. This has been a winning cause for Democrats before: civil rights is a good example. Obamacare was meant to prevent wealthy and powerful insurance companies from exploiting the poor folks who need healthcare. The American Dream is all about coming from nothing to build a secure future for yourself and your family. Democrats can become the party that defends those who have nothing from the powerful who want to keep them from realizing that dream. And by fighting the power not just in politics but in society as a whole, we we stand up for the majority of Americans in their workplaces and where they spend their money. We won't be saying, "you didn't build that," we'll be saying, "you deserve to keep what you've built." We'll be encouraging free-market competition and innovation by fighting corporate monopolies and market strangleholds. The Republican mantra is that regulations stifle growth; we Democrats aren't interested in regulations. We're interested in protections. Change the language. We want to protect consumers from the power of the wealthy businesses to buy their information, limit their market choices, and inflate the prices charged to them. We want to keep the power of the wealthy out of their daily lives, not just out of their choices at the ballot box.
I don't know if what I'm saying here constitutes a shift further left or a shift toward the middle. I also don't think it hasn't been said before in different ways. I'm just offering my thoughts. I also don't hold out much hope for Democratic victories later this year, when Jason Chaffetz vacates his dramatically red Utah district (R+25), or Alabama fills Jeff Sessions' Senate seat (R+14). Perhaps these will be chances to experiment, however, and see if Democratic candidates with "bold" economic agendas will do better than expected. We can take greater risks if our odds of success are even lower. (That's another way of saying, "what have we got to lose?")
[Author's Note: I understand that weeks ago I said my next post would be my ideas on how to reform the media industry. That endeavor is essentially a policy paper, and I want to be as thorough as I can with it. Right now, I still find there is a lot of research and rumination to be done on the subject, so expect it later. I won't forget!]
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