Democrats: Left in the Lurch - Part 2
This is Part 2 of this article, source is the same as Part 1:
What lies ahead
The Democratic Party has been written off before, even as recently as 2002, when Bush consolidated power with Republican gains in both the House and Senate. But just four years later, Democrats took back Congress, and six years later they retook the White House, too, in a landslide.
Since the November election, the Democratic Party has been gripped by an existential dilemma: Does it try to win back white working class voters or cut them loose? While the choices aren’t mutually exclusive, they involve trade-offs in how the party speaks to voters and which ideas it prioritizes.
While Democrats will inevitably attempt to pursue some combination of both — “We don’t need to decide between social justice and economic justice. We’ve got to have all of that,” Democratic National Committee Chair candidate Keith Ellison said — it’s worthwhile to examine the choices separately to clarify the differences.
0. Baseline
Democrats could always just call 2016 a black swan event and carry on without major changes. Clinton won the popular vote, after all, and many Democrats think she only lost the Electoral College because of Russian hacking or FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute intervention.
In the 2020 presidential election, the electorate will continue to evolve in Democrats’ favor as minorities and millennials make up a larger share of overall voters while non-college educated whites continue to decline. Indeed, four more years of natural demographic changes alone might be enough to give Democrats the relatively tiny number of voters Clinton would have needed in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to win the Electoral College in 2016.
In four years, Republicans’ base will get older while Democrats will get younger. Young voters turned out in lower numbers for Clinton than Obama, but they still broke for the Democratic nominee by a wide 55%-37% margin, according to exit polls. That’s a huge silver lining for Democrats. Millennials recently surpassed Baby Boomers as the biggest generation in the country and their voting power will only grow as more reach voting age.
Despite the maxims about everyone getting more conservative as they get older, plenty of research suggests Americans’ political views tend to crystallize in their early adulthood, leaving an imprint on how each generation votes for the rest of their lives. So millennials are likely to remain liberal as they age.
Turnout patterns by age look like an upside down Nike swoosh, rising steadily through young adulthood before plateauing in middle age from the 50s through the 70s, before falling precariously in the late 70s and 80s as mobility and health issues make it harder for voters to get to polls.
Still, even the most ardent Democrats agree that the 2016 election revealed deeper problems within the party’s coalition that will not be solved by waiting for older Republican voters to age out.
Their plans for climbing out of the abyss have fallen into two basic camps:
1. The Ohio path
One option for Democrats is to try to reconstruct as much of the lost portion of the Obama coalition as possible — ironically, by returning to the party’s white working class roots.
Ohio, long a presidential bellwether, is one of the upper Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states — including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan — that had recently voted Democratic, but flipped for Trump. Democrats will probably never win the presidency again without winning back Pennsylvania or Michigan, which were both extremely close in 2016. But the question is what to do with places like Ohio and Iowa, both of which Obama won twice before Clinton lost them decisively.
To win back the white working class voters who populate both states, Democrats would likely need to de-prioritize policies that are either unimportant or alienating to these voters, like immigration reform, and so-called identity issues to refocus on a bread-and-butter economic message. Proponents of this path range from Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left to what remains of the party’s moderate “Blue Dog” caucus in Congress. That may not mean moving to the right on policy, and could entail a more populist direction on issues like free trade (something that has deeply divided Democrats).
But talking less about priorities of, say, the Black Lives Matter movement and more about those important to laid off factory workers risks turning off emerging parts of the Democratic coalition, like minorities and young people. And there’s no guarantee Democrats could even succeed in winning back non-college white voters in large margins.
2. The Arizona Path
The other option many Democrats favor would be to lean into their coalition’s future diversity, write off their losses with white working class voters, and hope demographic changes move quickly enough to catch up to them by the next elections.
Clinton’s late campaign foray into Arizona, a state that has long voted Republican, was widely seen as one of the campaign’s biggest follies. But she came within 4 points there and lost Georgia by just 5 points, while she lost Ohio and Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points each. Many respected analysts say Democrats’ future lies in the sunbelt, not the rust belt.
Arizona and Georgia alone won’t win Democrats the presidency, but Georgia’s 16 Electoral Votes would nearly replace Ohio’s 18, and Arizona’s 11 are equivalent to Wisconsin’s.
The biggest, most tantalizing, game-changing prize on this path is Texas, with its 38 Electoral Votes. Clinton lost Texas by just 9.2% — less than her losing margin in Iowa — which was a dramatic improvement over Obama’s 16-point margin in 2012.
The strategy would require a dramatic realignment of political resources away from the traditional battlegrounds. And Democrats would likely need to re-prioritize immigration reform (Arizona) and issues important to African-American voters (Georgia), which may make it harder for the party to reclaim white working class voters.
No matter what, Democrats will need to reinforce their decaying state and local party apparatuses to build power outside cities. Conservatives understood the importance of these down-ballot races years ago and have invested heavily in them, while Democrats tended to concentrate on the presidency and interest-group specific causes.
Party leaders seem to have recognized the error and have the new Obama-backed effort to win state legislatures ahead of the next round of redistricting in 2020. If successful, the party will lessen the headwind of Republican gerrymandering, though they will still have their own self-gerrymandering to worry about.
Tags
Who is online
99 visitors
RED BOX RULES APPLY. This is a discussion about the Democratic Party and their way forward, this is not a discussion about President Elect Trump or other Republicans. Please keep to this discussion, all other comments will be deleted.