Inspired and chilled
by Tom Sullivan
Terre Haute, Indiana. Photo by Simon Dodd at English Wikipedia via Creative Commons.
Watching this powerful spot by Doug Jones, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Alabama, I’m struck by two things.
First, by the fact that spots like that bring a tear to my eye the way Khizr Khan’s holding aloft his pocket Constitution did. Second, by the fact that others got teary at rallies by the sitting president and not by what gets to me.
Regarding that disconnect, Martin Longman wonders what it is that prompted Vigo County, Indiana to vote for George W. Bush twice, then for Barack Obama twice, then for you-know-who. The New York Times indicates voters in Terre Haute already have buyer’s remorse. What are we missing?
Longman writes at Political Animal:
Now, a lot of people mock the idea that economic hardship had more to do with the election results than racism. Conversely, the Democrats’ fixation on “identity politics,” however defined, is frequently blamed for turning off Obama voters in communities like Vigo County. I think both of these arguments are basically dead ends. What we know for sure is that protesting Trump’s racism didn’t have the effect we had the right to expect it would. We know that he wasn’t wrong-footed by his positions on transgender bathrooms or Muslim and Latino immigration or his blind support for police violence. We know women didn’t turn against him in big enough numbers even after numerous victims of his sexual predation came forward.
We tend to get bogged down in these facts and attack the communities who overlooked all these signs. We want to write off any voters who would support a candidate after all the evidence that was presented against him. But Vigo County was Obama territory. It could easily become Democratic territory again. And, to be honest, the things the left supports on the cultural or “identity” plane weren’t much different in 2016 than they had been in 2012 or even 2008. The answer isn’t going to be magically found by pandering to cultural conservatism.
What’s needed is a focus on the things that make people wince. We tend to wince at sexism and racism, and we expect everyone else to have a similar reaction and fault them if they do not. I can’t fault us for that, but I think the evidence is in that it isn’t a winning political message in a lot of the country. I also don’t think it’s a brilliant idea to assume that the Democratic Party can just tinker with their message or focus on mobilizing their base. What the people of Vigo County need and want is a set of fresh ideas that haven’t been tried before. The reason I’ve written about anti-monopoly and antitrust issues is because it something new in the sense that we’ve gotten away from it for so long that it will seem fresh. The national party can do whatever it wants, but Democrats running in Obama/Trump areas need to have something new to offer.
Obama’s message was hope and change. His successor’s “great again” slogan was hope and change mixed with nativism and a thumb in the eyes of people who’d promised change but didn’t deliver. Under both presidents, for places like Vigo County, Washington was still Washington and the fat cats just got fatter. They’re finding out now their new champion can’t deliver either, and those cats are on their way to obese.
DNC Chair Tom Perez last weekend touted the diversity of his at-large DNC picks. The problem is, ideologically his picks look to many like more of the same “Now With More Diversity.” My guess is that’s not an indication of the change people in Vigo were hoping for when they voted twice for Obama. Look more closely.
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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.