MAGA America this morning will be asking itself what just happened. Its champion has lost the Oval Office. World leaders welcomed America back into the community of nations. People celebrated in London with fireworks. Church bells rang out across Paris. People danced in the streets across the U.S. until the wee hours Saturday night. MSNBC’s Brian Williams observed, this is how people behave when a dictatorship falls.
Former Vice President Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. Sen. Kamala Harris makes history as the new vice president-elect, thrilling generations of women and members of long-marginalized ethnicities. When Biden makes his first address to a joint session of Congress, he will begin (likely), “Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President …” For the first time, two of the top three positions in U.S. government will be held by women. Former Obama staffer and CNN commentator Van Jones wept on camera at what it meant to see Trump defeated. Character matters. Being a good person matters.
Still, people in my social feed were already asking how Democrats can talk to voters devoted to Donald Trump. The answer is they cannot. And should not try. Any more than Glinda tried to tell Dorothy she always had the power to go back to Kansas. She had to learn that for herself.
Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer last week advised Democrats to come to terms with the fact that “the very 1st thing that matters” is party identification. “A disproportionate share of the overall Indie pool, are closet Reps: they are not persuadable no matter how much you cater to them,” Bitecofer wrote in a tweet thread.
Why? Because as “one of fewer academics that come from the real, unpolished, bottom 50% world,” Bitecofer observes, “sexism, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry run rampant: and not only are these ‘isms’ prevalent, there is a belief that they shouldn’t have had to be buried.” This is why MAGA America accepted Trump as its culture war hero.
They long for the old days when, as Isabel Wilkerson observes, America had a more formal caste hierarchy and they were at the top of it. Now, it is gone and Democrats are to blame.
Better messaging, better policies will not reach the most entrenched of them. It will take “a complete and total overall of the entire electioneering approach of the [Democratic] party.” (Regular readers may have noticed that is what I advocate.)
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recommends a similar overhaul to how Democrats campaign. Democratic members who complained the party’s left lean cost seats are running lame campaigns that make them vulnerable to Republican attacks. The party is in a rut:
If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.
Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.
There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.
The party’s reliance on an old-boy network of consultants means it is slow to pivot to modern tactics that progressive insurgents bring to the table.
I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.
The boom-bust nature of campaigning means whatever competencies the party builds during election years wither away after every election. Letting his network wither was one of Obama’s biggest mistakes. Democrats need to nurture skills at the local level that build every election. Rather than expect top-of-ticket candidates to pull along down-ticket candidates, local committees need competencies to elect local Democrats without needing help from Washington, D.C. lobbyists. Wins at the local level mean wins at the top of the ballot. Democrats operate as if it works the other way around.
Political campaigns are called races. Perhaps Democrat should treat them as athletic competitions rather than ideological chess games. You don’t persuade bitter rivals that yours should be the winning team. You train hard and develop skills to defeat them soundly. After a few defeats, perhaps they figure out for themselves they are on the wrong team. But you don’t persuade them to let you win with gentle words and dulcet tones.