It’s Encouragement Day here at Hullabaloo
Multiple people here at Netroots-Pittsburgh came away more hopeful than when they arrived. Legislative wins for Democrats, more legal bruising for the former guy (TFG), and a couple of favorable polls for the left have activists and organizers leaving here feeling more upbeat about Democrats’ propsects for the fall than they were a month ago.
After a couple of years of COVID and Zoom, people expressed joy and relief to finally see each other in person again. Even if the reunion was in masks and the crowd smaller than peak years (unofficially, I heard about 2,500).
Cautious optimism
Leaning on conventional wisdom in an uncomventional political environment is a bad bet. Naturally, it is the reflexive bet most pundits in the press will make. While activists derided as “the professional left” left more upbeat, they were not perhaps as upbeat as Simon Rosenberg.
Susan Glasser of The New Yorker considers what the prospects are for a not-awful 2022 for Democrats. She spoke wth Rosenberg who has positioned himself as a prophet of not-doom:
“In the age of Trump, nothing is normal,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of the liberal think tank the New Democrat Network and a veteran strategist, told me, on Thursday. “Nothing is following traditional physics and rules, so why would this midterm?”
Rosenberg, a staunchly public proponent of this view for the past few months, argues that Trump’s continued hold over the Republican Party is actually good news for Democrats this fall—and beyond. Trump, he posits, is not so much killing off his political enemies as he is destroying his own host organism, the G.O.P. itself.
Recent events, according to Rosenberg, have started to prove his case, including what appears to be the easing of inflation, lower gas prices, and Congress’s passage of Biden’s long-stalled signature climate-change-and-health-care legislation. The horrific school-shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas, upset pro-gun-control Democratic voters across the country, and the Supreme Court’s decision to toss out Roe v. Wade is giving millions of Americans a reason to vote in November. “It’s a new, bluer election,” Rosenberg tweeted, on Thursday, as part of a long thread of upbeat-for-Democrats data points. Or, as he put it when we spoke: “There was never really a red wave.”
The Trump factor, according to Rosenberg, is key. For the past several election cycles, nothing has united Democratic voters more than the chance to vote against him. And all summer Trump has been back in the news, thanks to revelations from testimony in the House’s January 6th hearings; the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents improperly taken from the White House; and endless speculation about whether Trump will be indicted or run again for President—or both. “It awakened the anti-maga majority in the country,” Rosenberg insisted.
Many women came off their couches for the first time after Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March in January 2017. Heading into the 2018 midterms, several new county chair contacted me looking for help in coordinating getting out the vote as rookies with little or no prior political experience. Post-Dobbs, expect to see that again, and then some. Yes, it’s a narrow window into the wider political environment. But then 2018 worked out pretty well for Dermocrats.
From Netroots Nation-Pittsburgh
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