Learn some new tricks, Democrats
Democrats had best get their act together. The lunatics running the Capitol Hill asylum may succeed in further souring Americans on Brand Chaos. Voters demonstrated in 2018, 2020 and 2022 that America on the whole is not buying what Republicans are selling. Nevertheless, Ron DeSantis’ Florida is vying to be the first among the Fascist States of America. Where Republicans are in control elsewhere they are working hard at consolidating minority rule and turning the Land of the Free into the Home of the Knave.
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, warns that 2024 will be “the tipping point for democracy globally. As of now, 60 percent of the world is living under autocracy. We’ve rolled back to 1989.” The dis-ease is palpable.
Democrats need to up their game.
Greg Sargent suggests they look to Michigan to counter “the virulent reactionary turn in red states.” Democrats there have a trifecta, holding the governorship and both legislative chambers, for the first time in decades. They are using it:
After flipping the state legislature and reelecting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year, Democrats opened their legislative session with a barrage of culturally liberal legislation, including new LGBTQ protections and repeal of an onerous antiabortion statute, which Republicans had blocked in the majority.
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) (remember her?) offers her take:
“I hope that we do become the model,” state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who represents a district in the Detroit area, told me. She said Michigan should become a “microcosm for reinvigorating the American Dream” around the principles that “everybody is welcome” and “we talk about our past in honest terms.”
“For this to come from a state from the Midwest” and not a “coastal Democratic state,” McMorrow said, will illustrate a “different way forward.”
“Even Republicans admit their culture-mongering has become a loser,” Sargent writes. Heather Williams, acting head of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, tells him, that in 2024 Democrats will tell voters “what they did [to improve their lives] with the power that they had.” Democrats must do more than complain about MAGA reactionaries. Where they can they must retake lost ground by frontally attacking the MAGA agenda:
Some Democrats are showcasing examples of this in red territory. One bill in Missouri would expressly allow teachers to discuss LGBTQ history to promote tolerance. A proposal in Texas would repeal restrictions on critical race theory. Meanwhile, a Virginia bill would bar removal of instruction materials solely on grounds that their subject matter includes classes protected from discrimination.
With recouped state-level power, Democrats can do more of that. It would illustrate to the country contrasting cultural values shaped around the idea, as The Post’s E.J. Dionne notes, that “the efforts to close minds” by a “willful ideological minority” will not make our nation “stronger” or “more moral.”
Michigan filmmaker Michael Moore condemned legal cheating by Michigan Republicans and recommended that Democrat-controlled states use ballot proposals (in the 26 states where they exist) to outlaw Republican gerrymandering. A nonpartisan commission now draws districts in Michigan. Those states Democrats control should pass an initiative process [timestamp 36:55] where they do not now exist, Moore offers.* (See “Slay the Dragon.”)
Franklin Foer writes at The Atlantic that President Joe Biden has a role. As Vice President, Biden chaffed at Barack Obama’s reluctance to market his legislative wins. The technocratic Obama operated from the flawed liberal assumption that good policy sells itself. It doesn’t:
Obama frankly admitted that he took “perverse pride” in how his technocratic administration constructed policy without regard for political considerations. The 2009 Recovery Act included tax cuts, but intentionally didn’t advertise them. The government quietly withheld less money from paychecks, a dividend that almost nobody noticed. This furtive tax cut was theoretically effective, because consumers were less likely to save money that they didn’t know they possessed. But it was also a political nonfact.
Good policy is useless without good politics, Biden believes. Now president, Biden will hard-sell his own large-scale legislative achievements:
Overseeing these investments will allow Biden to fulfill the two grandest ambitions of his presidency. The first ambition is both lofty and self-interested. He has long argued that democracy will prevail in its struggle against authoritarianism only if it can demonstrate its competence to the world. That means passing legislation. But he believes that non-college-educated voters, the neglected constituents he wants to take back from the Republicans, hardly know about the big bills emanating from Washington with banal names. And they won’t believe in their efficacy in any case, unless they can see the fruits of the legislation with their own eyes.
Biden intends to deluge this group with relentless salesmanship—christening new airports and standing next to local officials as they break ground on new factories and tunnels. When he daydreams in the Oval Office, he imagines omnipresent road signs announcing new government projects in his name. In his mind, there will be Biden Rest Stops as far as the eye can see.
But seeing is not enough, my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio says. People don’t operate on the “I’ll believe it when I see it” principle in this polarized environment. They’ll see it when they believe it. Biden needs to make believers of non-college-educated voters. Jobs and paychecks can do that more than rest stops.
Biden’s ambition includes that, Foer argues:
His second ambition is far trickier. He doesn’t just imagine scattered projects. He wants to comprehensively change the economy of entire regions of the country. By geographically concentrating investments—in broadband, airports, semiconductor plants, universities—he can transform depressed remnants of the Rust Belt into the next iteration of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. By seizing the commanding heights of the industries of the future, he can reindustrialize America.
All of that is good. If it happens. But “good politics” means more than selling good policies. Democrats have to upgrade the way they sell themselves and conduct more imaginative campaigns on the ground. What one sees out here in the provinces is Democrats in a rut, doing the things they’ve always done because that’s the way they’ve always been done.
At a recent confab of dusty testosterone here, aging politicos pined for the days of N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt when men were men, when precinct chairs knew everyone in their precincts and turned them out on Election Day. With early voting in most states, that model hasn’t been active in decades and isn’t coming back. The few activists under 35 rolled their eyes.
It was clear early on that Cheri Beasley’s 2022 U.S. Senate campaign lacked the juice it needed to turn out the votes she’d need to beat Ted “Monster Truck” Budd. But she opened her campaign with a TV ad that was as least 20 years old. Her media consultants? A firm led by a DSCC veteran. I prayed for some kind of “Hail Mary” move that would snatch a win from the jaws of defeat. It never came.
Michigan Democrats are demonstrating how to innovate legislatively. Biden, whether he runs again in 2024 or not, is acting as salesman-in-chief. But if Democrats expects to push proto-fascist, red-state reactionaries, yellow dogs need to learn some new tricks. And not count on glitzy new tech to do it for them.
* Caveat: Californians recognize how the initiative process itself can be rigged.