Can urban Democrats?
Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state won a seat last November in her rural, working-class Third Congressional District. She shouldn’t have. Wasn’t expected to. National Democrats wrote her off. Her victory was “widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022,” the New York Times reminds Thursday readers.
We’ll come back to her.
Q: When is majority rule not majority rule?
A: When it’s washed through the legacy of the country’s slave-era constitution.
That constitution, combined with a) political parties’ (one in particular) urge to gerrymander and/or legislate their way into permanent power, and b) left- and right-leaning people’s tendency to sort themselves into urban and rural areas of the country, means that in many statewide and local races, a majority of citizens do not get to elect candidates who reflect their views. Call this democracy-lite.
There is no need to rehash how that’s played out in 21st century presidential outcomes.
There is also my reminder from yesterday:
The right’s existential crisis began on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, when the country elected a Black man to the White House. White conservatives until then could ignore repeated warnings that by 2042 demographic shifts would mean whites would no longer be a numerical majority in “their” country. That white voters had not been a voting majority for many election cycles was too subtle.
But under our clunky system “not a voting majority” does not mean an electoral minority. The outcome of statewide and federal district elections depends somewhat on the urban-to-rural population ratio. What it all means for the left is that while any moderate-to-conservative white population is in slow decline their votes are by no means insignificant. Where they live matters. Democrats ignore them at their peril.
Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature opposed to most eveything a majority of Tar Heels elected him to do. North Carolina Democrats’ sad aspiration over the last couple of general elections has been to maintain enough of a minority to sustain Cooper’s veto. Barely.
The Times reminds readers that Gluesenkamp Perez’s
… Third Congressional District is exactly the kind that Democrats have had trouble holding on to for the last 10 years: It’s 78 percent white, 73 percent without a bachelor’s degree or higher, and made up of a low-density mix of rural and suburban areas. It voted for Barack Obama once, in 2008, and Donald Trump twice, and the national Democrats wrote it off, giving her almost no campaign assistance.
What happened there?
But as the 34-year-old mother of a toddler and the co-owner (with her husband) of an auto repair shop, she had an appealing personal story and worked hard to distinguish herself from the usual caricature of her party. She said she would not support Nancy Pelosi as speaker, criticized excessive regulation of business, and said there should be more people in Congress with grease under their fingernails. But she also praised labor unions and talked about improving the legal immigration system, boosting domestic manufacturing, and the importance of reversing climate change. In the face of this pragmatic approach, her Republican opponent, Joe Kent, followed the Trump playbook and claimed the 2020 election had been stolen and called for the F.B.I. to be defunded. She took a narrow path, but it worked, and you might think that Democratic leaders would be lined up outside her office to get tips on how to defeat MAGA Republicans and win over disaffected Trump voters.
But some Democrats are still a little uncomfortable around someone who supports both abortion rights and gun rights, who has a skeptical take on some environmental regulations, and who has made self-sufficiency a political issue.
“It’s a little bit of a hard message for them to hear, because part of the solution is having a Congress who looks more like America,” she said in an interview last week. “It can’t just be rich lawyers that get to run for Congress anymore.”
To regain control of state legislatures where much of the right’s antidemocracy pogrom is taking place, Democrats need to start acting like a big-tent party. The term of art Anand Giridharadas applies in “The Persuaders” (and even this is derogatory) is that the left must make “room among the woke for the waking.”
[Gluesenkamp Perez] said there is a kind of “groupthink” at high levels of the party, a tribalism that makes it hard for new or divergent ideas to take hold. But if Democrats don’t pay attention to newcomers like Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, they risk writing off large sections of the country that might be open to alternatives to Trumpism.
“The national Democrats are just not ever going to be an alternative they vote for, no matter how much of a circus the far right becomes,” she said. “But I think there obviously can be competitive alternatives. There are different kinds of Democrats that can win, that avoid the tribalism.”
As hated as he was by many NC-11 liberals, Democrat Heath Shuler won the now 82% White district in 2006 (pre-2011 redistricting) with a similar appeal. (It helped that eight-term Republican Charles Taylor had worn out his welcome.) Still, as much as Shuler made lefties grind their teeth (Shuler voted against the ACA), he still voted heavily with the Democratic caucus during his three terms. He was replaced by Republicans Mark Meadows, Madison Cawthorn, and Chuck Edwards. I’d have Shuler back in a heartbeat.
North Carolina Democrats elected a new state chair, Anderson Clayton, 25, in February with a focus on regaining traction in rural areas. (Full disclosure: I advised and helped fund Clayton’s campaign.) It helped that party delegates from rural counties are tired of being the party’s red-headed stepchildren, neither heard nor seen. And tired of losing. Clayton wants to build Democratic infrastructure in rural districts where little exists now. Sometimes it is enough in close races just to shave Republican margins. They’ll need financial help, too.
You can’t win where you don’t show up to play. And if you do show up, you’d best have game. Howard Dean understood that and built his 50-state plan around it.
It is certainly too early to tell if Democrats are getting the message, but every liitle victory counts and builds bench for the future.
Clayton, like Gluesenkamp Perez, is drawing national attention.
