The front lines are not inside the Beltway, says David Pepper
“The battle for democracy is a long battle,” says David Pepper, former Ohio Democratic chair.
It is harder for Democrats to win with election-cycle thinking, I’d argue, and because they always seem to be fighting the last war with the wrong weapons. More on that later.
Paul Rosenberg provides a Salon interview with David Pepper following the release of “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American.” (It’s on my to-do list.) Pepper wrote it as a follow-up to “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines” because so many readers (as I did) skipped to the end to look for answers to Pepper’s all-too-familiar diagnosis of where the reactionary right is taking the country.
“Team D” and “Team A” are fighting different battles, Pepper argues. Small-d democrats still believe the answer to pushing back on the autocrats is about electoral victories at the federal level. Then they win them they discover “that they weren’t really victories.”
Why not? As I wrote in 2016:
I live in a state taken over by a T-party legislature that has passed one of the worst voter ID bills in the country, drafted absolutely diabolical redistricting maps, passed HB2 as a get-out-the-vote tool, and launches regular legislative attacks against our cities where the largest block of blue votes are. President Bernie isn’t going to fix that for me. Neither is President Hillary. And not in Michigan or Wisconsin either. We have to beat them ourselves. Here, not in the Electoral College.
Team A, says Pepper, knows its agenda is deeply unpopular. They do not represent a majority and know it. Secondly, they know democracy can be undermined and have fought a long war to rule as a minority in state after state.
To win that long war, Team D must first gain ground in the provinces, in all 50 states.
“But you never win if if you’re not there. This is how you take on the extremism, by getting in a strong counter-push in all the states. Right now this doesn’t exist because everything is about a swing state now,” Pepper says. You must be present to win. The front lines in this long war are in state legislatures and local school board races, not inside the Beltway:
The fact that 50% of the Tennessee Republicans who voted out the two Justins didn’t even have an election last November explains so much of their behavior. This is a crisis across the country. Once you have no election where the public actually has a choice, and the politicians know that, the effect on these people’s incentive warps them completely. You have an incentive to be an extremist as opposed to mainstream. You have an incentive against public service, because the public really doesn’t matter anymore. The private players in your statehouse matter more. So the warping of democracy when so many of these people face no democracy, no accountability — we’re seeing it play out.
Discontent over North Carolina Democrats forfeiting 44 of 170 legislative seats in 2022 is why Anderson Clayton, 25, became the youngest Democratic state chair in February. Because she got mad about it. A majority of the state party activists agreed. She’s working to contest every race in 2024, saying, “Democracy isn’t democracy unless you have choices on a ballot.”
Pepper concurs:
It’s truly a crisis that we have millions and millions of Americans living in a world with no democracy at the state level, and that is leading to the downward spiral of extremism. I mentioned this earlier: In a district with no opposition, all the incentives of your time and power are warped. You are serving an extremist agenda, because that’s how you avoid a primary. That’s why a new mindset is of paramount importance: We have to run against them everywhere and build an infrastructure that values running everywhere, which is something we do not have right now. So I call it a crisis: In a mindset where you largely care about federal swing states, you don’t see this is a crisis. This is seen as how it works. We have to change that.
As Rosenberg usually concludes, he asks, “What’s the most important question I haven’t asked, and what’s the answer?”
Pepper replies, in part:
Right now, we too often accept the smaller electorate that is a result of purging and voter suppression, because our political operations only talk to the most frequent voters. That ends up leaving so many others out. It’s critical that as we use our full footprints to lift democracy, we find as many ways as possible to engage the voters that have essentially been removed from the political conversation. That’s why community organizations and effective precinct organizing are so important. They allow us to get to folks who are too often left unengaged by standard political operations and campaigns.
This is my focus right now. Independents (UNAffiliated voters in NC) are the largest bloc of registered voters in NC: 36% (2.6 million voters). But statewide they voted against Democrats here 58% of the time in the last two elections. Democrats cannot win without them, but their traditional tactics, as Pepper recognizes, focuses only on “the most frequent voters.” This tactic leaves many “removed from the political conversation” in what I’ve dubbed “No Voter’s Land.” These are voters campaigns are reluctant to contact (using the tactics of the last war, you might say) because computer scoring deems them not good bets.
In a sense, Democrats believes low-scoring UNAs are (in Seinfeld terms) not sponge-worthy. It’s not that they won’t vote with Democrats, it’s that Democrats lack the data to give them confidence that they might, so they cautiously avoid them. Republicans do the same.
If Democrats focus their voter contact efforts on the bluest 30% of UNAffiliateds, and the GOP focuses theirs on the reddest 30%, who’s inviting the middle 40% to participate in our elections? 40% of 2.6 million voters is a lot of voters to ignore.
There are plenty of places out there “where the fishing is good.” It’s just that Democrats don’t bother casting nets there. This has to change. They won’t win using the tactics of the last war with the wrong weapons.