Democratic strategy

I want to talk more about Democrats and the Democratic Party.  As a political independent, I am always worried when one party becomes so weak. Our system works better when the two parties are in balance. Both have good ideas, and both have nutty ideas, but when they are more or less in balance the good ideas from each side tend to come to the fore in moderate compromise, and the nutty ideas tend to get restrained by the other party. When one party becomes too dominant, the extremes in that party begin to get too much power.

Why am I focused now on the Democrats? Because the Republicans, having won a no doubt temporary majority (though hardly because of their own efforts), currently have little incentive to change, though they badly need to, while the Democrats, having been defeated so decisively at both the state and federal level over the past decade, finally have an incentive (one hopes), and a desperate need, to do some serious soul-searching.

So if I were a serious Democratic strategist, trying to figure out how to recover some of the voter base the Democrats have lost over the past decade and begin again to win some elections, what might I pay attention to?

First, the shift of the Democratic base toward the more secular liberal costal urban areas has lost a lot of the more religious voters. The facts are, according to a 2014 Pew Research study, that while there has indeed been a drop in religious affiliation over the recent decades, seven in ten Americans still profess to be religious, largely Christian. So from a strategic point of view,  dismissing and ridiculing religion (as Obama did with his snide “clinging to guns and religion” comment) is not a smart move. And simply blindly opposing some of the religious views that really matter to this group, like halting abortions, is a serious mistake. It would be far wiser and more effective to work to understand their point of view, and try to find middle-ground accommodations with them.

Second, the traditional blue-collar small-town Democratic base is in terrible trouble, hollowed out by automation and globalization and urbanization. Democrats lost this block to Trump because he acknowledged their plight, while Democrats, focused on the better-off urban liberals and their issues, just ignored them.  It not at all clear how to help them, and nothing Trump does will restore more than a few of their jobs, so they are a voting segment the Democrats could someday recover, but not if they keep referring to them as dumb, racist, sexist “deplorables”. That is block of something like 40-50 million voters the Democrats have alienated and ceded to the Republicans by default, and they can’t afford to do that if they want to win elections.

Third, the Electoral College matters. Democrats keep harping on the fact the Hillary won the popular vote to make themselves feel better, but that is irrelevant – Electoral College votes are what mattered. And whatever the arguments for or against the Electoral College system, it isn’t going to change any time soon, It would take an amendment to the Constitution to change it, and the vast 85% of rural and small-town America isn’t about to disenfranchise themselves by voting for such an amendment and giving away yet more power to a few urban centers and a few more populous states.

The Democrat’s current problem, at the federal level, is that while they have a large urban liberal base, it is mostly concentrated in just a few states and large coastal cities. That gives them popular vote numbers, but not enough Electoral College votes. And in fact, while that was not the original reason the Electoral College was constructed the way it was, it does have the effect of requiring presidential candidates to appeal to and attend to the concerns of a broad swath of America, and not just to voters in a few populous states and big cities – which in my opinion is a good thing. So any successful Democratic strategy has to win over a lot of rural and small-town Americans with conservative, religious, nationalistic, patriotic family-centered values.

In that regard, the current liberal freakout over things like Trump’s immigration policy isn’t helping their cause in the long term. This is an issue Trump voters cared about, cared about enough to overlook some of Trump’s more unsavory personal traits and vote for him anyway. For their own long term good, Democrats would do far better to acknowledge the concerns and fears of these voters and find a stance that shows some accommodation to those concerns.  All the current liberal hysteria is doing is pushing those voters further away from the possibility of recovering them to the Democratic Party.

Fourth, repeated studies have shown that America as a whole is politically centrist, very slightly biased to the conservative side. And the slight conservative bias is probably largely due to the individualist nature of American society. That means Democrats can win when they are more or less centrist. But it also means going far left, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrant would like to take the party, is not a winning strategy in the long run. (and Republicans should note that going far right isn’t a winning strategy for them either).

The Democrat’s current problem is that the base they largely depended on in this last (losing) election, the well-educated, ultra-liberal, heavily secular, internationalist, urban voters, have nothing but obvious and publically expressed disdain for the conservative, rural and small-town, largely religious, nationalistic and patriotic, working-class voters – the “deplorables”.  And those rural and small town voters in turn have nothing but equal disdain for the liberal urban voters.  Yet to win Democrats need both. Democrats have got to find a way to forge an alliance between the two groups, to find common ground and mutual respect and understanding between them.

Fifth, Democrats have got to back off of the cultural issues and focus more on the economy. It's not that women's rights and LGTBQ issues and refugee issues and  racial issues don't matter. They do matter, a lot. But a well-off urban liberal with a secure job and a home in a safe gated community can afford to worry about these trendy cultural issues; an unemployed steel worker in a decaying Midwest town is focused on more urgent issues, like paying the bills and affording medical care and keeping the family safe from the local drug gang. So long as the Democratic party remains captured by the relatively wealthy Hollywood set and urban corporate liberals, it will remain insensitive to the economic needs of the working class base it needs to recover.

The question is, can Democrats make these course corrections in time, or are they going to continue on their current self-destructive course?