Everyone is biased, whether they think they are or not. So let me make my bias plain from the start. I am a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, and a moderate. I have voted for Democrats and for Republicans and even for a few third-party candidates in my time. No current party represents my views. I think Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens all have some valid points here and there, and that all also subscribe to some pretty naïve and dumb things as well. I read history, and I read/listen to people I don’t agree with because it is informative, and occasionally I discover they are right and I am wrong. So filter what I say below through those biases.
Despite the desperate attempt of spin doctors and liberal media to put a cheerful face on it, this election has been as big a disaster for Democrats as 2016, or perhaps even worse. Yes, they will almost certainly get the presidency, but it will be a weak presidency because Republicans will almost certainly maintain control of the Senate, which is much more powerful. Democrats will hold the House, but they even lost seats there. Even more significantly, Democrats failed to make any significant dent in the majority hold the Republicans have on state governorships and state legislatures, and this will matter greatly as we come up on the decennial redistricting fights. So what lessons could one draw from this election?
Republicans don’t need to draw any lessons from it. I have no idea what Republicans stand for these days, and probably they don’t know either. Nevertheless, they are doing just fine in the vicious power-driven street knife-fight that passes in Washington for politics these days. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant, if thoroughly unprincipled, political strategist, but she is more than matched by the equally brilliant and equally unprincipled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and the Senate has more power and leverage than the House. Actually, in the long run getting Donald Trump booted out of the presidency is probably a bigger help to Republicans than to Democrats.
Democrats, on the other hand, have lessons to be learned from this election, lessons that they could have learned from the 2016 election but didn’t. Here are a few that I see:
The nation is split almost exactly 50/50 between liberals and conservatives, and this isn’t going to change any time soon, despite the perennial optimistic books that predict demographics will ensure a liberal dominance “soon”. If liberals are to return to power, they are going to need to capture some votes from the 50% on the conservative side, and calling conservatives nasty names – racists, sexists, “deplorables”, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals “clinging to guns and religion” etc. - isn’t going to do it. That conservative 50% is angry, because they think – correctly – that the nation’s ruling elites in both parties, happily focused on enriching themselves, neither understands their increasingly desperate plight nor cares about it. Donald Trump’s 2016 election was a message to wake up and pay attention to the distress of rural America. Democrats didn’t, so now the message has been repeated. If they don’t get the message this time, they will probably suffer more defeats in the coming elections, and that is not good for the nation. We are healthier when liberals and conservatives are more or less in balance in power, and restrain each other’s excesses.
It is always dumb to underestimates the opposition. Democrats have done that twice now, aided by the illusions the left-leaning media provide for them. It is always dangerous when you begin to believe your own propaganda and spin. In this case it seriously compromised Democratic election strategy. Conservatives/Republicans are not dumb. In fact, the conservative movement is more cohesive, more pragmatic, better organized and better at long-term strategic planning than the liberals, which is why they hold so much power in the country. Liberals have to get out of their absurd “holier than thou” attitude and get real about the world they live in and about human nature. And a good start would be to shut up, stop lecturing conservatives about how evil they are, and really listen to why they are upset. Then Democrats could craft campaign messages and positions that would draw some conservative votes to their side.
The nation is general slightly center-right; extremists on either the right or the left don’t get much traction in elections. Democrats did manage to avoid immolating themselves by selecting Bernie Sanders as their candidate, but they still are pandering too much to the far left, to media darlings like AOC and “the Squad”. Pelosi was absolutely correct yesterday to warn the Democratic caucus to shut up about defunding police and socialized medicine, for fear of damaging the chances of the two Democratic Senate candidates in the January Georgia runoff who represent the only (thin) remaining chance the Democrats have of taking the Senate.
“It’s the economy, stupid”. James Carville, who was Bill Clinton’s brilliant strategist, said this, and he was absolutely right. Liberals get lost in their flights of fancy about fundamentally reshaping the society and the culture, but what really matters practically, and for winning elections, is the economy. When the economy is good for everyone, not just the top 10% or 1% but for everyone, then the nation is calm and stable and as rational as nations ever get. When things get as unequal as they are now, with a few billionaires and overpaid CEOs raking it in at the top while tens or hundreds of millions see their financial situation as hopeless, things get ugly fast. Liberals despaired at Donald Trump, but he was a minor threat, far too incompetent at governing to be a true autocrat. But if thing don’t improve economically for rural America we might well eventually get a real threat – a competent autocrat with a competent following.
Liberals like to think they are smarter and better educated on average than conservatives (a questionable belief, but let’s go with it). If so, then they had better show it by using all that supposed intelligence and education applying themselves to improving the economy and reducing the inequality. It will take more than cosmetic changes like raising the minimum wage, nice as that is for those whose jobs don’t disappear or get automated as a result. Let be real. If the COVID pandemic hadn’t happened Trump would likely have won this election easily, simply because the economy had improved (slightly) under his watch and wages for the lowest paid had risen (slightly) during his administration. It’s hard to get people to worry about elite issues like climate change or social justice or immigration policy if they are unemployed, facing eviction and can’t afford to put food on the table.
If I were a strategist for the Democrats right now, I would advise them to abandon all their elite issues for the moment and to think first and foremost about a Marshall Plan for middle America that addresses the chronic unemployment or underemployment of all those rural and small-town workers whose jobs went overseas and whose local factories closed and who are now in such desperate straits. And I would advise them to remember that these folks are their fellow citizens, in need of help, and that to despise them just because they are different is thoroughly illiberal.
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