Democratic Delusion And The New Clinton Map

Does Hillary really expect wealthy conservative lobbyist Evan Bayh to deliver white working class voters for her?

As we mentioned Sunday evening, Zephyr Teachout's new book, Corruption In America, is out now. She's been going around the country promoting it and the ideas behind it. Thursday she was in DC, speaking at a forum held by Mark Schmitt's financial reform organization, New America. Early yesterday she was at Twitter: "We need more populist, pro-teacher, pro-public, anti-monopoly Democrats running in primaries." We sure do-- part of the reason we have been so passionate in urging Nancy Pelosi to forgo another Wall Street hack as chair of the DCCC and choose a Democrat who can relate to the legitimate aspirations of grassroots, working and middle-class Democratic voters (Donna Edwards).

In the NY Times' Sunday Review Kevin Baker went after the problems for the Democratic Party from another perspective: delusionary thinking. "Demographics," he begins, "is not enough. For years now, it’s been an article of faith among Democrats that the future belongs to them, thanks to the country’s changing demographic mix. The rising percentage of voters who are women, Americans of color and especially Latinos were always about to turn the country deep 'blue.'... The future failed to arrive on time again this fall. Democrats lost all over America, and they lost big, by much wider margins than predicted. They lost statewide races in the Midwest where Democrats have won repeatedly in presidential elections for more than 20 years. They lost in races against radical right-wing Republicans they might have been expected to defeat, like Sam Brownback in Kansas and Paul R. LePage in Maine."

Democratic tacticians maintain that things will be different in 2016, when their base will go to the polls in greater numbers, and when demographics-- again-- will render the country less white, more Latin and more female. They blame this latest meltdown on terrible candidates, administration flubs and foreign crises. They argue that voters favored Democratic positions in state referendums, from a higher minimum wage to abortion rights and legal marijuana.

In other words: “Problem, what problem? We Democrats are in great shape, if only we could turn out our base, find good candidates, deal with crises efficiently or get people to vote our way even when they agree with us.”

The accepted wisdom is that the Democrats hamstrung themselves many years ago, when they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and thereby lost the Solid South forever. It’s a nice story, one that allows everyone to feel good: liberal Democrats, who would like to believe their party was martyred in as noble a cause as there could be, and Clinton-Obama Democrats, who have long cited it as proof that the party needs to move to the right and start appealing to conservative Southern whites again.

The only trouble is, it’s not true.

...Nor have Democratic losses in the South been much worse than they were all over the country. To give just one egregious example, Democrats lost the Massachusetts statehouse this year-- for the fifth time in their last seven tries.

This is a historic shift. From 1931 to 1995, Democrats held majorities in the House of Representatives for all but four years and in the Senate for all but 12. On the state level, they held their own with (or outnumbered) Republicans in governorships and state legislatures for the vast majority of those 64 years.

It’s been a completely different story since 1994, however, and by next January, Democrats will not only be in the minority in both houses of Congress. They will likely hold 18 statehouses and both chambers in only 11 state legislatures.

Suffering a series of historic defeats is not a sign that you’re winning. The Democrats no longer please anyone much, neither their depressed base nor the less committed. Meanwhile, Republicans still manage to portray them as wild-eyed socialists. The party does take the White House more often now, but at the state level, and in the midterms, when a third of the senators and all representatives are up for election, the party has been hollowed out.

THE trouble was that the Clinton-Obama strategy got things upside down from the start. Why try to cast yourselves as economic moderates and cultural progressives when the disparate elements of your coalition have little in common culturally, but are all struggling with the same wretched economy?

The Democratic Party that shot to some 50 years of overwhelming electoral success beginning in the 1930s was helped in part by changing demographics. But many of those who built what George Packer calls “the Roosevelt Republic” started out as Republicans. Or “Bull Moose” Progressives, or Populists, or Socialists, or Communists, or simply the politically alienated and disengaged.

The people who built that party rallied around big things-- and usually big things they had come up with themselves. The reforms that Democrats embraced were almost all culled from grass-roots movements, and they were big enough to erase the lines between cultural and economic issues.

Electrifying large swaths of the South and West changed how people lived and worked every day, how their cities grew and their farms survived. The G.I. Bill, to take another of a thousand examples, was intended to reward veterans and stave off a postwar depression, but it also opened up new possibilities of learning and travel (and therefore work) for millions of young men. This blurring of the cultural and the economic includes the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, which threw the weight of the federal government behind the struggle of African-Americans to go about their daily lives with hope and dignity and which did not alienate every white person in the South.

Today’s Democratic Party, with its finely calibrated, top-down fixes, does not offer anything so transformative. It seems scared of its own shadow, which is probably why it keeps reassuring itself that its triumph is inevitable. It needs instead to fully acknowledge just how devastating the recession was for working people everywhere in America, and what a generation of largely flat wages did to their aspirations even before that. It needs to take on hard fights, even against powerful forces, like pharmaceutical and insurance companies that presume to tell us the limits of what our health care can be or energy companies that would tell us what the world’s climate can endure. It means carving out a place of respect for working men and women in our globalized, finance-driven world.

Invite us to dream a little. You don’t build an enduring coalition out of who Americans are. You do it out of what we can be.

It seems the Clinton Camp is looking at this far less narrowly than building an enduring anything. It's all about the tactics and strategies for expanding Obama's winning map. Her tacticians, unlike Baker, think she can win in red states-- or at least turn them into battlegrounds, particularly Missouri, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia and Indiana (which Obama won in 2008 and lost in 2012), even if North Carolina looks like a stretch (again, which Obama won in 2008 and lost in 2012).

Clinton has a record of appealing to white working-class voters-- especially women-- and they could be enough when paired with the Obama coalition to pull out a win.

"Where I think Secretary Clinton has more appeal than any other Democrat looking at running is that with white working-class voters, she does have a connection," [Ready for Hillary advisor Mitch] Stewart said. "I think she's best positioned to open those states."

Stewart pointed to Clinton's sizable 2008 primary wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio, along with the enthusiastic support for her from former Indiana governor and senator Evan Byah, as evidence of her potential competitiveness with that population and therefore in those states.

Those white working-class voters in those states could be "the difference between winning and losing, assuming that we maximize turnout, we maximize voter registration in St. Louis, Indianapolis and northwest Indiana," he said. "Assuming we do all those things, the fact that would push her over the top is her appeal to white working-class voters."

The second bucket consists of Arizona and Georgia, two states that Democrats believe are demographically trending toward them, a process that could accelerate with the voter turnout that usually occurs in presidential elections. As Stewart put it, they are "structurally on the precipice of becoming purple states and a presidential campaign can be the catalyzing factor to move those states forward."

Georgia combines an increasing African-American electorate, Clinton's appeal to the white working class and northern voters who are moving into the state. Stewart compared the trend to North Carolina, now an established battleground. Arizona can turn blue, Democrats believe, if they mobilize the growing Hispanic population... "If Republicans have to spend resources in Arizona and George to make sure that they win it, that means that they're spending less resources elsewhere," Stewart said. "The further we can play into their field, the more money they're going to have to spend playing defense in places they've normally taken for granted."

..."I think Hillary Clinton can be a temporary salve to Democrats' fading chances with white voters, primarily because she will attract women," Carter Eskew, a top adviser to Al Gore's 2000 campaign, told TPM. "If she supplements her gender appeal with a real contrast on the economy, then all the better."

That will be key, Stewart agreed. Clinton has already been testing a 2016 message that heavily emphasizes wage growth and expanding the middle class. That's how she'll attract those voters that could bring these additional states into reach.

"For whatever reason, Democrats have not been able to articulate a message that resonates even though our economic values align with that working-class family's economic values," Stewart said. "It's something that we have to figure out."

It is not a universally shared opinion, however. Mother Jones's Kevin Drum outlined why Democratic struggles with the white working class have become so ingrained in recent years. Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, sounded skeptical when asked by TPM about Clinton's ability to break through with that population.

"It’s possible, but I’ll believe it when I see it," he said in an email. "The hardening of party lines during the Bush and Obama years make switches more difficult unless they are propelled purely by demographic shifts."

Others within the Democratic Party cautioned, though, that no matter who the 2016 nominee is, working-class whites shouldn't be viewed as an electoral elixir. The base Obama coalition is still the foundation for national wins.

"As you put together the coalition, it still is an important part. What's important is that a Democrat gets a certain respectable showing there," Kenneth Baer, a former Obama administration official and founder of Democracy: A Journal Of Ideas, told TPM. "It is necessary to win a part of the white working-class vote, but it is not sufficient by any means to win a presidential election as a Democrat. And so you really, really need to perform strongly in those other categories as well."

Beltway priorities have severely undermined the Democratic Party