I want you to take a look at an image. It depicts which party controls the legislatures in our fifty states. If you see blue, it means that the Democrats control both chambers. If you see red, it means the Republicans control both chambers. And if you see fuchsia, it means that control is split, which each party controlling one of the two chambers. Nebraska has a unique unicameral legislature that is non-partisan but controlled by Republicans.
Now, there is some positive news for the Democrats relative to that image. After this past Tuesday’s elections, we can now change Washington State from fuchsia to blue, and, pending recounts, we may be able to change Virginia from red to fuchsia.
Overall, however, it paints a bleak picture for the left in this country. And there are other ways to measure this. Nationwide, there are 4,166 (56.4%) Republicans in our state legislatures compared to 3,114 (42.2%) Democrats. There are twenty-six states where the GOP has the trifecta, meaning they have the governor’s mansion plus both chambers of the legislature. The Dems can say the same in only six (with Washington, seven) states.
You should take special note of how many red states there are on that map in states that Clinton or Obama carried.
This is why I continue to talk about the need for Democrats to do better in small towns and rural America. I think Ezra Klein is absolutely correct to point out that Trump will lose his effort to win reelection even if he holds on to his small-town and rural support if he loses much support in the suburbs. The bloodbath the Republicans experienced on Tuesday in places like Northern Virginia, the Philadelphia suburbs, and Long Island should deeply concern Trump’s political team.
But the results look less promising for winning over our country’s legislatures, including either chamber of our U.S. Congress. That’s why I wrote that the Democrats didn’t do as well as you might think. The way I put it was that the Democrats did an excellent job of maximizing their strength so that it more closely resembles their true potential. They made sure to win where they should win, which is an important first step to winning back legislatures. What they didn’t do was make many inroads into the kinds of districts they’ll need to win back control of the legislatures in states like Pennsylvania.
Progress is progress, and it was a great night for the Democrats from almost every perspective. But it did not change the fact that the way the two parties’ support is currently distributed works heavily in favor of the Republicans when it comes to controlling legislatures.
And while the Democrats rightfully value executive power, they are the legislating party. They controlled Congress almost continually from 1933 to 1995, and both parties have developed skills, habits, and ideologies to match that history. Forced to choose, the Democrats should take legislative over executive power every single time. Likewise, the Republicans have no clue how to legislate or behave as a majority party, and they don’t seem likely to learn those skills anytime soon. They do much better in the governor’s office than they do trying to hold hearings with experts and formulate sensible policy.
The status quo is not just bad for the left, it’s bad for the right, too. It’s bad for the country to have two parties, each trying to fulfill roles that they’re very bad at performing. The Democrats are adequate executives, but they’re miserable as a minority opposition party. The Republicans are no better at legislating at the state level, where they think most power should reside, than they are on the federal level. Where they excel, when they excel at all, is in holding a majority party accountable.
So, aside from partisan preferences, we should not want to see an entire era of our country go by with these mismatched skills dominating the political landscape. The Democrats need to figure out how to win statewide legislatures again, and they need to find a way to win and hold the U.S. House of Representatives.
They should not be satisfied with winning the presidency most of the time. Beating Donald Trump is a priority, but it’s basically the lowest-hanging fruit. So, yes, the Democrats can be optimistic that an ascendant coalition of white professionals, immigrants, and minorities from our cities, inner suburbs and college towns will not lose another presidential election to Trump, but that won’t prevent the right from continuing to absolutely dominate most of our country’s political bodies.
A truly successful left-wing party in this country has to have more geographic and cultural depth that the Democrats have right now. Without it, the right will continue to have much more power than their numbers warrant, and the left will find itself stymied and checkmated most of the time even when they eke out narrow and transitory majorities.
That’s why I think Ezra Klein kind of misses the point even as he’s making a very solid and unassailable argument. He’s right that Trump can keep his base and still lose reelection in a landslide, but that’s only of secondary interest to me. The party shouldn’t be building itself to beat Trump. It should be much more ambitious than that, because beating Trump based only on superior base mobilization will leave the Republicans with far too much power.
I’m sorry, BooMan — I’m having trouble reconciling these two statements. What am I missing?
one is about the Dems and one is about the GOP.
So sorry! I got lost in the grammar. Thanks for responding.
The real lesson of recent years and of last Tuesday is: recruit the best candidates you can find EVERYWHERE and support them.
That is the first step. Its a dame shame that it got ignored for 6 or so years.
I think we’ve got a chicken and egg problem.
We don’t win so we don’t invest. We don’t invest so we don’t win.
Suburban Dem candidates in purple to lean R areas are raising a ton of money. There are something like 5 candidates in the PA-07 with hundreds of thousands raised for the primary.
Rural ones are barely able to keep up enough to travel the district and hire a campaign manager. Adopt a deeply Red district – congress, state leg, whatever – and fund a candidate. They just might win this year…and winning begets winning.
And winning begets interest and hope, and all of a sudden you have a real team being built up the pipeline. But that kind of program takes years to build and we don’t have it.
Our main problem is that a huge percentage of strivers & the achievers from these rural towns got the hell out of there. They aren’t going back – but we can finance the few that stayed…and jump start the process. And we build on that.
Conservatives can count on wingnut welfare, we cant match that.
Just to be clear, when you say small towns and rural America, you don’t mean just white voters, right?
This article points up just one of the issues minority voters have to deal with in small towns and rural America; namely, getting a seat at the table. It’s a good thing the ACLU is on the case, but rather than talking about unemployment or trade, maybe we could talk about the basics like making everyone’s vote count the same.
The experience from the state I currently live in, we have to account for both gerrymandering and rural culture as well.
In 2010, 70% of residents in the “Second Most Reliable Republican State” wanted fair apportionment of districts, yet Republicans did what every other legislature/Governors Mansion did in 2010 and whatever progressive vote that existed in the smaller towns across the state was neutralized.
In under 7 years Democrats are now a super minority in the state legislature.
As for rural/small town culture, being openly progressive in such places has always been hard, socially ostracizing, and, in some places, downright dangerous. That is why so many flee to bigger cites.
I think it is overly simplistic to think progressives live where they live only out of a desire for artisan cheese and expensive coffee. Many have more in common with refugees than some imaginary “coastal elitist” trope.
Even living in small to medium sized cities that are dominated by the GOP can be a grind. I don’t have to drive that far outside the city limits before I will think I stumbled onto the set of Deliverance. That’s just reality. And for a good while those who identify as liberal have felt the need to hide for fear of losing their livelihoods. This last year has changed some of that, thankfully. But it is a long slog to essentially hit reset, and rebuild a local party from practically scratch. Multiply that by a large number of small-ish communities and the reality is it those of us willing to put in that effort are expecting payoff more in the medium to long term. Still, as bad as things can seem sometimes from where I currently reside, it does feel like refuge compared to the very small town I spent a decade in. And even if a move to either coast were feasible, given the types of jobs I qualify for – I seriously doubt artisan cheese or expensive coffee would ever be in my price range. I’d be happy just to have enough $$$ to keep the rent paid and the lights on.
You had me at: “the way the two parties’ support is currently distributed works heavily in favor of the Republicans,” and “It’s bad for the country to have two parties,” But then you lost me at, “A truly successful left-wing party in this country has to have more geographic and cultural depth…” like those rural districts in which Republicans typically excel.
You seem to admit the root problem, but then attack an entirely different issue that–as you describe–is a failure of mismatched political skills.
Desperately chasing electoral victory in a rigged game is for muggs. Political insiders are far too invested to see this. It’s not the party apparatus that is broken, it’s the electoral apparatus. The two-party system brings victory to no one but the political establishment. It leaves vast swathes of America to twist in the wind.
Encouraging Democrats to ape the cynical trappings of Republican “populism”, will only push America deeper into calamity.
I do not disagree with anything in the post. I do not, however, believe there is a way out of this dilemma in the short run.
The problem is that Republicans are also running, and Republicans have a very appealing message and strategy:
We saw that strategy play out again in Virginia and it worked every bit as well as it did nationally in 2016.
I don’t think there is an effective response – I don’t think Northam was right to duck on sanctuary cities, but it didn’t help him. Calling voters racists won’t work either. There is no positive message that can compete with fear and a hate-on for minorities. That’s America, where racial animosity is called “culture war” instead of white supremacy.
Until demographics make the message a loser, Democrats will be on defense. We may not make great progress (see Obama’s last six years) but we can hold onto gains as long as we hold the executive.
Stick to the values, organize, turn out the vote, defend, defend, defend. Eventually, they will all be dumped in the dustbin.
But the short run? I don’t think so.
Its not America, its being human.
I think you’re right. The issue is: How can Democrats win in white, rural areas while remaining Democrats?
Short answer: They can’t. That Johnstown piece in Politico lays it out nicely. Only a tiny group votes ideology; they vote tribe. And the Democratic Tribe is anathema in rural, white America. And no five point bulleted policy agenda is going to do jackshit about that problem.
White Republicans won’t vote for Democrats. Right now the only hope for Democrats is a suburban wave that allows them to redraw districts in 2020.
Is a slightly-less-short answer, “Run ‘Independents’ in rural areas, who support Dem positions and will caucus with the Dem party?”
I know there’s an argument against abandoning our party, instead of trying to reclaim the name, but … you’re right. Anathema.
Better yet is for Democrats to fund super-batshit crazy Republicans to run as a 3rd Party to try and split the rightwing voters.
To get to the right of merely-batshit Republicans, they’d have to be actual Nazis.
No, because they just run as Tea Party challengers and win.
I’ve been saying something similar for Democrats to form a new party for rural areas but got shot down
I unshoot you down.
Of course, my other Wild Plan is that all Democrats just switch party affiliation and become Republicans, then take them over from the inside.
You also left out one of the biggest advantages that republicans have: Fox News. Rural areas tend to vote republican because of 20+ years of brainwashing by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, etc… to believe that Democrats are evil and that we are the “enemy”.
If you really want to win rural areas, we need to start embracing their Clinton/Obama Derangement Syndrome and ratfuck their brains out.
A few days before each election, send postcards to every republican’s house with a picture of their candidate and either HRC or Obama with a note saying that they endorse that Republican candidate. It won’t result in them voting for any democrats, but the cognitive dissonance will certainly melt their brains.
Clearly, BooMan hates us color vision-challenged folks.
https:/fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-county-in-america-that-voted-in-a-landslide-for-both-tr
ump-and-obama
You might want to read this if you missed it.
Sounds a bit like the town I live in. It was Bernie in the primary, Trump in the general.
How about engaging hispanic voters in rural america? That’s not going to be a top-down process, but it does mean active engagement with community activists and local groups that already exist while promoting those that do not yet exist. It’s one thing to emphasize the pertinent issues on your party platform, but another thing entirely to mobilize people.
Adding: Has anyone come across work talking to “fly over county” Democratic voters? They seem universally ignored in this “what to do about rural America?!?” conversation.
For example, my own city of birth and surrounding area (not where I live now and THAT is also part of the problem) I looked at the county and district wide 2016 results and 40% of the vote in each is STILL Democratic.
That is why I think fair redistricting will do more because you turn out that 40% and half of them bring a friends who now feel safe to be progressives in a small town to the polls that county/district flips.
Republicans and the media WANT us to think that between the Hudson and Las Angles county line is some fundamentally conservative land when the data shows it is decidedly not. I think we’re being deceived and thinking we need to send liberal missionaries to re-convert the Twice Obama/Once Trump voters is wrongheaded.
NJ and VA have enough suburban voters that winning them in the amounts that HRC should have won them can lead to huge gains in the legislature. That’s what happened in VA, isn’t it?
So how can you fault the strategy employed in these races?
If the Dems try this in a state with more of a rural population, like Iowa, say, it probably won’t work.
Can you wait until they make that mistake or look like they’re going to make it before we say they are doing the wrong thing?
Buy a state full of radio stations in rural areas, and I think that some folks might be able to talk to their neighbors with some sense that they lost hold of in 1988 when a shock jock became a profitable personality and got promoted by wealthy local businessmen as a propagandist. In Central North Carolina, that businessman was a chicken farmer called the House of Raeford.
The big cheeses in the rural areas bought a radio showman that did the downhome touch to politics and put a little anger out there. Didn’t matter that he lied. It stuck.
Except those local stations are probably all owned by Sinclair or shortly will be.
Biden went rural. He went to Alabama for Doug Jones a week or so ago.
What did he pitch? Nothing reallly. We’re not that far left wing like Bernie Sanders. That’s not talking to local people. That’s poormouthing the competition within the party as part of a test of a Presidential run.
That is absolutely the way to continue the status quo.
What do Democratic policies seek for rural areas? What would the folks there like policies to seek for rural areas. My brief guess: higher incomes, better infrastructure, and less obvious waste. Absent higher incomes, you better come up with lower taxes.
Lower taxes for rural areas is a brilliant idea. Tax the fuck out of the suburbs, and give deductions for cities and low population counties. Watch new cities suddenly pop up.
The demography of the rural west is changing. We need to take advantage of this. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get many of these rural voters to register and vote. They often say their votes don’t matter. We have to convince them their votes do matter.
At least Colorado does not put up barriers to registration and voting. It has same day registration, as well as mail in ballots.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/09/colorado-rural-demographic-minority-increase/
Booman writes:
Awwww Booman…that’s just wishful thinking on his part, because if they are capable of that, any way you look at it his ass is grass.
AG
. . . rural voters.
Even if the overlap is large (though I think there remain large numbers of black rural voters in places like, say, Mississippi).
Appealing to the whiteness/white resentment of white rural voters is reprehensible. We should leave that tack exclusively to the GOP.
Addressing the (non-racist) needs of, simply, rural voters is good . . . needed.
The situation looks even worse when you look at a county-by-county map and can see the cities as well. The Repubs control around 3000 counties compared to the Dems’ 500 or so. That means that not only do they have control of most of the state legislatures, they have most of the county supervisors and city mayors and councilmembers. By something like a 6 to 1 margin. And these lower level officeholders hold an awful lot of power.
. . . “the bench” or “the pipeline” (pick your metaphor) for statewide/national elective office candidates.
New York would be blue except that there are eight so-called Democrats in the Assembly belonging to a group known as the IDC that caucuses with the Republicans.