After World War One, the French built the Maginot Line as their defensive strategy against a repeat invasion from Germany. It was a spectacular and expensive failure, and now serves as an analogy for all costly and stupid backward-looking endeavors. No two wars are the same, and no two presidential elections are the same either. For this reason, figuring out why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 is important but not necessarily that helpful for figuring out how to avoid defeat in 2020.
There are many possible mistakes the Democrats could make. They could decide that Clinton was too moderate and did too little to engage the base, without realizing that the base is going to be engaged this time no matter who the nominee is or what they espouse. They could take the suburbs for granted and pursue policies that make them deeply uncomfortable and willing to stay home, vote third party or even go for Trump. They could write off all of small-town and rural America as hopelessly and irredeemably deplorable and let Trump roll up even bigger numbers in those areas. I don’t normally take advice from Charlie Sykes, but he’s not wrong about this:
…Trump could still win reelection, because he has one essential dynamic working in his favor: You.
Trump’s numbers are unmovable, but yours are not. He doesn’t need to win this thing; he needs for you to lose it. There are millions of swing voters who regard Trump as an abomination but might vote for him again if they think you are scarier, more extreme, dangerous, or just annoyingly out of touch.
There are some indicators that can be taken to support and rebut what I am saying here. For example, new survey results from Emerson Polling show that both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are leading Donald Trump nationally by a wide ten-point margin. This supports my contention that ideology is overrated for motivating the base while undermining my contention that ideology can depress the middle. What I think it really shows, however, is that Trump is a dead man walking and his only hope is for the Democrats to screw up. So, the question then is, “how can the Democrats blow this election?”
Clinton’s loss can most easily be explained as a failed experiment in swapping votes. She took millions of votes away from the Republicans in the suburbs but lost even more in small towns and rural areas. It’s a realignment that has continued during Trump’s presidency and could be seen in the results of the midterm elections. What changed is that Trump’s rural advantage contracted while the Democrat’s suburban advantage exploded. If the trend continues, the Democratic nominee really could win by an almost unheard of ten points, or even more.
If the Democrats continue to eat away at Trump’s areas of strength while maintaining their suburban advantage, they should be successful in 2020, but their base is not rural and the base still considers itself urban even if it’s really now an unnatural urban/suburban alliance.
Maybe it’s because I am from the Mid-Atlantic region, but these dynamics are not new to me. Successful Democrats in this area are not the kind of folks that bring a pitter-patter to progressives’ hearts. They’re people like Andrew Cuomo, Chuck Schumer, Ed Rendell, Bob Casey Jr., Joe Biden, Tom Carper, Cory Booker, Bill Bradley, Chris Dodd and (I hate to say it) Joe Lieberman. They’ve been winning with the support of liberal-minded rich white suburban professionals for a long time because they had no real alternative.
I never thought this was a desirable national model because I come at politics from the perspective of looking out for the little guy first, and pandering to people who are already comfortable usually comes at a cost for those who are most vulnerable. I’ve tolerated Mid-Atlantic Democrats more than admired them, and I’ve generally judged them by a different standard than national Democrats. For me, growing up in New Jersey, clean politicians like Bradley and Booker were godsends compared to the Hudson County machine politicians we usually had to stomach. If they were a little too friendly to the financial services sector, well, Louisiana and West Virginia Democrats are too friendly to the energy sector, and at least they didn’t belong in jail. It also helped that they had a formula for success, because who wants to be governed by Chris Christie or Tom Corbett?
Unfortunately, the country as a whole has come to more closely resemble the Mid-Atlantic. Not only that, but Pennsylvania is now one of the pivotal states that will decide the next election, so the formula for winning the Keystone State is pretty close to the formula for winning nationally.
The good news from my perspective is that Trump’s ceiling is so low that it should allow a good margin for error. The bad news is that the Democrats could easily blow past that margin if they they’ve learned the wrong lessons from the last war.
Here’s what I mean by that.
Trump’s formula barely worked. He traded suburban votes for small-town and rural votes and it was enough to get him an Electoral College win even as he was trounced in the popular vote. The trend-line since the 2016 election have continued in a way that is unfavorable to him. This is why he’s trailing badly in both public and internal polling. The Democrats will probably win as long as they don’t interfere with this movement. The best way to keep it going is to recognize that the goal is to hold down Trump’s small-town/rural votes while maximizing their own suburban vote. In other words, don’t tamper with a formula that failed in 2016 but should work in 2020.
In fairness, part of the reason it failed in 2016 is because the Democrats didn’t realize that their gains in the suburbs were more than being wiped out in the sticks. They can’t let that happen again.
The good news is that was immediately obvious after the midterms that many Trump voters and lifelong Republicans had turned out and cast a vote for the Democrat. While Trump remains popular in small-town and rural areas, his support is waning and he’s showing vulnerabilities on several issues, including health insurance and the cost of prescription drugs. Few people realize it, but the supposedly unmovable “deplorable” vote has already moved against the president to a measurable degree.
Voter-file analysis recently conducted by Catalist, the Democratic data firm, indicated that the party’s gains in 2018 House races were actually strongest in rural areas, not the suburban ones that got more media coverage, relative to the results of the 2016 presidential election. The gains “weren’t enough to get over 50 percent and win seats in many rural districts,” Catalist’s Yair Ghitza wrote — but winning a bigger share of the rural vote in key swing states in 2020 could put Democrats on a path back to the White House.
To get back to Charlie Sykes point, the Democrats can screw this up by sounding too out of touch in rural areas and by appearing “scarier, more extreme, dangerous” to their suburban base. This is about the last thing progressives want to hear, and I don’t blame them. This is the kind of political alignment I grew up with in New Jersey and didn’t like and didn’t want for the country as a whole. But it’s the alignment that Trump has created with his racist and populist messaging. It changed the winning formula for both parties whether we’re happy about it or not.
Having said that, I am not particularly concerned that the Democrats will alienate people through progressive policy prescriptions. While a candidate exclusively focused on climate change might seem out of touch to a lot of rural voters and a candidate who constantly berates anyone who works in the financial services will lose a lot of suburban support, a balanced approach that looks for solutions on health costs, a fairer less monopolized economy, more affordable education, a serious approach to climate, solutions for the gun violence and opioid crises, and a cleaner and better-protected electoral system can probably include some very progressive proposals and still fall within the margin of error. The Democrats don’t need to nominate an Andrew Cuomo to win. One of the advantages of Trump being such an outlier is that it opens up the middle for more progressive solutions.
The key is to make sure that it’s solutions that are being offered rather than infighting and grievances. And the battle is to keep the middle open and to own it.
Jesus, you made me curious enough to go and read that Sykes article. That was 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
I apologize for that.
Just another embarrassed Republican concern trolling Democrats.
You’re more of a party man and can talk to broader swaths of people, but I just feel like concerns about suburban people fleeing if there’s too much left wing movement to be a concern of the past that isn’t showing up much in the evidence, either here in the US or over in Europe. The suburbs are diversifying, housing/childcare/health care costs are becoming a problem for the wealthier middle class. Europe is more “left wing” on economic policy than here so there are different baselines, but the suburbs trending left is happening all over there, too. I’d like someone to do more of a deep dive so we can have apples to apples comparisons and figure out what’s driving it. The fulcrum isn’t even about economics anymore but “liberalism” itself, as the far and radical right push the center right parties in their direction.
I can tell you what is driving it around Philadelphia. The GOP is no longer a respectable party. Decent, well-educated people used to signify their status by voting Republican. It was the same for buying a nice German car and getting a country club membership and sending your kid to a good college. The Democrats were for those people in the city who were either minorities or the left-behind Italians and Irish looking for a patronage job. It was decidedly low class to be a Democrat.
Things began to change when Bill Clinton came on the scene, but habits die hard. Obama narrowly lost Chester County to Romney, for example, and Hillary won it handily. She just should have won it by a lot more. Too many suburbanites spent the 1990’s lapping up anti-Clinton rhetoric, and it held down her numbers even as she did extremely well.
These folks are not Republicans anymore but they’ve also never really been Democrats. They are moving left despite the economics that traditionally made them tax-averse and anti-urban. They hate Trump but don’t like most Democrats either, and they want and elect moderates like the ones I listed that look like a Progressive Most Wanted poster.
But are they tax averse for wealth reasons or was it racist reasons that are now changing because of a diversified suburban politics, combined with education social pressures and a radical right that threatens that diversity, which now includes more young people (millennials are as old as 36-37 now!). You say it yourself about your kid’s school.
As long as poverty is heavily correlated with race there is going to be a racial component to tax aversion. If the suburbs became more racially diverse that also means that there is less of a perception of us vs. them in redistributive policies. It then becomes less racial but still maintains the urban/suburban divide. The Dems now have a coalition that depends on urban/suburban unity which is unnatural and completely contrary to the entire history of white flight. It really shouldn’t be sustainable, but Trump is offensive enough to sustain it for now.
But suburban people still don’t want to pay for Philly’s schools or Philly’s transportation system or for people in Philly to get welfare or food stamps. The old divisions haven’t gone away but are being muted by a common enemy.
It’s actually pretty easy to drive a wedge into that coalition, but Trump prefers to seek his votes in the rural areas and small towns and exurbs rather than compete for suburban votes. It cost the GOP the House and it will cost him this election unless the Democrats do his work for him.
But again, you’re so focused on Trump (for good reason) that you miss this same trend happening everywhere. Granted, no other Western country has the racial cleavages we have, but I think it’s important to see that this isn’t just a Trump driven phenomena. He’s put gasoline on the fire and accelerated what was already there.
Philly suburbs are gonna have to fund the schools and services. They’ll have no choice. Or we will die a climate death together.
If by “everywhere” you mean Western Europe, well, the trend is for lower classes to move right on cultural issues including immigration policy in response to right-wing demagoguery and an objective failure of left-wing parties to represent their interests or at least to competently address their downward mobility in an automated and globalized economy. Race, as a wedge, prevents class-based solidarity so the left rallies around cultural solidarity instead, leaving lower class whites out of the coalition and becoming dependent on relatively well-to-do and well-educated whites. What you get is a defense of the status quo against radical fascism. And then the left splinters over the fact that economics have been relegated to second place. It should be obvious why the right is winning in this environment more often than they lose, and the idea that a cultural based coalition is as stable and secure as an economic one is deeply mistaken.
If you follow Germany, you’ll see the surge in the Green Party. Who is their common enemy to unite against? Why the Greens? Many former Merkel voters are moving to the Greens, but many social democrats are also moving to the Greens and further left parties who are pro-immigrant. The far right has (noticeably) shifted their rhetoric from purely anti-immigrant sentiment to climate change centered issues. The anti-immigrant rhetoric and resentment is still there of course, but now there is far more outrage in the mix at this or that imposition from supposed “eco-dictators”. I keep posting these two charts for a reason:
For years, for decades, “Republican-lite” Democrats have been expected to win as “the lesser of two evils.” Wouldn’t this work with the “former republicans” you describe, who would see Trump as the greater of two evils even if they didn’t regard the Democrat as ideal?
>> I don’t normally take advice from Charlie Sykes
And that’s the right idea. Before varying from this, think twice, and then think twice more.
Counseling against ‘grievances’ sounds to me like asking brown and black people, mostly, to quiet down? (Which, for all I know, is a prerequisite for a blowout victory. However, it’s a pretty tough ask.)
My feeling is that any democratic nominee will be portrayed by pro-authoritarian media from Fox to the NYT as terrifying and out of touch. Maybe because they’re for reparations, maybe because of, uh, email server security policy. That’s baked in. It’s absolute. So it’s largely irrelevant. IMO, we just need someone who knows how to campaign in poetry; doesn’t matter what that poetry _says_, really. Anything that rhymes.
“The key is to make sure that it’s solutions that are being offered rather than infighting and grievances.”
Agreed. Which is why Warren should be the Democratic candidate.
The only people who care about any Pocahontas racism are racist scumfucks that won’t vote for a Democrat anyway. And she has almost zero baggage compared to Sanders, who I’d also love to see as the Democratic candidate.
I’ll of course happily vote for Biden if/when he’s the nominee, but I really don’t want him to be the candidate. Another 4-8 years of trying to prevent Republicans from destroying the country more isn’t enough. It wasn’t enough from 2009-2017.
We need someone who will tirelessly work on fixing as many problems as possible. And the only way to do that is to have policies and the ability to sell those policies to people who don’t pay attention to politics.
That is Warren. She can do it.
Have to take issue with one point: while I’ll definitely vote for Biden if he’s the nominee, I definitely won’t do it “happily”.
I say happily, because everyone needs to get on board with the fact that the most important thing is not losing to Trump a second time. A second loss to Trump is effectively the end of this country as anything remotely resembling a democracy and government of laws.
And I’m not even sure it isn’t already too late, some days.
And I agree with all those reasons for voting that way. Still won’t do it “happily” if it comes down to that. I’m cautiously hopeful that it won’t.
This brings to mind the late, great Molly Ivins’ maxim for voting (paraphrasing): “Primaries are for voting with your heart; general elections are for voting with your head.”
Basically they want a socially liberal fiscal conservative. Someone who is going to keep their LGBTQ sons and daughters with the rights they have fought so hard for, and otherwise make the economic playing field fair. The social warriors currently leading the Republicans have ripped off the costume and revealed their nefarious aims. What good is money if nobody except the super-rich has rights to use it? That scares the daylights out of the more well off, who got a sudden shock that these folks don’t care about them one bit. And, their scions likely won’t be able to obtain the same social status as their parents if the Trumpists have their way. Right now the Democrats are the party positioned to take advantage of it. A proud progressive offering an expansion of social and economic rights should be able to win this.
When the old guard is removed, and Millennials run government, it’s going to be more liberal. We are seeing it in Minneapolis where the governor/council are mostly millennials and GenX trying to use government housing policy to build more dense housing and end the segregation. The older whiter people are complaining about it, but they passed the bill anyway.
It’s not the suburbs I guess, but they’re going to be absorbed by similar populations as the shifts continue.
Case and point: the old Dem urban coalition backed the incumbent whereas the young lefts backed the reformer
This is sloppy. The Maginot Line succeeded in channeling the German offensive to where the French planned to engage it. The French just bungled the Ardennes and their higher command funked. And then the British started their sprint to the Channel and unhinged the entire line.
While what you say is true, I think it’s fair to say that the Maginot Line created a false sense of security and proved worthless in the end. The Germans easily identified the way to circumvent it.
The false sense of security was in effect when the French allowed the Germans to remilitarize the Rhineland.
He needed an example of why it’s best not to plan to fight the last war and France 1940 is a perfect one. The Maginot predated the mechanized Blitzkrieg that enveloped the Allies and demoralized them. Planning to defeat Schlieffen II was not the way to go…
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Oy. Et tu, Booman?
Occasional, obviously needed reminder of how Clinton defined “deplorables”:
Yet having proclaimed that ‘the supposedly unmovable “deplorable” vote has already moved against the president to a measurable degree’, you proceed to evidence purportedly supporting that thesis that includes not a scintilla of actual evidence of even a single “deplorable” (as defined by Clinton) having made this alleged move. Instead, you seem to simply assume that if there’s been significant movement against Trump, it must include some of the deplorables. Yet I’m unaware of any evidence whatsoever in support of that thesis.
Point taken on the use of the word ‘deplorables’ but sometimes my evidence is provided in the links. In addition to the part from point 3, here is the part from point 5.
So, what I am saying is that a large portion of the gains the Democrats saw in 2018 came from people who voted for Trump and then voted for a Democratic candidate for House, Senate, governor or whatever. And, that their biggest gains came from the reddest areas even though this wasn’t immediately obvious because they still generally lost the elections in those areas.
Taken together, that means they won the exact kind of votes that were supposed to be unwinnable.
OK, thanks, that’s better, and I see little to argue against in it once you drop the claim that that movement reflects movement by ‘the supposedly unmovable “deplorable” vote’. I just wish you wouldn’t fall into acceding to, if not outright adopting, dishonest Banana Republican framing to make an otherwise valid point.
The reason I adopt the term un-ironically here is because the assumption has been that Trump voters from rural areas are like 98% behind him and cannot be budged, and any effort to win their votes is pointless and morally suspect because they’re irredeemable and deplorable people who hold deeply offensive beliefs.
Yet, these same people showed the greatest movement away from the GOP from 2016 to 2018. They didn’t become more racially enlightened. They just changed their minds about which party to support. This wasn’t supposed to be possible.
The question still remains whether it is desirable, but I don’t know too many successful political parties who turn down votes because they’re not sure of the purity of the people casting them. The valid criticism is that we don’t want to pander to their prejudices or water down our principles to attract them. But I wrote from the very beginning that those things were not necessary to win back a lot of support and prevent another upset loss in the presidential election.
But do we know the numbers of Trump supporters who switched from Republican to Democrat, vs. Trump supporters who stayed at home because they’re just Trump voters, vs. new voters in rural areas who didn’t vote in 2016?
I still don’t think that Trump’s floor is less than 40%. Right-wing authoritarians will always come home. And if Trump starts a war, then I’d bet it’d be closer to 43%, or higher.
This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion around here, but…I think that Medicare for All is a sure loser, and could easily get Trump re-elected. People don’t like change, and they are loss-adverse. Taking away private insurance with the promise of replacing it with medicare is going to be a deal-breaker for many voters.
And, it’s so pointless, because there are plenty of ways to get where we want, in a manner that is politically palatable, and will be popular. Some form of early medicare+a public option for ACA+more regulation of insurance companies. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the politics are clear.
Same thing with student debt relief, which I would personally LOVE to see. But canceling all student loan debts is not the way to go (for some of the reasons you outlined in a previous post). As I’ve mentioned before, I think a great way to go would be forgiveness of interest…that effectively reduces the size of the loan over time (because of inflation), but still keeps the principle that people are paying back the loans that they took out.
I fear a primary where the candidates try to distinguish themselves in a left-leaning purity contest, backing themselves into a corner.
It’s easy to finesse. “Medicare for All” to many voters doesn’t mean what Bernie means. Anyway, you’re generally right that it’s a loser which is why it won’t pass the House. But Bernie also isn’t going to burn it all down if he can’t get the votes for what he wants. It’s not in line with his quite pragmatic voting record when the bullets in the chamber are real.
YES! That’s the winning argument…”Medicare for all” as medicare buy-in, not single payer. Which candidates are for the former rather than the latter? I know that Bernie and Kamala are for single payer, but I don’t know the other about the other candidates.
Why?
This guy is saying many of the same things that I am saying. I think he’s a little too cautious, but he’s close enough to where I’m at on the politics for me to basically endorse his strategy.
A political stance advocating for abolishing private insurance, however you put it, is not a good idea. A lot of people use private insurance and like it. Expanding the market with better inexpensive options is a good way to achieve something close to universal coverage, which is the goal. But if you propose that people with good insurance — teachers, for example — give up their most significant benefits in exchange for the unknown, that is going to go poorly.
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I only saw 3 out of 11 issues to be of concern, the biggest being the elimination of private insurance. The smartest response to that, as mentioned during the recent second Dem candidate debate, is allowing private insurance to compete with government insurance plans, the latter which have significantly less overhead and thus a better chance of being favored. This allows private insurance to die a natural death without making it look like a loss-of-freedom issue to the electorate. I’m surprised Warren hasn’t used this as a good tack to take.
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