I have to disagree with Jamelle Bouie. Southern Democrats can’t sit around and wait for demographic changes to turn the South brown enough that they can win elections without white votes. They have to go aggressively after the white voter. I wrote about this yesterday. The recent paradigm for Southern Democrats has been the Blue Dog model. The model involved being a budget hawk on domestic spending while turning a blind eye to supplemental war spending. It didn’t limit itself to being conservative on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, but was relatively hostile to labor and generally pro-business on regulatory matters. In short, it was a form of self-loathing liberalism that offered the voters a Republican-Lite alternative to the nuttiness of Jeff Sessions or the rank hypocrisy of David Vitter. The advantage of being a Blue Dog in central Tennessee, for example, wasn’t that people there preferred the Democrats, but that it allowed candidates to raise corporate money. Without outside corporate money, it’s hard for a Democrat to raise enough money out of poor rural districts to compete with the party of big business and mega-churches.
This “centrist” strategy worked for a while, but the 2010 elections cut the Blue Dog Caucus in half. And it is doubtful that they can win those seats back using the old strategies. Democrats needs to figure out a way to finance their campaigns that doesn’t involve getting in bed with New York bankers and the Chamber of Commerce. If money were no object, it’s obvious what the Democrats would do. They’d draw a sharp contrast to the Republicans on pocketbook issues and become true champions of the southern working man. With nothing left to lose, they should go ahead and do this anyway. If they follow Bouie’s advice, the racial divide between the parties will just get worse, and the Republicans will respond by doing their best to set up Jim Crow-style obstacles to Latino voter registration.
We don’t need to exacerbate that trend.
The Blue Dog thing has run its course. By now, most recognize that given the choice between a Blue Dog and a regular Republican, most will choose the Regular republican (apologies to Harry Truman). The question is, will the Blue Dogs recognize this?
One of the principles I keep repeating is that (1) every voter in the US should have the opportunity to vote for a progressive Dmeocrat in a primary; (2) every voter in the US should have the opportunity to vote for a Democrat in the general election. If that ever became the strategy, we might be surprised at what voters actually think when given the choice.
I agree that should be the strategy. But progressive can’t even count on the national Democratic committees to actually field a Democratic candidate in federal elections, let alone a Democratic candidate that won’t run away from the party (see Bright, Bobby). I think progressives (small p) will have to organize in parallel to the Democratic Party in order for your strategy to be realized.
Why should local progressives be waiting for the nation DNC to field a candidate locally? Don’t local progressives know candidates who might be salable to, say, 170,000 people (to win a Congressional seat)?
Too often I think that progressives have a bad case of learned helplessness.
Why should local progressives be waiting for the nation DNC to field a candidate locally?
When did I say they should?
Because “leaders” like Rahm Emanuel smash local efforts at independence.
By now, most recognize that given the choice between a Blue Dog and a regular Republican, most will choose the Regular republican (apologies to Harry Truman).
Do you think this is true in a year where the difference between “Blue Dog” and “Republic Republican” the difference between opposing and supporting Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan?
Because I’m not so sure about that. “Not a Republican” is a pretty strong hand in a harshly anti-Republican year. Look at the crazy seats the Democrats won in 2006.
The Democratic party has its own racial bugaboos. The party strategists have fully embraced the Magic Latino theory of politics, where all they have to do is wait for enough white people to die out and usher in a new era of progressivism.
It’s a nice theory for strategists because it comes with a built-in excuse for why losses are inevitable in the meantime, and how it’s nobody’s fault but the voters’.
And the other aspect that is idiotic about the ML strategy is that Latinos are culturally conservative. Prop 8 had a bad outcome in CA for a simple reason: Blacks and Latinos are NOT in favor of gay marriage. Latinos are catholic, and many are VERY conservative catholics. At this moment, Latinos vote Democratic, but as we see in FL, Latinos (which are not a thing but about 30 things, as Mexicans, guatamalans, spanish from spain, puerto ricans and cubans are all different just like Germans and English are different) are not a liberal bunch.
People who want voters to support gay marriage need to go out and earn those votes. You don’t get it by default. Even 10 years ago white liberals didn’t support gay marriage as much as they do today. It takes time and a good message.
Your notions about Prop 8 are also a bit flawed. Nate Silver ha written about this. The problem wasn’t blacks and latinos as much as it was older voters. Younger voters, blacks and latinos included, voted against Prop 8 by a solid margin. Older white voters, especially 65+, accounted for much of the for Prop 8 vote. You don’t get to generalize and say that blacks and latinos don’t support gay marriage.
Agreed.
I saw issues polling recently that showed that Latinos were more liberal that white people on social issues.
Ah. Another believer in the “Latino”.
There are about 30 types of Latinos. Cubans are not Mexicans. Guatamalans are not Costa Ricans. Spanish are not like any of the rest.
Ah. Another believer in the “Latino”.
Yes, along with all of the people who self-identified as Latinos in surveys of their political opinions, as well as all of the people capable of reading surveys which report the results of self-identified Latinos, I do not force myself to pretend to be unaware of the category “Latino.”
The existence of sub-categories within a larger category does not make that larger category disappear, and the existence of measurable, predictable, consistent differences in the expressed opinions of people who do, and do not, self-identify as Latinos demonstrates that, yes, Latino is a meaningful category.
BTW, Irish people are not English, who are not Italians, who are not French-Canadians, who not Germans. I trust you feign equal outrage when faced with the horror of polling that reports results for whites.
You are incorrect. Anything in this area cannot be simplified down to one or another basic thing, but
That is, analysis of the vote demonstrates that B and L are more religious than other groups, more likely to support Prop 8 than other religious voters, and were disproportionately voting in favor of Prop 8.
My point, however, seems to have escaped you in your search for a simplistic explanation. Reiterating, L voters are CULTURALLY CONSERVATIVE, and are thus NOT natural allies of progressives.
The idea that blacks and Latinos will not vote for progressive Democrats because they are culturally conservative assumes that they vote on the basis of their cultural conservatism when there is not a single issue item. That assumption is likely wrong.
Blacks tend to vote their political and economic interests. And Republicans (and Blue Dogs) are sacrificing both of those right now when it comes to the issues that Blacks tend to vote on. Progressive candidates in North Carolina tend to get stronger black support than Blue Dog candidates. There is more incentive to turn out.
Maybe there are a lot of progressives who see themselves not as natural allies of blacks and Hispanics. There was a time not that long ago that progressives and blacks worked together to transform a nation and to transform the South. At great risk to themselves. Maybe progressives have gone soft and expect elections to be handed to them without having to do the ground work of voter registration and getting out the vote. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner died because they were registering voters in Mississippi. And folks came back for two years running to continue to register voters in spite of that.
I have black neighbors who are long-time born-again Christians who understand that gay marriage is a civil rights issue, not a “moral” issue. Who work hard to prevent girls having to have abortions but think that government should butt out. And don’t get them started about firearms. And they are not atypical. Politicians, not ordinary people, have made these cultural issue political in order to have a never-ending issue to campaign against.
It’s time for progressives to learn how to work in coalitions again.
Great comment. How many conservative candidates have I seen try and fail miserably to make inroads among black voters on the grounds that they have high levels of church attendance?
There have been only two times when Southern Democrats have come close to FDR-type liberalism: during the New Deal and in the early 1970s. And both times it was a matter of opportunity because national problems outweighed the race card. The first time Democrats were triumphant; the second desperate to rebuild with a united party after 1968. That said, the minority of Democratic politicians who have taken farmer-labor populist positions is not small.
In the 1950s, Democratic governors cozied up to business interests in order to get the economic development through plant relocation that could help them deliver on their promises of jobs. Corporations have turned that strategy into one of job extortion that sucks off tax credits and delivers few jobs. The most notorious example in NC was Dell Computer, which got $400 million in tax breaks and state commitments in order to get 400 jobs in Greensboro with a 10 year commitment. Dell closed the plant after 4 years because of the 2008 meltdown and refused to return the state even part of the money they had been given because “it had not been in the contract”. Failure: NC Department of Commerce. That is a potent issue if someone would raise it. And it is that sort of public-private corruption that is driving some of the members of the Tea Party in NC but they articulate it as government spending gone amok.
Democrats cannot depend on demographics to help them win back the South; Republicans can easily defeat that strategy by re-instituting Jim Crow-Lite laws. See what Scott Walker just passed in Wisconsin for an early example of this trend. Democrats must appeal to a wide range of white voters through tough talk about real issues and naming the Republican strategy as distractions with shiny objects. You are exactly right in your criticism of Jamelle Bouie’s analysis.
As hard as it might be to believe, it is easy to overstate the racial politics in the South and make it an excuse for continued failure of strategy. Probably less than the majority of white people in the South vote with a race consciousness. There are a lot of suburban white moderates who vote Republican because they grew up in Midwestern Republican areas and have not broken the habit of automatically pulling the R lever. And there are entrepreneurial blacks who buy the Republican small business, low taxes bullshit.
What needs to happen with the Democratic Party, and not just in the South, is that it has to get real and stop pussyfooting around uncomfortably with every issue that comes up. It is time for Democrats to play the “you may not agree with me but you know where I stand” messaging with authentically more progressive and critical non-identity themes. Bill of Rights themes beyond the second amendment for example. Coming out strongly against the looniness of Republicans trying to outdo each other by wanting to bring back child labor or slavery or restricting women to household work.
Campaigns require money only because the approach has become a professional marketing approach that requires large and expensive media buys. And those buys now finance Republican campaigns, and that undercuts the effectiveness of donations.
Maybe 2012 is the year that Democrats run on being able to control budgets because they can run effective campaigns on 1/100th of what Republicans will be spending in their saturation media campaigns. Maybe it’s time to motivate people power to counteract the media saturation bombing that the Koch brothers are going to finance. Make the Republicans spend more on media and withdraw Democratic funds from media owned by Republicans.
The Democrats’ problems are not just a Southern problem. There is the Midwest. And the West, especially the Southwest. And Pennsyltucky is not in the best shape–and it should be the populist part of Pennsylvania.
I do believe it is time for a class-based campaign.
So, progressive economics, and class-conscious attempts to remind the forgotten man who his real friends are.
Like Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s spectacularly successful attempt to finally pump some progressivity into the state’s tax code, using an explicitly Christian justification — in the heart of the Bible Belt for it — for example?
Good luck.
The problem is that it has to be integral to the candidate; it can’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. And I’m not sure that buying into the Christian framing helps the case or opens the door to other church-centered issues. Riley was a Republican and had to worship at the Republican altar as well as the Christian one.
It’s not a matter of luck. Progressives and Democrats are going to be at a severe disadvantage nationally if they do not seriously campaign – both in terms of message and with candidates – in the South. It is a much the absence of different Southern voices as anything else that is leading Democrats to defeat. Too much Republican bullshit is going unchallenged locally. And no one is seriously making an effort to characterize Rush and FoxNews as outsiders who don’t have Southerners’ best interests at heart.
If progressives think the South is hard, wait until they have to win back Wisconsin and Michigan and California in order to backstop a poor position on everything south of the Mason-Dixon line extended to the Pacific Coast. That line hits along an axis between Fresno and San Jose.
There ain’t no easy way out. We can’t depend on luck.
And no one is seriously making an effort to characterize Rush and FoxNews as outsiders who don’t have Southerners’ best interests at heart.
Rush and FoxNews and their clones and wannabees on a hundred 1000-watt daytime, 50-watts-after-sundown AM stations, certainly have what Southerners think Southerners’ best interests are at heart — because enough of them keep voting for it with their ballots, and their radios and televisions.
The odd Gujurati entrepreneur or black businessman throwing in with the GOP, or the occasional Elliot Levitas or Steve Cohen surfacing in the Democratic party, isn’t going to even make a dent. Rick Perry beat Jim Hightower.
There’s always a coalition that can be cobbled together who want Jim Crow, old and new. The median voter is content to drown, or go hungry, so long as the people he doesn’t like went under first, or he got to watch them starve first.
That coalition vote is there whenever the need for it arises, and apart from occasional flukes, like 2006, and miracles, like 2008, I don’t see it ever going away.
For a supposed progressive, you seem stuck in the belief that things will never change.
Father Coughlin got passe; Joe McCarthy drunk himself to death. Things change.
And moods change. Stagflation in the 1970s helped Ronald Reagan’s candidacy over Jimmy Carter. Had Carter appointed Paul Volcker his first year in office, the economy would have been going gangbusters in 1980. And it would have been a recession in 1977 and 1978. That’s when the relaxed attitude of the 1960s and 1970s hardened into “I’m gonna get mine.” And Reagan had “morning in America” and Poppy Bush had the recession that elected Clinton who caused Rush to start building audience. And the GOP to embark on a scorched earth policy that said that if they didn’t get a permanent majority, they would destroy the country.
That strategy is now becoming transparent enough even in the South that things might be different in 2012. It is 2010 that is the fluke in this round. The GOP is inching closer to its own 1968. And it happens when the GOP in Congress loses, as it will, on the debt ceiling gambit. If they push through what they want they lose; if they actually kill US government finances, they lose; if they capitulate, they lose. This is a case in which the President and the Congressional leadership should give no bipartisan cover at all. And Southerners do like their own Social Security, their own Medicare, their Medicaid for nursing homes, and especially their SSI that keeps them from having a disabled relative as a dependent.
Rush is a team sport which up to now has had no real consequences in their lives. It’s like rooting for the Tigers or the Tide or the Volunteers. When it gets real for them, things will change just like they did in the 1930s.
With glacial speed. We still have to sort out the party realignment that began to happen forty years ago — my guess is, it’s half-done.
One quibble.
Michael Dell wasn’t even born until 1965. Otherwise, kudos for your usual excellent work.
The practice of bribing corporations started in the 1950s and continues to this day. It has escalated from just setting up some courses at a community college and expediting the land acquisition (i.e. relatively low public cost) to the megadeals by which Alabama brought in Mercedes, South Carolina brought in BMW, and North Carolina brought in Dell. The Dell case from the Great Recession shows just how out of hand this inter-state competition to bribe companies has become.
and the Republicans will respond by doing their best to set up Jim Crow-style obstacles to Latino voter registration.
The GOP is already doing this…have you been following what they are doing in terms of redistricting, and the new Voter ID LAW?
You need Dem candidates who can be honest with White working class Southerners…being White just isn’t it anymore. that they have to let it go
Dem candidates can be as honest as they want, but no one wins elections on a platform of “I’m here to blow up the core of your self-image!”
Normal people don’t commit suicide.
A swing of 10% to 15% of voters would change the political landscape.
It is only a minority of white voters, even in the South, for which being white is the core of their self-image. And loss of self-image is nowhere like committing suicide. As most white Southerners who have moved beyond racism have found out through hard struggle. What it is is liberation from a mindset that creates an oppressive society.
Probably no more than 30% of white Southern voters would experience deep psychic stress if they broke with their racist stereotypes. And I would bet that number is closer to 10%. There is a lot of social pressure to hold these attitudes in being, and it is all a kind of a bluff. It persists as long as no one calls it. Which is why an effective progressive tactic in the South has been (1) calling the bluff of social pressure and (2) testifying that people can change because over time you did.
It seems to me that a lot of non-Southern progressives want to keep the South in a political state that justifies their antipathies. And it irks progressive Southerners as much as other Southerners that non-Southerners have allowed the conservative disease to fester in their own states without much comment. Will Waukesha County WI or St. Joseph MI ever change? How about Boston’s Southie or New York’s Bensonhurst?
We have a national fight on our hands.
Who did the centrist strategy work for? Aside from (arguably) President Clinton’s second term, did “Third Way” politics deliver notable electoral successes? The Blue Dogs chased out in 2010 may have been mostly centrists, but if their ideological alignment was to credit for their ascendancy, why weren’t they elected in the heyday of centrism, say 1996? Looking at the list of defeated incumbents in 2010, most were elected in 2006 or 2008, which is to say after Terry McAuliffe left the DNC and the “New Democrat” movement had lost its mantle of inevitability.
Perhaps centrist and money-friendly politics are all it takes to pry marginal seats loose when the GOP is weakened by scandals and/or local candidates can ride the coattails of a strong national campaign. Or perhaps there is a secondary factor, such as Dean’s efforts to rebuild the party in neglected districts and states. In any case, centrism is not enough to gain, let alone hold these seats.
Aside from (arguably) President Clinton’s second term, did “Third Way” politics deliver notable electoral successes?
You answer your own question: Looking at the list of defeated incumbents in 2010, most were elected in 2006 or 2008
“Third Way” politics worked very well in red districts in strongly anti-Republican years.
In any case, centrism is not enough to gain, let alone hold these seats.
“These seats,” meaning, strongly red districts in the South? Yes, it takes an anti-Republican wave for the Democrats to win them. On the other hand, how many strong progressives were elected to these seats even in 2006 and 2008? It would appear that both “centrism” and a favorable election cycle are necessary conditions for Democratic candidates to pick up “these seats,” just as it took both a moderate candidate and an anti-Democrat wave for the Republicans to win a Senate seat in MA.
And it is doubtful that they can win those seats back using the old strategies.
Why not?
Because a lot of reddish seats were lost in the most lopsidedly-Republican election cycle in memory? That tells us nothing about the underlying strength of this type of candidate.
Even in areas that lean Republican, most people don’t want to voucherize Medicare or privatize Social Security. With the GOP marching in lockstep to their doom, all it takes is an acceptable alternative to beat them. What qualifies as an “acceptable” alternative will vary from place to place.