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I certainly do not have all the answers, but several broad themes have been kicking around in my mind that I thought I may as well offer up as discussion points as we close out 2020 and look forward to 2021. These broad strokes will likely sound familiar to anyone who reads me regularly or who has been watching Markos and me bat around ideas with some great guests weekly on The Brief.
1. The Sunbelt is the new Rust Belt: Yes, Biden won the critical Rust Belt states—the erstwhile “blue wall” states for Democrats—much to the credit of his campaign. That said, since Biden was a tailor-made Rust Belt candidate—an older white man and native son of Scranton, Pennsylvania—the fact that he won Wisconsin by a meager 20,500 votes and Pennsylvania by a little over 80,000 votes does not bode well for the future of what is emerging as a much younger and more diverse party than this nation has ever seen. In actuality, the razor-thin wins in Georgia (12,000 votes) and Arizona (10,500 votes) probably provide us with a glimpse of a better path forward for the future of the Democratic party, although it certainly won’t be happening overnight.
2. We can’t afford to cede the Heartland entirely: As I recently wrote, the Republican party isn’t changing a thing following Donald Trump’s loss. Instead of reassessing how to bring a greater diversity of voters into the GOP fold and become a majority, Republicans are clearly content to double down on being a minority party given their built-in advantages in the Electoral College and congressional representation. The bet is that they’ll control the Senate more often than not, be competitive enough in the House, and sometimes manage to capture the White House with the right candidate—all while explicitly being the minority party of white people. Republicans have basically traded the white working class voters they gained under Trump for some losses among suburban voters, and they’re embracing it.
It is a gamble to some extent since it’s not at all clear the Trump voters they gained in 2020 will necessarily show up in the numbers party leaders are counting on without Trump on the ticket. On the other hand, if those voters become GOP devotees—and Republicans appear perfectly eager to court those voters by shoveling heaps of conspiratorial fascist sludge their way—and some suburban voters shift back to the GOP, Republicans could remain competitive enough for their purposes, at least for the next decade.
For Democrats, this means that if we ever want to effect big structural changes to our political system in order to make it more representative, we cannot just turn entirely away from the Rust Belt and the more rural areas of the Midwest. We have to bring home at least some wins at the congressional and state levels in order to have a chance of building the congressional majorities we need to make change.
When I spoke to Matt Hildreth, executive director of RuralOrganizing.org, in the first episode of The Brief, he reminded me that progressive policies like making health care more affordable and accessible are popular in most of these areas once you decouple them with terms like liberal or Democrat. Missouri voters, for instance, didn’t reelect Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in 2018, but they did vote to expand Medicaid in August 2020 by 53%-47% via constitutional amendment. So while the Democratic brand needs to be retooled, many Democratic policies are actually far more popular than those of the GOP. In other words, this is doable with the right candidates, the right messages, and a long-term commitment to building capacity in some Republican strongholds. And in fact, if Democrats simply lose less in some smaller rural areas, it can help them notch some occasional wins at the state level in red states that have sizable metropolitan hubs.
3. Grassroots groups will light the way: Perhaps the most glaring lesson of Democrats’ underperformance in the 2020 Senate races is the fact that spending gobs of money on ads, particularly in statewide races that are more localized than a presidential race, is yielding increasingly fewer returns. Given how polarizing our politics are, being able to define a candidate through TV and radio ads is mostly a thing of the past. Although I would argue that Biden’s advertising nationwide was likely a worthwhile investment for two reasons: 1) Trump by his very nature sucked all the media oxygen out of the room, leaving almost nothing for Biden without paid advertising; 2) early in the race, Biden’s favorability rating was underwater, but that flipped during the Democratic National Convention and he stayed above water for the rest of the race. In my mind, Biden’s double-digit improvement in favorability was a product of a well-crafted convention followed by lots of consistent message reinforcement, and part of that message reinforcement happened through paid advertising.
In the statewide Senate races, however, Democratic candidates’ whopping cash advantage didn’t carry the day in too many cases. That was true for different reasons depending on the state/candidate, but I think we can generally conclude that long-term investments in registering people to vote, engaging new voters, and getting them involved early in capacity building and canvassing operations is more important than ever and will provide the right Democratic candidates with the base support they need in order to emerge victorious on future Election Days. Bottom line: A winning formula for Democrats isn’t to come in during the final months of a campaign and blanket the airwaves with ads. Rather, it’s investing in the grassroots groups like those in Georgia and Arizona that have spent the last decade in particular building the change we witnessed in November.
This is a long-term project with no quick fixes. But it’s also one that everyone can find ways to take part in, particularly at the local level if you live in a red or purple state. It will also require some entrepreneurial thinking from many of us to perhaps build organizations or networks that didn’t previously exist. But the key for all of us is to stay engaged and active and continue doing the work as if our lives depend on it—because as 2020 taught us, they do.
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