The Democratic Party has many problems, to be sure. It’s gerrymandered out of winning control of the House anytime soon. It struggles to get a big part of its base to turn out in mid-term elections, let alone off-year elections, which means it struggles to hold on to the Senate and is utterly out to sea when it comes to winning governorships, control of state legislatures (which is both an effect and the cause of its gerrymandering problem), and offices at the local level. Democrats may start out with an edge in the Electoral College, but they’re playing catch up at virtually ever other level of politics. These are serious, long-term problems, especially the state-local weakness, that may not stop Hillary Clinton (or whomever) from being elected president next year, but will eventually start to threaten even Democrats’ ability to contend for the White House.
The Wall Street Journal (I know) reported on this problem pretty thoroughly today. If you’re paywalled and don’t want to bother getting around it, you can get a sense of what the piece is about from this Jon Schwarz piece in The Intercept (I know). Schwarz goes after Tom Daschle, who use to be the Democratic leader in the Senate but now prefers to give quotes to the WSJ about what the party should be doing, while instead of actually helping to do any of it, he spends his time lobbying for foreign governments. I want to say something about Daschle too, but specifically something he said to the WSJ. From their piece:
Democrats are quick to say they will rebound, just as the GOP bounced back from setbacks in 2006 and 2008. At the same time, some Democrats say the party can’t ignore its state-level defeats.
“We have a little bit of blue in the West Coast. A little bit of blue in the Northeast, and occasional blue elsewhere. But, boy, it’s a bright red map in all of those big, square states,” said former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. “That’s where I do worry about recruiting and building a bench and finding ways to connect with real voters. We’re not doing a very good job of that.”
What does that mean, “real voters”? Does he mean that voters in “those big, square states” are somehow more “real” than voters in those blue areas on the coasts? Does he mean that the voters in the big square red states who do vote Democratic aren’t as “real” as the ones who vote Republican?
I honestly don’t understand what Daschle means there, but I know what it sounds like he means. Democrats of all stripes, but especially red-state Dems like Daschle, have a tendency to talk about middle-of-the-country voters (and feel free to substitute your own less charitable interpretation of what they mean by that: white, male, Protestant, etc.) as though they matter more or are somehow more reflective of the country as a whole than voters on the coasts and in big cities (again, feel free to substitute a more damning interpretation: black, Latino, gay, female, etc.). Depending on how you approach this tendency, you might see it as a manifestation of the “Default Man” condition, where we tend to think of straight, middle-class white guys as the “default” setting for society, and somehow if a political party doesn’t win that demographic than it’s doing something wrong.
Again, I don’t want to put words in Tom Daschle’s mouth, but this is what it sounds like he’s saying. And this attitude is itself corrosive to the Democratic Party, because it minimizes people who do regularly vote Democratic by casting them as somehow “not real” (or “not real Americans,” maybe?) when compared to those “real” voters in the heartland. It’s absolutely true that Democrats need to get better at chasing votes all over the country (and, boy, is it just me or does the decision to abandon Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” look really bad in hindsight?), but if your strategy for attracting new voters is to dismiss your current voters (who still appear to comprise a majority of the country, by the by) as (by implication) not “real voters,” then you need to find a new strategy.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 