Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:
Misplaced focus on unpopular social policies drives voters away from the Democratic Party and mobilizes Republicans. Democrats used to be the working class party, but today they are seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, paralyzing the police and injecting social justice into math classes.
As a result, Westwood continued,
Unsurprisingly, this is unrelated to a working family struggling to pay rising grocery bills. By giving up their core brand, even Democrats who oppose police definancing are saddled with the party’s commitment to unpopular social policies.
The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he claimed, Democrats
have decided to spread the party’s fringe messages around issues that fail to gain majority support. Perhaps the most successful disinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the grassroots Democratic Party. The Twitter crowd plans to push social policies that have about zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you’re in favor of lowering middle-class taxes, immigration reforms, and raising the minimum wage, resisting defunding the police or legalizing property crimes makes you an unreasonable pariah.
Along the same lines, John Halpin, who works with Teixeira as co-editor of The Liberal Patriot, emailed to say that
the biggest problem leading up to the 2022 midterms is that voters don’t think Biden and the Democrats are focused on the issues that matter most to them. If you look at the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, Democrats are currently running a double-digit deficit compared to Republicans in perceptions about which party is best able to tackle nearly all the issues that matter most. for voters: for example, rebuilding the economy (–13), controlling inflation (–17), reducing crime (–20) and border control (–26). Democratic gains on things like education are also significantly lower than they were a few years ago.
There are political analysts who differ greatly from Westwood and Teixeira in their critique of Democratic strategy.
Will Bunch, a liberal columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that Democrats should go full steam ahead, damn-the-torpedoes. In a March 3 column, Bunch claimed that the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s still casts “a cloud of doubt over the Democratic Party” and that
party messaging remains largely dominated by reaction and fear rather than boldness. Those fears seem rooted in a panic that progressive values will be seen as less American-when the reality is that ideas like academic freedom, the prevention of censorship and a belief in research, including science, are the core beliefs of this nation. It is time for President Biden and other Democratic Party leaders to adopt this message.
I asked Bunch how a Democratic candidate should appeal to working-class white voters and socially conservative black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters. He replied by email:
The white working class is a much more diverse group than commentators on all sides tend to believe. Consider the large turnout for Black Lives Matter marches in isolated Rust Belt and rural communities in 2020, for example, and many in the working class remain ardently pro-union. I think the biggest cause of resentment is the lack of education and related career opportunities that have excluded the working class of all races. The Democrats have been philosophically wired to expand these opportunities — through a free community college and trade school, for example — but have failed to make this a priority, leaving a sense that the Democrats are now the party. of self-enlightened diploma holders who look down on them. That cycle can and must be broken.
I also asked how a Democrat should counter Republicans who exploit critical race theory, the police, affirmative action, transgender rights and other political divisions.
Bos replied:
It’s important to reframe the conversations so that the debate about schools, for example, isn’t about critical race theory (a construct taught only in law schools) but about banning books or banning teachers from even talking about Martin. Luther King of Rosa Parks, which most voters in the wide middle are vehemently opposed. Likewise, Democrats need to make it clear that their goal is to make streets safer and end the heartbreak of murder, but the way to do that is to carefully build safer communities and stop wasting more taxpayers’ money on botched police methods. The best positive action strategy, at least in education, is to make higher education a public good again and eliminate the current “hunger games” of college admission.
Dan Froomkin, a media critic writing for Press Watch, argued in an email that Republicans are using a collection of fabricated problems with little substantive value. On critical race theory, for example, he wrote:
It’s a fake issue. What far-right Republicans mean by “critical race theory” is that white children in public schools are taught to be ashamed of being white. This is a made-up issue that serves as a stalking horse for inciting white complaints. Like so many of the far-right accusations against their opponents, it really couldn’t be less true. The reality is that public schools that write big don’t teach nearly enough about the sordid aspects of American history or culture, as you well know. As a press critic, I’m horrified at how gullible many political reporters have written about Republican lies — and how impressed they were with their alleged (but completely unproven) effectiveness. They wrote about it as if it were a real problem, rather than an obvious, bad-faith attempt to cause white panic.
The prospect of Democratic losses in the House of Representatives will have ideological consequences for both parties.
Halpin pointed out that the Democrats who lose seats in Congress in 2022 will certainly be drawn disproportionately from the moderates who struggle most to win reelection in purple districts:
If Democrats get beat up this fall, it will be mostly frontline members — those who are more moderate and centrist — who lose their seats, paving the way for a minority Democratic party to become even more left-wing. This would be a disaster for Democrats, but no one in the party seems willing to face it.
Matt Bennett, the executive vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, cited a big difference now compared to previous midterm elections, writing in an email:
Republicans at every level are openly planning to steal the presidency in 2024, as we describe here. A vital part of their plot is to gain control of Congress. That means the future prospects of both the Democratic Party and American democracy could be seriously damaged by a loss in 2022.
The Congressional Republicans, Bennett continued,
those who resisted Trump’s attack on democracy are now counting in the single digits, and most of them are retiring or likely to lose in the primaries. The candidates who would give them their majority are, almost to one person, completely committed to the big lie Trump won in 2020. legal protection (other than the Second Amendment) and disregard for vital governance standards. Worst of all, they have committed to unwavering support for Donald Trump, who has devoted his entire post-presidency effort and comeback to an attack on voting. By putting his acolytes at the head of Congress, we could fly to the cliff and jeopardize the future of the world’s oldest and strongest democracy.
Bennett warned:
While the economy continues to influence voter behavior the most, Republicans have been able to weaponize cultural warfare issues in ways that significantly hurt Democrats. In a major look back at the 2020 congressional elections that Third Way ran along with the Collective PAC and Latino Victory Fund, we found that Republican efforts to brand Democrats as radicals worked devastatingly well. Of the 12 Democratic freshmen who lost the previous cycle — on a ticket with a winning presidential candidate — all were seriously injured in cultural warfare attacks.
This democratic accountability has become acute as politics has been nationalized, forcing all Democrats to pay a price for what a small but prominent group is pushing for:
Members of Congress on the far left have taken a range of stances — such as relieving the police, abolishing immigration and customs enforcement, closing federal prisons, decriminalizing border crossings, etc. — that are politically toxic in swing districts. It is no longer the case that what happens in a deep blue neighborhood, where these kinds of ideas are perhaps more palatable, stays there. The fact is, ideas and slogans like this create the impression among swing voters that Democrats are outside the mainstream.
John Lawrence, who served as an aide in the House for 38 years, including eight as Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, is the kind of party strategist hardly anyone outside of Washington has heard of, but who is extremely knowledgeable about the state of American politics.
Lawrence replied by email to my question:
I think many voters will use 2022 to remind Biden (and Democrats, because they can’t vote against him) that their vote in 2020 was a vote to return to normalcy, not a blank check to build on the New Deal and Great Society. Once in office — albeit by ridiculously narrow margins — Democrats used the crisis to swing into the stands, ignoring the historic lesson of the Senate’s moderating role. So they created the worst of all worlds: not carrying out what the grassroots demanded (but they didn’t have the votes to deliver) and appearing that they had gone too far and invited an electoral haircut by many 2020 supporters who have never embraced such a drastic change. agenda.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine makes the future very uncertain, not only in Europe, but around the world. Likewise, albeit less violently, the state of the economy, inflation and Covid’s trajectory fuel controversy and remain unpredictable.
The historical pattern of midterm contests suggests that a rejection of the party in power is the usual course of action. But the fallout from a Republican takeover of the House or either arm of Congress is unlikely to be routine. What we can be sure of is that Democrats can’t go on forever with such a huge gap between what the majority of progressive party activists think the party should stand for and what the majority of Americans think it should. should.
