If you have managed to pay even moderate attention to U.S. politics since the election, and not made the reasonable choice to take a time-out after the deeply exhausting November elections, you have probably heard of how some Democrats are voicing disappointment in the overall results despite Joe Biden’s decisive popular vote victory. The Democrats lost seats in the House, lost Senate races they were confident they would win, and failed to make many gains in state house races across the country. In some places, Democrats lost ground with white working class voters despite those very workers failing to benefit under President Trump; received a smaller share of Latino votes than expected; and saw the president outperform his previous urban vote share.
Such results were certainly below many Democrats’ expectations, and require study and debate to figure out the reasons for the distance between hope and reality. But a report in the Washington Post describes how some in the Democratic Party are prematurely converting these disappointments into portents of coming disaster:
Those warning signs have dampened the celebratory mood among Democrats enthusiastic about dispatching Trump. Party strategists now speak privately with a sense of gloom and publicly with a tone of concern as the election results become clearer.
They worry about the potential emergence of a mostly male and increasingly interracial working-class coalition for Republicans that will cut into the demographic advantages Democrats had long counted on. They speculate that the tremendous Democratic gains in the suburbs during the Trump years might fade when he leaves office. And they fret that their inability to make inroads in more rural areas could forestall anything but the most narrow Senate majority in the future.
While the challenges and threats are hardly figments of their imagination, my 10,000-foot-view on the fears expressed by Democratic strategists in this article and elsewhere is that they trace back to the fact that American politics is in a time of both conflict and transition not seen for perhaps half a century. Such a scenario would be particularly unsettling to those who have spent much of their professional careers with a more static and glacially-paced internal model of how American politics operates. For instance, while hardly all Democrats believe that demographic changes will eventually deliver greater and greater political power to Democrats, I do think that many, if not most Democrats, have assumed such trends as part of their overall understanding of American politics. Even if you only have this trend as one of your reference points, it is admittedly unsettling to see elections results suggesting, for instance, that Latino voters not only aren’t automatically going to vote for Democrats in decisive numbers, but that they also voted for a president who many Democrats think couldn’t have been clearer in his contempt towards Latinos and other minorities.
I think the dominant undercurrent of the Post article is the perceived tension between a Democratic Party that appeals to minority voters but that can also appeal to white voters. This tension, created in large part by demographic changes that are steadily reducing white people’s majority status in the country, is unavoidable for the party, and is indeed a fault line in American society and politics, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s ability to leverage white fears into the first white supremacist presidency of the modern era.
I also think that some Democrats have had unrealistic expectations of what it’s going to take, and how long it’s going to take, to bring white working-class voters back into the Democratic Party after a schism between this voting block and the party that has been going on, and grown, for literally decades. Many of these voters live in conservative news bubbles that subject them to undisguised propaganda, including reinforcing perceptions that their economic and status challenges in life are due to non-whites taking over the country. From this perspective, even no-brainer Democratic “messaging” ideas like running ads where rural whites make appeals to rural whites must fight against deeply-established perceptions that the Democrats don’t care about white or working people. And to dismiss Donald Trump’s role in legitimizing white supremacist politics among millions of voters, or to think that this Klan-robed genie can be stuffed back in the bottle after a single election cycle, only increases the sense of disappointment when white voters fail to respond sufficiently to Democrats’ messaging on economic issues.
I think Democrats who are panicking at election results would be well-served by taking a step back and looking at the big picture. Democrats won the presidency against an incumbent president, not an easy feat, particularly when the incumbent worked nonstop during the election to subvert the American people’s faith that voting can make a difference. The Democrats lost seats, but held the House. The Senate was always going to be difficult to win, given its over-representation of white, rural (i.e., GOP-leaning) states — and there is still a chance that they will win the run-offs in Georgia and control the Senate after all.
Getting too deep into the nitty-gritty of the election results also risks losing sight of the fact that, through vote suppression and gerrymandering, the GOP has rigged elections to give them a built-in advantage. In states like North Carolina and Michigan, the number of Democrats elected to the House are not in proportion to the size of the Democrats’ vote. Likewise, agonizing over the Senate, while understandable, is self-defeating when Democrats ignore the fact that Democratic candidate for Senate won many millions more votes than did GOP candidates. To internalize these factors as Democratic failures, rather than as decisive reasons to rally the American people to the party against an authoritarian GOP in future elections, is truly self-defeating.
What I am getting at is that worried Democrats need to have the courage of their convictions. If you believe that major elements of the Democratic agenda are the right ones for America, then you need to have faith that you can persuade people of them. Thinking about the Latino vote presents a major case of how a little perspective might help. While there is nothing pre-ordained about a diverse group of people — both immigrants and natural-born citizens, with roots in dozens of countries with a broad range of cultures and politics — overwhelmingly choosing to vote for Democrats, the Democrats have surely appealed to many of these voters by being a party that fights far more strongly for racial equality and immigrant rights than the GOP. At the same time, it is not at all wild that many Latino voters might choose to vote for the GOP — for instance, because they oppose abortion or don’t agree with amnesty for undocumented immigrants when they themselves followed the letter of the law in coming to the United States. Clearly the Democrats have made some stupid, unforced errors in too often treating Latinos as a monolithic voting block that has no choice but to vote for Democrats; but nothing is stopping the Democrats from learning from their mistakes and redoubling their efforts to win Latino voters based on the fact that on multiple fronts, the Democrats will work to improve their lives in ways that the GOP would never do.
The Post article talks to strategists who think the Democrats need to communicate in more authentic ways to voters (particularly white voters) about their economic needs. As the Ohio state Democratic chairman argues, “We need to go right into these small towns and tell them what the Democratic agenda is for them and why it will lift them. Until we do that, we will be on defense.” And Democratic Representative Tim Ryan tells the Post that the “Democratic brand [. . .] is completely disconnected from workers,” with the Post noting that Ryan “argues for a far more targeted economic message, promising a tax cut for the middle class, infrastructure spending and a new manufacturing agenda.”
But even more important than straight talk is actually delivering economic results. The Democrats can already rightly make the case that the last two Republican presidents have created economic disasters; but what they also have to do is actually reverse those disasters and improve all Americans’ lives. Working to deliver substantial, concrete results to ordinary Americans is the existential requirement for Democrats right now. Alongside strengthening our voting systems to roll back Republican sabotage of elections and voting rights, there really is no other way forward. Fussing and worrying about small shifts in voting preferences, and acting as if Democrats have no deep appeal or ability to persuade Americans, is a foolish distraction from what will truly decide the fate of the Democrats and the direction of American politics over the coming years.