Position-Taking is Not the Problem
By Rich Yeselson’s midterm postmortem should be read in its entirety. I’d particularly like to highlight this:
Based on number five, it would seem that Meyerson makes a strong point: Democrats need to act like, at the least, a party of leftist populism in order to galvanize its core constituency of the young, single women, and people of color, increase turnout, and more fully resist the GOP extremists. The problem is that while this is the right thing to do normatively, there is no particular evidence it would be that effective politically. The Democratic senators who got beat ran ahead of Obama’s approval percentage in their states. And a lot of them got killed.
It’s not the 1930s anymore — white people in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Arkansas despise anything that reminds them of the national Democratic party, which they already think is socialist as it is. They don’t want it to move left, they think it’s grotesquely left enough.
It was craven for Alison Grimes to not even say whether she voted for Obama, but there’s no social science or historical evidence that would indicate most Americans are intensely interested — as a matter of voter-motivated preference — in greater union bargaining rights, redistributive public programs, and the taxes that would be needed to pay for them.
This cuts the other way, too — Grimes probably didn’t gain much by running away from Obama and especially the ACA, since she’s tied with both anyway, so you might as well try to make a positive case (especially when many people in your state are benefiting from the Medicaid expansion.) But the idea that voters in most of the states where the Democrats lost are looking for full-throated left-wing populism is dreaming in technicolor. The number of voters in these races who don’t like Obama because they don’t think he’s liberal enough are essentially a rounding error. Enacting populist economic policies could well have substantial political benefits (although as the passage of the most important progressive legislation in nearly five decades shows, maybe not), but politicians talking about them more won’t.