Where Should Democrats Go Now?

Since Democrats are, you know, in array, pundits now have to think about what that means. Of course Michael Tomasky is far better than your average pundit, so he’s thought seriously about this stuff for a long time. He has a long essay about the state of the party in the latest New York Review of Books and it is worth your time. The insights are interesting enough for a conversation here at least.

As for the Democrats, their responsibility these next two years will be to continue, without apology, on the economic path they’ve been pursuing—what Biden calls “middle-out economics.”

There is alas no data that I know of proving that Biden’s economic philosophy helped Democrats in this election. But it obviously didn’t hurt—although many commenters believed that inflation was going to destroy the Democrats and that Republicans were going to convince voters that Biden and the Democrats’ profligate ways were responsible for inflation. Most economists believe that Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan probably did contribute to inflation—Dean Baker, a prominent liberal economist, estimates that it accounted for 2 percentage points of the roughly 8 percent inflation figure—but note that inflation is higher in the eurozone.

Certainly, voters cared about inflation—but they cared about abortion and democracy, too. And maybe they also recognized Biden’s accomplishments. Ten-million-plus jobs gained in two years is a lot of jobs. The CHIPs and Science Act, passed in August, provides nearly $53 billion to boost chip manufacturing in the United States. Just the day after the election, a major chip supplier to Apple announced its intention to build a manufacturing facility in Arizona. These announcements don’t make CNN, but they sure make the local news, and people notice these developments, just like they notice all the highway construction happening on the nation’s interstates because of the infrastructure bill. Whether most people will connect enough dots to give Democrats credit is doubtful, at least while gas prices hover near four dollars a gallon. Of course, it is the Democrats’ job to connect those dots for people, a task to which they’ve often proved unequal. But if inflation is tamed and the economy is strong in the spring of 2024, Biden (or whoever) should be able to make a case to voters that an economic program that rewards work rather than wealth and that seeks to transfer wealth from the rich to the middle and working classes is succeeding.

It is with this perspective that I’m most relieved the much-trumpeted red wave failed to materialize. If it had, pundits and centrist Democrats would have argued that the results were proof that Biden overreached and went too far left. Today, no one is saying that. In fact, some Democrats in purple districts, such as Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger and Kansas’s Sharice Davids, won by embracing the Biden agenda rather than trying to separate themselves from it.

Spanberger’s victory was especially important, as well as telling. The former CIA officer, who became a vocal representative of the moderate faction of Democrats, holds a district that includes some Richmond suburbs but is mostly exurban and rural. It was represented by a very conservative Republican from 2000 to 2014, when he was defeated by an even more conservative Republican.Spanberger first won in 2018, beating the Republican incumbent by 1.9 percentage points. She was reelected in 2020 by 1.8 points. Virginia Republicans then targeted her in redistricting, making the district less familiar to her and drawing it in such a way that her home was no longer in it. Last year, she distanced herself from Biden, complaining, after Youngkin won the governor’s seat, that “no one elected [Biden] to be FDR.” Then this year, she stood up for the right to abortion and touted improvements to the district that derived from the infrastructure act. It helped her defeat her extremist MAGA opponent by 4 percent. A little FDR, she seems to have decided, wasn’t so bad after all.

This needs to be the Democrats’ message: that they are on the side of working people. They may not convince every working person, a critical mass of whom will always be drawn to Republican arguments about religion and guns and the Democrats’ alleged desire to force gender dysphoria upon the nation’s unsuspecting sixth graders. But broadcasting support for workers can draw enough voters to erase or at least mitigate the Republicans’ huge advantage among voters in America’s lower-population areas, which after all is where Democrats lose elections.

In Texas, for example, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who lost to GOP incumbent Greg Abbott by eleven points, won just 19 of the state’s 254 counties; in many of the counties he lost, tiny as they are, O’Rourke won less than 20 percent of the vote (in some, less than 10 percent). A Democrat who could win 35 percent of that vote could win a statewide election in Texas. Demonstrating to those people that the Democrats oppose Big Pharma and the tech monopolies—and in Texas specifically, the beef monopolies—is a path to that 35 percent.

That’s a long fight—it’s a struggle to make even most Democratic elected officials understand all that, let alone voters. But there are signs that some Democrats are rising above the party’s defensive, we’re-not-too-liberal posture of the past twenty years. Fetterman, for example, probably could not have won statewide in Pennsylvania twelve or sixteen years ago. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and was seen by some as “too left.” But he easily dispatched a more centrist opponent in the Democratic primary, meaning that the state’s Democratic voters judged him as electable in November. They ended up being correct. (Whereas Oz’s GOP primary opponent, Dave McCormick, was surely more electable than Oz, but he lost.)

Read the whole, etc.

Also, help me out here. If Biden was to blame for $5 gas, are we now supposed to credit him as our savior since gas is lower than it was a year ago and continuing to fall? The media is surprisingly silent on this now……