How Can Democrats Build Support in Red States When No One Know What Democrats Did?

You know what is key to winning? Good old-fashioned propaganda. But good government liberal types generally hate stuff like this. But if you go back to the New Deal, FDR engaged in the kind of brand of personal propaganda matched only since by Donald Trump. It was in public art, movies, popular music, basically all parts of life. Everyone knew what FDR had done for them and if you hated FDR, you hated him like we hate Trump today. He was a threat to everything America stood for and you thought he was the equivalent of pre-war Hitler or Stalin. That’s not to equate FDR and Donald Trump except in one way, which is that both very much understood the appeal of personalist politics. Sure, Trump may be lying when he takes credit for infrastructure Biden created. Not that lying ever bothered him. But Biden opened the door to that by making sure that no one knew what he had done with the infrastructure bill. Even the signs about it always said the “bipartisan infrastructure bill,” as if that was going to get Democrats a single vote ever. Just a complete failure of vision, one far too common for the Democratic Party on strictly political matters for a long time.

I have no idea whether actually telling people Joe Biden was giving them good jobs would make much difference in hardcore Republican places. But I will say this–you sure as hell won’t if they have no idea what Biden has done for them. What that means is that they might be bummed to be losing a job based on Trump’s actions, but they have no idea that it was Biden who had given them that job in the first place:

It was not supposed to be this way. Democrats built the clean energy tax credits into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which they passed without any Republican votes. Since then, nearly 80 percent of the $843 billion in new electric vehicle factories, battery plants and solar and wind projects has flowed to Republican-led districts, something Democrats believed would insulate the tax credits from politics.

But in Cedartown, many people interviewed said they’d never heard of the Inflation Reduction Act and did not connect it to the Solarcycle factory. Some of those who had heard about the law described it as wasteful spending.

“They spent billions of dollars on the wind, and it didn’t work,” said Miller Green, 93, who had stopped in at the Polk County Historical Society Museum with his wife. She admonished him to stop talking about politics.

It seems unlikely that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican whose northwest Georgia district includes Cedartown, will face any political blowback from voting to eliminate the clean energy tax breaks that Solarcycle was banking on.

“We’re still at the point where the economic benefits are still pretty vague,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization. “It’s not like the factory has been a staple of the town for a generation.”

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That’s something Tyler Grimes said he had found, too. Mr. Grimes, who is Solarcycle’s facility manager, grew up in Alabama. His parents were raised in Polk County, and his grandfather was a pastor at two churches in the area.

“Everybody that’s from Cedartown, or from the community I’m from, they go off to college and get an engineering degree, and then they stay around Atlanta and Birmingham,” Mr. Grimes said. “This is an opportunity for a technology company to come to Cedartown and keep some of that brainpower that’s from here.”

Edward Guzman, Cedartown’s city manager, said the promise of the Solarcycle factory had lured other investments. New townhouses are being built, and Mr. Guzman said the city was in discussions with a “large-scale commercial development” that was not yet public.

At the Solarcycle offices, Rob Vinje, the chief operating officer, recently received word that the company’s plant in Odessa, Texas, can now handle the recycling of one million aging and battered solar panels each year.

The Cedartown factory, he said, will be able to process 10 million annually, or about 28,000 panels a day. And then in a circular process, it will use the materials to make new solar glass, diverting the supply chain from China, which currently provides about 80 percent of the glass used in solar panels.

“Rather than buy it from China, let’s go employ people from Cedartown, Ga., and go make glass domestically,” Mr. Vinje said. He estimated that the company could start hiring in July, but for the uncertainty around the Republican tax bill.

“If you told me tomorrow that President Trump said ‘Everything’s OK,’ we are shovel ready,” Mr. Vinje said. “We are ready to roll.”

Of course, this is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s north Georgia district, so we can question how much of a difference it would make when the population is this far to the right. But what is clear is that people are certainly ready to hear someone tell them that the jobs are ready and they want to credit someone. Maybe they wouldn’t have credited Biden if they even really knew it. But they don’t all have to do so. It wouldn’t take that many to have swung Georgia to Harris. When we are talking about strategies to pull Democrats back into power, we can dismiss them because they won’t change the minds of most people. That’s true, but they don’t per se have to. Even FDR only won more than 60% of the popular vote once.

In any case, one thing the Democrats absolutely must invest in for the future is nakedly obvious propaganda, FDR and Trump style.