The racial divide works against the Democrats in the South. The Republican majority of white voters outweighs the Democratic majority of black voters.
But the Republicans are vulnerable on the gender divide. On a national level, the majority of women vote Democratic. And that’s the group southern Democrats have to reach. If the Democrats can split white women voters off from white male voters, they can retake the south.
A few, anyway. Chattooga County in Georgia, for example, still elects Democrats at the local level, despite voting Republican in state and national elections.
However, that last bastion may be crumbling. Following the most recent election the local Democratic Party publicly “excommunicated” the “Democratic” county commissioner because he was actively working for Republican candidates. So I expect he’ll run as a Republican next time, which will probably be the catalyst for some or all of the other local Democratic politicians to switch party affiliation.
I think we have to use the presidency as the engine to pull the whole train. The key to success in the state and local level is to have success in statewide elections in years that end in zero. Then if you control the state house, you control redistricting. The Republicans won the House in 2012 not by getting the most votes (they didn’t) but by gerrymandering their way in. The whole trouble started with Democratic failure to defend Obamacare against the continuous smear campaign against it in 2009-10, allowing Republicans to create a groundswell of opposition to what should have been a popular program. They rode this to victory in 2010, and took advantage of that to put their thumb on the electoral scale for a decade.
The way to end this is to take advantage of the every 20 year presidential election that takes place in a year ending in zero in 2020. If Hillary performs well and leads a popular re-election campaign, she can pull enough state and local Dems to victory with her and undo the GOP gerrymandering.
From the article:
This is exactly the wrong diagnosis of the recent election. Many of the Democrat Senators who lost were business-friendly conservatives, while the Blue Dogs in the House have dwindled to a mere 11 (compared to 54 prior to the 2010 election). The takeaway IMO is voters will choose a staunch Republican over a Democrat trying to be Republican-lite. Compare that to Democratic winners like Al Franken and Tom Udall, strong progressives who faced a ton of right-wing money and came from states (MN and NM) which–though not as conservative as the South–aren’t exactly reliably blue either.
And as for dismissing “Elizabeth Warren-style confrontational populism”…progressives didn’t win marriage equality or immigration reform by playing nice, and today these are fairly mainstream positions despite the Republican caterwauling. Confrontation–and the political power to back up your threats–is what gets action out of Washington, and voters seem to like that. IMO the fact that various referenda for minimum-wage increases won handily even in red states like Arkansas should make it a no-brainer position for Democrats to champion as a national policy. It certainly would be “confrontational populism”, but it also has the advantage of being more of a winner than yet another mealy-mouthed Democrat working hand-in-glove with the business community.
This is accurate on the facts, but uselessly vague on the strategy. “Women” are too big and diverse group to target effectively.
The Dems advantage on women is wholly due to single, and especially urban single women, who go dem overwhelmingly. Married women, nationally, are usually about 50/50. Obviously, that can be changed, but just doubling down on the traditional “women’s issues” that Dems focus on likely won’t get it done.
It needs the industrial midwest though, and while Obama carried most of them, future Democrats won’t if Democrats continue to see their standing among working class whites degrade.
And the Republicans that lose the most are liberal Republicans, which tells us what?
When moderates of either party lose, it’s because they failed to be independent and went along with the wishes of the majority or their President too much. I believe that a staunch liberal is going to do better in red states than someone with no principles. I also believe a staunch conservative Democrat can do better in red states than a Democrat with no principles. Jon Manchin will probably never have anything to worry about, because he is actually independent, whereas Pryor, Hagan, and Landrieu were rubber stamps for Harry Reid and Barack Obama. They’d only pick small issues to vote with the Republicans on to demonstrate a faux independence. Manchin’s a guy that if he’d been the 60th vote needed to pass ACA, he probably would have voted it down with a smile.
lolwut. Pryor, Hagan, and Landrieu have all been opposed to the Obama administration in varying ways throughout their terms. Pryor, let it be noted, voted against the Affordable Care Act-the very centrepiece of the Obama administration’s legislative accomplishments! You are right you need Democrats with principles and the problem is most of the Blue Dogs far too right-wing on economic issues when they need to double down on economic populism while touting their social conservatism in a strategic manner.
Pryor did not vote against ACA. If he had, it wouldn’t have passed. They found little issues to oppose the President on, stuff that was important locally, like Landrieu with the oil stuff.
The problem is that you can be liberal, you can be moderate, you can be conservative, and you can win. What you can’t be is a fake. The Senators that lost were conservative back home, liberal in DC.
Pryor voted for the PPACA in 2009; he then voted against the amendments to that bill (the changes done via reconciliation) in 2010.
I’d also like to note that Pryor was the only Democrat to vote against the “Buffet Rule” cloture in 2012 and was against the $10.10 minimum wage increase this past year.
That’s extremely specious, and belies a belief in the myth of the independent voter. Pryor lost because democratic voters stayed home; if this election does anything positive for the Dems, it should kill the idea that they can pick off enough republican leaners to compensate for an apathetic base. Most leaners (for both parties) will almost never vote for the other party; they’re just more likely to not vote than their staunch party-supporting counterparts.
Yes. The true believers are the ones who turn out in off-year elections.
Independents do turn out. In 2006, the Democrats also suffered from poor turnout. They won because independents overwhelmingly favored them. There is no “myth” about independent voters.
What happened in 2006 is simply that Republicans only one white voters by a mere 4 points. Minorities and young voters still failed to turn out.
What 2006 proves is that Democrats will get more mileage out of appealing to those persuadable voters than relying on their unreliable base.
Democrats who want to blame everything on racism need to ask themselves why Democrats are getting so throroughly pummelled in the South only NOW?
Some liberals like to point to LBJ’s alleged comment that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had delivered the South to the Republicans for the next 50 years… but if that were true, why were there still so many Southern Democrats in the Senate for decades after that Act was passed?
Louisiana elected Mary Landrieu to the Senate three times, starting in 1996. Until 2004, Louisiana hadn’t elected a Republican to the Senate since Reconstruction. Are we to believe the people of Louisiana have become MORE racist since 1964?
In 1986, Georgia elected liberal Democrat Wyche Fowler to the Senate. In 1996, they elected liberal Democrat Max Clelland. Has Georgia magically become more racist since then?
Arkansas elected liberal Democrats like J. William Fulbright and Dale Bumpers to the Senate until finally electing Republican John Boozman in 2010. Until 1997, they hadn’t elected a Republican Senator since Reconstruction.
Seems like it took a mighty long time for “racism” to start winning big elections in the SOuth.
A black president might speed up the process.
The demise of truly independent Democrats representing their state against the competing interests of DC has more to do with it. face it, the Southern Dems drank the Kool-Aid when they voted for ACA, and on the issues where they did disagree, Reid and Obama hung them out to dry by making sure those issues never came to a vote, lest it embarrass the President by forcing him to veto.
So it was fair for southern voters to ask, “What good are these Democrats? They either can’t, or won’t represent us.”
I’m not sure why Southern Voters wouldn’t appreciate their Senator voting for the ACA. That is, by definition, “representing their state.”
I’d say that’s up to southern voters.
You’re the one who suggested that this is why they are leaving the Democratic party. Certainly they *can *feel that way. But do they?
I don’t doubt that may voters declare themselves “independent”–mainly because nobody likes to be labeled. But, as has been proven repeatedly, most self-styled independents always vote for the same party; they are better characterized as closeted Dems/Reps.
The link you provide only breaks down the vote by percentages, which is not helpful. My contention is, for example, that the reason Dems did so well with Whites as a percentage in 2006 (48-52) because more Dem-leaning whites (and, conversely, fewer Rep-leaning whites) came out to vote in 2006. This is difficult to prove nation-wide–at least my Google-fu didn’t pull up any nationwide turnout numbers by party affiliation (that may be because many states do not require voter registration by party affiliation). The best I can say is look at 2014 Gallup polling for voter engagement by party affiliation (including leaners). The results correlate quite well with voting trends in each of the past 5 midterm elections.
A fair way to read this is, simply, that motivating your own favorable voters to vote is more effective than trying to persuade self-styled independents who, in truth, aren’t really persuadable. The Dem base isn’t unreliable, it’s dissatisfied with the Republican-lite choice presented. IMO offering a clear alternative would remove that dissatisfaction because polling on various liberal/progressive economic issues shows that a supermajority supports it.
So he voted for it, before he voted against it?
How does that work out for politicians, generally? cf. John Kerry