Which states do we target, and how do we target them?
I say to go back into the Blue Wall states. We barely lost them in 2024. We shouldn’t just throw up our hands in Wisconsin, PA, and Michigan. We still have Democrats that get elected to state-wide office in all 3 of those states.
Next, we need to really make a push in North Carolina and Georgia. There are large urban areas with black voters, that make them competitive. Biden won Georgia in 2020. NC has a Democratic Governor. Georgia has two Democratic Senators. We need something to push over the line there and make them blue.
Somehow, I would love to make Ohio and Iowa competitive again. Until 2016, we were always competitive there. Admittedly, I don’t know much about those states, except that they became “lost” to the Dems in recent elections.
And finally, maybe Nevada is lost to us now. But I’d like to know what happened there, and if there’s a hope of getting it back in the blue column for POTUS. We have 2 Senators who are Democrats. So, it can’t be totally lost to us.
Exactly how we start flipping, I’m not sure. But we have to start thinking state strategy, then tactics. It could be that we’re in for more losses to the MAGA machine in the near future. But let’s start in 2026. We are competitive in the House. We start there, and see what happens.
There are two significant issues here. The first is that working class voters in previously solid ‘blue’ states (quite justifiably) feel neglected by the Democratic party which has been chasing corporate money and ignoring labor since the Bill Clinton era. While Trump is no real friend to labor, he makes sympathetic mouth noises and ‘talks tough’ about imposing tariffs to bring back jobs, and while his rhetoric is as much bullshit as his policies, he is not entirely wrong in using the power of the federal government to impose some ‘protectionist’ measures to shore up American occupational opportunities. Of course, this means more expensive labor and thus more expensive products but the offshoring and globalization of trade is part and parcel of the ‘enshittification’ and loss of quality in many inexpensive foreign-made products, and the inability of American companies to produce high tech goods like 7nm microprocessors and MEMS/NEMS devices is a genuine national security threat only recently and partially addressed by the CHIPS and Science Act.
The second is the ‘culture wars’ nonsense, which despite being almost purely manufactured outrage, hits at an emotional level that logical debate doesn’t touch. Frankly, that so many people are so outraged about how other people live even while hypocritically demanding their own ‘freedom from government tyranny’ tells you everything you need to know about how fear-driven this kind of scapegoating is. For all of the recent criticism about how ‘woke’ the military is about accepting transgender and gay people, the reality is that the DoD didn’t do this out of ‘wokeness’ but because they are having an increasingly desperate time recruiting qualified people, and it is a career field that young people can get into even if they don’t ‘fit in’ or have the means for college or corporate life, and that many join to escape from terrible family situations, and many go on to serve with distinction despite some deep prejudice within military ranks. The general Democratic response to losing is that they should abandon ‘progressive’ positions to try to appeal to the ever-declining middle even though that means alienating a significant and motivated base, which isn’t just wrong on principle but pragmatically stupid.
As for ‘flipping’ red states, acknowledge that what has happened in coal country and the post-industrial ‘Rust Belt’ has been devastating, and at least in part of failed policies, and find ways to appeal on grassroots campaigning and bring useful industry instead of telling former autoworkers and coal miners that they need to learn web design and app coding if they want to keep earning a living. Which is a lesson you would think the Democrats would have learned twenty years ago but they mostly keep pushing the same buttons on an electoral vending machine that is clearly out of soda.
Thanks, Stranger. It was kinda sorta rhetorical; my sis who lives in the middle of red town has always said “I hate Vegas, but thank my lucky stars they make NV blue.” She’s been talking for a couple of years about “all the damned Californians moving there” which pretty much explains it.
Feck, I can’t even formulate a cohesive thought because my psyche is so inundated with anger, fear, disbelief and despair.
When I moved to Montana 16 years ago, it was solidly a purple state. They’d had a number of recent Democrat governors and while the state legislature was majority republican, it had a fairly large number of democrats. The combination of a Democrat governor and Republican congress kept things in balance, and required everyone to work toward a middle-ground to get anything done. (It was unlike Wyoming to the south, which is solid red and always will be.) But things have changed. Now there is a super-majority Republican legislature and a Republican governor, and I don’t see any progressive or liberal movement anymore. I think the DNC simply ignored Montana which gave Republicans an opportunity to take it, plus the challenges of living in a large rural state dependent on natural resource are very different than those of the big cities, and it was clear what mattered most to the Dems.
Also, Hispanics tend towards more religious and socially conservative. This is a big part of why they moved towards Trump, and they are a growing part of the population.
Both Texas and Florida were closer in the election than Ohio was. Noises have been made for years about flipping them, and nothing ever happens even in state elections.
Yet, all the large cities are solidly blue. They complain loudly against the oppressive laws the legislatures pass to appease the rural MAGA crowd. Women organized themselves magnificently in 2024; they need to repeat this on every level.
And both states have growing populations, meaning that many newcomers have not firmly assimilated into local norms.
Florida especially will be increasingly devastated by hurricanes and coastal flooding. Texas will see some damage as well, in the Galveston/Houston area. They can’t pretend to ignore climate change forever while the state is washed away under their feet.
Dems can’t campaign on past issues; they have to look to the future. They also have to find some emotional issues to speak to the majority. Moderates and liberals are 70% of the party; progressives are 15% and not as reliable voters. Finding a platform that would speak to both would be gold, but that would take an exceptional politician to do so.
Florida used to be a mixed bag, a true purple state. But it’s now solidly red.
I feel like Texas is do-able. But it’s “felt” that way for a long time, and still remains out of our grasp. It feels like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown every election.
Texas has become a go-to destination for “Left Coasties” who think that California, Oregon, and Washington are too liberal and hostile to business. While I don’t know that this alone has really shifted the demographics, it certainly seems that Texas has shifted solidly to the right int he last three decades with the prominent ‘blueberry’ of liberal-ish Austin. I think Texas is pretty much a lost cause for the foreseeable future.
The Rust Belt and Appalachian states that used to be solidly blue are far more fungible but bringing them back into competitive territory means somehow taking control of culture war issues that the Democratic party has and continues to flomp on because they don’t understand how to make emotional appeals, as well as revitalizing their industrial economies with jobs that don’t require taking on five figures or more of college debt.
Deportation efforts are going to hit Texas hard. The administration’s quasi-concentration camps are going to be located along the border, where there is already anger about the way immigration is handled.
And every week, it seems, another Handmaid’s Tale policy is passed by the state. The Leg, as Molly Ivins used to call it, is aiming for a true theocracy, pleasing a small minority.
Texas is always too tempting to ignore, as you say, but it’s fragmented internally. Flipping it would also provide a manual for flipping other states. The prize is too important to write off.
Liberals have been talking about Texas being on the verge of becoming a swing state since at least the second Bush administration. But with the recent shift in voting trends among Hispanics, especially in South Texas, the state, unfortunately, is destined to remain reliably red for at least another generation.
For sure, Biden reached out to organized labor in ways previous Democratic candidates in the last thirty years have not, and charactering him as “labor-friendly” is a cromulent description, but the problem is that there isn’t a lot of basic industry left in those states, and the influence of labor unions has waned so much that reaching out to unions alone doesn’t bring a lot of pull. These areas need new industry for jobs and revitalization, and while Biden pushed the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act“ as part of a new wave of ‘green jobs’, it just didn’t produce jobs quickly enough to move the needle, and unfortunately the labor voters have also been propagandized significantly by the branding of anything ‘green’, energy efficient, or connected as ‘climate change’ as a conspiracy taking away their livelihoods.
The Lincoln Project ran all kinds of ads of this type, contrasting Trump and other MAGA Republican’s words with their deeds and results, and as far as I can tell it accomplished fuck-all at changing anyone’s mind about politics, so I doubt it would do so on such a trenchant issue as anthropogenic climate change. People have decided that they just don’t believe in climate change or that extreme weather catastrophes are a consequence of injecting massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and frankly, business interests and influential allies wouldn’t let governments do anything effective about it even if there were popular support, so that entire argument is lost regardless of facts in evidence, and will become even more difficult to present as the Trumpists concertedly shut down climate modeling and earth surveillance programs.
I feel like put up signs at the border crossings
Texans: Wyoming is that way (arrow points north)
Californians: New Mexico is that way (arrow points south)
Yeah, the sheer size of it makes me want to always put effort into it.
The bottom line is the Democrats need a presence in every state. Even if we have a small chance of winning a POTUS vote in a state, we could maybe pick up some seats in the House in a down-ballot race, or maybe a Governorship, or maybe a Senate seat.
There’s value in “trying” in all states. And honestly, if we’re visible in a state and in its communities, you never know when our time could come in a POTUS race. Prior to 2020, I never would have put Georgia in play really.
I think the last DNC chair with a real 50 state presence was Howard Dean. He helped get Obama elected. There’s been talk about 50 states since, but more is needed.