The News: Smart ALEC, Diffident Democrats

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

President Biden seemed to shift gears this week towards securing future elections and protecting the rights of voters. I have to confess that I’m one of those folks who have been nearly going nuts waiting for him and the Democratic Party leadership to take a more active and sustained interest in this issue.

I don’t think their slow start has been just a matter of trying to delicately manage any negotiations with two nominally Democratic Senators, both of whom appear to have little interest in election security or voting rights, for their possible assent to legislation on this issue.

It’s also a further revelation of a basic problem with the Democratic Party that the party at the national level doesn’t have much of a handle on. It may be that it’s not a problem they can solve fully. But I think they could do better.

It became a bit of conventional wisdom among pundits that President Obama had little interest in Congressional politics and left that to House and Senate Democrats to work out, and that similarly, as leader of his party, abandoned any effort to sustain a “50 State Strategy”. I think that’s a fair observation about the Democratic Party for the whole of the 21st Century but I don’t think it’s a pattern that is just a result of Obama’s personality or preferences. If anything, I think he was just conceding to the perceived reality of the Democratic coalition. After all, Biden has touted himself as an expert in managing legislative politics and he really has not been strikingly more successful in building any kind of coalition capable of delivering major legislation in a reliable way.

The problem is that the spatial distribution of American political power disfavors the Democrats in a fundamental way. This is not uniquely a consequence of American federalism—this has become a significant issue in many other nation-states where there is some form of distribution of representation that allows rural areas, smaller deindustrialized cities, and regions whose political economy offers more limited or constrained links to globalized networks some allotment of political power that is bigger than their populations or economic centrality.

The Democrats have strong support in many large cities and in some of their suburbs, and an edge in popular votes both nationwide and in states where one or more cities has enough of a population to swamp the rest of the state’s population. But that means they often struggle to hold majorities in a significant number of state legislatures and to build effective coalitions that can claim many local and county elections.

Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” politics, his strategy of triangulation, was premised on the idea that if the Democrats appropriated some of the signature issues of Reagan Republicans, they might win back some fraction of the white electorate that had moved over to the GOP—hence, “tough on crime” legislation, ending “welfare as we know it”, and so on. At the same time, they hoped to hold on to or increase their share of the suburban vote by encouraging financialization of the economy and exposing the national economy to globalization. I think we know how well that worked out. It didn’t broaden the Democratic base and it freed the Republicans to move even further to the right.

It may have seemed pragmatic after that point to not invest any effort trying to maintain a strong presence in counties and states where the Democrats were simply not competitive. But that pragmatism facilitated the GOP’s nationally-coordinated plans to control redistricting in their favor and it left little to counter the Koch Brother’s heavy investment in organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helped GOP state legislators all over the country to coordinate with the national party and to pass legislation that further strengthened their political dominance at the state level.

That’s the infrastructure that the Trumpian GOP has inherited and can use now to systematically subvert voting in any state where national or statewide elections are close. That’s the landscape where the national leadership of the Democratic Party still isn’t really paying close attention—it continues to trust that the institutions which protected the 2020 election from being turned into a coup d’etat will continue to protect future outcomes in the last instance, if national-level legislation proves impossible to pass.

What drives me nuts about this is that in many of those ostensibly ‘red’ counties, Democratic voters still make up 40-45% of the county’s electorate, and those are often some of the bigger and potentially influential counties. Look at the PA map. Ok, for example, Trump carried Bedford County by 83%, Fulton County by 85%. Not a lot of love there, not a lot of opportunity for Democrats. On the other hand, there were only 27,000 people voting in Bedford in 2020, only 8,000 people voting in Fulton total. 280,000 people voted in Lancaster County, and while Trump won it, about 41% of the votes went to Biden.

That’s a lot of people who can be present in a great many meaningful ways that are politically consequential. They can be at school board meetings, at zoning board meetings, at county hearings. They can support businesses—or boycott them. They can be visible in public life. And they often are, but the national Democratic Party often doesn’t seem to fully know how to connect to them, to funnel resources to them, or to make use of them strategically in a nationally coordinated way.

There are already mechanisms for keeping an eye on the vote, for keeping attention on local officials, for making business owners aware that they need to stay open to all the customers they can get and to keep things from tilting out of control, for demanding transparency, for filing lawsuits to impede unlawful action. What the Democrats need is to be pushing money and attention through something as coherent and coordinated as ALEC has been for the GOP. They need to be present again as a locally-meaningful national party even when they’re outnumbered, to make Democrats everywhere feel as if they are not alone—and as they are not just waiting for King Manchin and Queen Sinema to issue some proclamation.

Plan as if no national legislation is coming. That’s what the GOP is doing, and has been doing since November of 2020 as a backup plan even if Trump’s brazen coup plans didn’t come off. Waiting for coordinated federal legal authority to make things happen is another bad mistake after three decades full of them.

"Joe Biden Accepts the Nomination for the Democratic Party's Ticket for President of the United States - Wilmington, DE - August 20, 2020" by Biden For President is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0