So it seems as if disaster was staved off in yesterday’s American elections. In a normal midterm, an unpopular President and a bad economy would have generally produced a big swing to the opposition party. But even where Republicans might win with an election-denying, QAnon-friendly lunatic like Kari Lake on the ballot, it’s plain that those kinds of candidates cost them readily achievable victories, and that other candidates (like Mehmet Oz) had to run too hard to the right in the primaries to make their last-minute conversion to moderation seem remotely plausible.
I don’t think the Democratic Party deserves much of the credit for holding on. Their one strategy is to let the Republicans sabotage themselves, and the Republicans continue to oblige. But the Democrats aren’t doing anything to knit their own coalition more tightly together or to encourage processes of social formation that would produce a more strongly felt and deep-rooted set of political goals for the party to persistently work towards.
I still think a key defining moment of this election cycle was the party’s response to the Dobbs decision. Rather than using that moment of fear and frustration to talk with their voters and with the wider society, the first thing they thought of was “send out text messages asking for campaign donations”. The second thing they thought of was “this is going to help us win some elections this fall that we might otherwise have lost”. They thought only towards this election cycle and only in terms of conventional strategies for running campaigns.
They aren’t talking to us about how we got to this point (on Dobbs or anything else) because that plainly has to be a story of political failure on some level. The defense of reproductive rights has enjoyed majority support in polls for decades, but somehow the Democratic Party and some of its major civil society allies settled for a kind of Maginot-Line defensive strategy that focused almost entirely on preserving a judicial ruling. Where were the state-level campaigns to amend state constitutions in 1990? In 2005? In 2016? Where was a legislative strategy in 1987? In 1996? In 2007?
So maybe that’s deemed an unhelpful conversation now—though I think when you think of politics as a struggle to preserve and extend what you value, you’ve always got time to think about how to win more durably after you lose a winnable battle—but at the least, when your voters are scared and angry and vulnerable, it’s time to talk to them as equals, to hear them for real, rather than just do up some focus groups and polls. To do politics in a more enduring, profound sense that goes beyond nudging and reframing and zip-code sociology.
The Republican Party, even its calculating faction that just want to run their patronage networks full throttle, has to see in the last few election cycles two lessons. First, that if they didn’t have a genuinely unstable narcissist yanking their chains this way and that, they could win more reliably. Second, on the other hand, that they would still be facing an emerging majority coalition that is now profoundly alienated from the voting base that the GOP is inescapably tethered to. If those insights really sink in, they’ll mean two things: a demand for a smarter and more stable Trump and a continuing dedication to subverting elections and trying to lock in power from a minority-party position. Both could happen as soon as 2024. The Democrats don’t have long to shift from trying to shore up their fortifications to some more active politics that lets their own voters move from fear and frustration to hope and commitment.
Image credit: "Maginot Line Tour" by heraldpost is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Yeah, and I don’t see nearly enough gratitude out there for the pro-Roe activists who worked their tails off. Instead there’s a lot of “conventional wisdom” types trying to find a “real issue” voters cared about.