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November 15, 2024

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After the election – Part 3

In the last couple of posts, I talked about the Democrats’ failing strategy and how they could – potentially – win over disaffected working-class voters. We looked at a couple of brief examples: AOC’s continued success in the House of Representatives and her outreach to voters who split their ballots and; An out trans city councilor in deep-red Kentucky who won a close race. That second bit, I now think, deserves a little more explanation about why it’s so important. So, bear with me while I go on a little digression before talking about the apathetic vote and the only hope the Democrats have to re-engage people.

If you saw any ads about campaigns running up to the 2024 election, you likely saw an unending stream of hate from the Trump campaign (and nearly all GOP candidates) directed toward trans people. I, luckily, was spared this because of a relentless approach to ad blocking that, often, cripples my own web functionality. (I do not consider this a loss.) With that amount of vitriol, you’d bank on a trans candidate in Lexington, Kentucky being obliterated in any vote. And yet, Emma Curtis won – narrowly, but she won. And yes, we must acknowledge that it is a city council vote and those, typically, are not high-engagement races. Consider, though, that high-engagement voters tend toward the conservative side. So, what does this show? To me, it shows that gender issues, trans issues, and the draw of hate is not as gnarly as I’d feared. This is, in my mind, one of the bright spots to cling to. This tells me that you can still get local progressives elected through showing up – authentically – to events.

And this, I think, is a good segue into how to get the apathetic vote. How to re-engage Americans. How to start cutting through the incredible cynicism people feel toward the political process.

Throughout my life, I’ve heard “both parties are the same.” For a chunk of time, that was not completely incorrect. Both parties were hawkish in the fallout of 9/11. Both parties turned sharp corporatist in their approaches after Reagan. The Obama years were different, but the problem faced there, centrally, was the staggering backlash toward his policies. What good the administration did (and there was a lot) was overshadowed by economic uncertainty courtesy of a neverending Great Recession as well as intentional sabotage by the GOP. The problem, there, is that over the years, America has defaulted to really only paying attention to the Presidency. For most people, keeping tabs on the skulduggery of Mitch McConnell, Boehner, Paul Ryan, and all the rest was simply not feasible. They saw the price of groceries and their rent go up and they blame the one guy they keep hearing about: Obama. It goes without saying that this is a deeply flawed perspective and needs to change, but that is the reality of the situation. By the time the GOP settled into their new strategy of crippling the government while claiming that it could never do anything right, the Obama camp had swung toward trying to appeal to independents and moderates while limiting direct outreach to working folks as a class – an incredibly ineffectual strategy as we’ve already seen.

The candidate approach

Obama’s greatest strength at the outset was tapping into FDR-style populism. He was able to talk to people in the same “fireside chat” way that FDR did and that did more to cement his wins than anything else. Even while he was being stymied by Congress, he retained that ability and could still approach people on a regular basis.

That is, ultimately, what the Democrats are lacking. You could not, in 2024, have had two more-different parties. The Trump campaign – and the GOP – ran on hate, nebulous promises, targeting minorities and at-risk demographics, and promising economic ruin in the name of repairing the economy. (???) By contrast, the Harris campaign and the Democrats attempted to approach the campaign like a church sermon, talking about greatness, unity, promise, and all of that stuff. It was as if they took a page from Marianne Williamson’s book and then, too late, realized that no one really liked Williamson. They chose Tim Walz, a progressive hunter from the midwest, as the running mate. They, in doing so, fronted a guy who showed up for his constituents and fought for peoples’ rights. And then, in a stunning own goal, took the spotlight away from him and then put it on endorsements from the most-ghoulish Americans alive. The Harris campaign, in other words, pivoted so much that you cannot blame anyone not addicted to political feeds for not knowing what they stood for.

What it came down to was, ultimately, that. The Harris campaign had principles and had plans, but it was lost in the noise of everything else they were doing. This was, of course, not helped by the fact that the national media is owned by the billionaire class who do not – absolutely do not – want anyone except Trump in office.

And so, here we are. You had a huge number of Americans who were not on board with what Trump stood for, but who were also not on board with what Harris stood for, sitting out. In what is rapidly becoming the narrowest popular vote victory since 2020, Trump is claiming that he has a deafening mandate to enact horrors on the country. And the country has two paths forward:

The first is to allow these horrors to go forth and hope that enough people wake up fast enough to put a stop to it.

The second is that the Democrats can stop stepping on rakes and listen to the people in their party who are winning. There are people in the Democratic party who manage to get voters to turn out, but they’re not the people that get support from the party. They’re the people who, rather, listen to constituents. They’re the people who, like AOC, have a campaign office that’s open year-round to work with their constituents, hear them out, and develop a plan for how to react to what’s going on around them. That is what must happen on the candidate level: The Democrats in charge of funding must start listening to their grass roots and stop listening to the consultants squirming out of the Ivy Leagues and top-ranked universities.

Community building

But that won’t get Democrats a long-term base. That will only get them spikes in engagement like we saw with Obama or the 2020 Biden win. The only thing that will get the Democrats a long-term base is consistent, honest engagement with people. They must, at a local level (county and maybe state at the highest), develop a plan for recreating community. That could look like regular events at parks, free movies for families, open access to Democrat headquarters, stocked with books, grub, coffee, and people to pass along feedback to reps. It could also look completely different. The reason that this cannot be directed from any level higher than county is that it will look very different for every area. The needs of Multnomah County in Oregon, for example, are very different from neighboring Washington County. From my brief time at the Multnomah County Democrat organization, there’s some promise there. You have a group that’s not fully made up of rich, older people from the West Hills, people who are engaged with their communities. They have a better sense of what’s going on than the politico class: They must have the funding and the imagination to create community, or the Republicans will do it in their stead.

What do I mean by that? I’ll give you a vague, but real, example. The online left, at some point, has determined that the correct approach to ignorance is to completely shun people and ostracize them. To be sure, there are a substantial amount of people out there who feign ignorance in order to troll, and determining who is actually trying to find answers and who is not is damn near impossible. But what this has wound up doing is alienating a lot of people who then get snapped up by the right. There are many, many accounts of right wingers swooping in when someone is alienating and offering a sympathetic ear. That, then, establishes a bond with the person and sets them on a path toward, say, voting for Trump when, four years ago, they may have voted for Biden. It’s not that they were yelled at, it’s that the people who talked to them were of a certain political persuasion. That, at its base, is community building.

(I want to say, at the outset, that there is absolutely a time where you are justified in cutting ties with people because of their beliefs. I’ve done that multiple times in the last few years because, at a certain point, some people are just too far gone. But that should not be our first recourse. What that decision looks like is different for everyone, but in my opinion, it’s pretty clear when someone is a misled-but-good person and when someone is too far-gone to be worth your time.)

My friends, I come to you, ultimately, to tell you a message you’ve heard before: We need community. We need the dumb, cheesy joy of hanging out at bowling alleys. Public spaces with chess boards. Big, publicly-owned centers that have daycare facilities, community classes, workshops. You know, the sorts of things that featured heavily in 80s comedies where the villains were, universally, the Donald Trumps of the world. If the Democrats want to make inroads with the working class, the lower-middle class, and, indeed, anyone who is not a college professor, they must start taking this sort of thing seriously. They must begin to draw people in by making these sorts of improvements. They have to, in other words, actually show up and help people.

Throughout the last several months, every email I received from the national Democrats was a shrill screech for fundraising. Prior to that, the only content that I received from the Multnomah County Democrats was either fundraising or notifications about upcoming fundraising. These people have my email – they send me leaflets in the mail. They know who their voting base is – why do they not do anything to directly reach out to people? Ed Koch was a deeply problematic politician, but at least he showed up in public and looked people in the eye. That’s something that more in-office politicians must do.*

I don’t know, what do you want from me?

America is in a deeply terrifying place right now. The Trump administration will have complete control of the US government with an incredibly slight mandate, propped up by an all-too-eager media owned by kowtowing billionaires. The only solace, right now, is that by choosing loyalists to run his government, Trump is choosing the dumbest, most vicious people alive to enact his policies. This will, I think, cause more chaos in his government than we saw before and, hopefully mitigate the worst of the damage he can do.

Beyond that, I don’t know what to expect. No one does. We, once more, will have a horse in the hospital.

I’ve had deeply worrying conversations with friends (both in and out of the country) in the last week – the sort of stuff that really, literally, keeps me up at night. We’ve talked worst-case scenarios and what to do if the worst happens. I’ve strengthened connections with friends abroad in the hopes that that will help ground me. I don’t know if it will, and I don’t know if that will be a rescue. The thing is: Nothing about that matters. Regardless of what happens to me, there are huge swaths of people in the US who did not ask for this. Who did not want this to happen. The only thing that will help them is community. I know this is very much in the zeitgeist right now, and I hope it continues to grow. And I hope that, in the next couple of years, I’m proven to be wrong about what I think will happen to elections and politics in this country and that the Democrats do get a chance to salvage things. But the only way they will is if they get off their asses and start building community and, in doing so, winning people over.

The future is going to be perilous and anxiety-filled, but, ultimately, that’s the only way authoritarian regimes win. The way to combat it is to find a niche within a larger organization with enough clout to stand a storm and work within it. There will be challenges and they will feel insurmountable, but, short of fleeing the country, this is all you can do. I’ve spent way too much time over the last week feeling helpless and frightened, and I’ve had enough of that. It is, in the immortal words of the IWW, time to organize.

* CAVEAT: I am ALSO not someone who goes to the usual Portland meccas – farmer’s markets, Saturday markets, etc. It may very well be that the Democrats do show up to those, but from the limited exposure I’ve had at those, that has not been the case.

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November 13, 2024

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After the Election – Part 2

This is the less-fun part of what I had planned. Here, I’m going to try and run through what is, I think, the ultimate best-case scenario of the second Trump administration. I’ll try to discuss it with the mindset of what I think the Democrats could do to improve their position with the voting demographics that they lost ground with and what that means for their national scale. For the sake of my own sanity and well-being (which, as of November 12, is hanging on by a thread), I’m not going to dwell too deeply on what I think of as the most-likely outcome of this (which is Trump and his cronies remake the electoral process in such a way that the GOP is now the only realistic federal power broker), but that might be something I have to write out just for my own therapy, even if I don’t post it. So, here we go.

As I see it, the Trump electorate (and others, as we’ll see) can be split into four segments:

  1. The dyed-in-the-wool MAGA crowd;
  2. Evangelicals and Protestants following the recommendation of their community, regardless of whether or not they, individually, believe what Trump is selling; and
  3. The people who only care about the price of goods they see in front of them. (In consultant terms, I believe this would be “low-engagement voters.”)
  4. The apathetic vote

You’ll have some individual segments outside of that (California ideology types; New Hampshire libertarians; etc), but those, to me, are the base of who turned out to vote for Trump.

If I were a strategist for the Democratic party, I’d essentially write off the first two segments. In my previous post, I wrote about how the Harris campaign’s strategy (a continuation of federal-level Democrat strategies since time immemorial) focused on appealing to moderates and conservatives and how that is, at its core, a flawed if not pointless attempt at courting a group of people who do not care about what you’re selling. It’s like trying to sell a car to someone who cannot legally buy a car. Those two segments – MAGA and Evangelicals especially – are essentially dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. There are, of course, a substantial amount of non-evangelical Protestants set who are more open to your message, but they’re likely already going to vote for you and don’t need to tune in to your convention.

Rather, the Democrats need to focus in on group three: The people who are going to be most brutally shut-down by the very economic policies they’re voting for. In order to do that, the Democrats need to take a look at what those people want, where they’re getting their information, and think long and hard about how they can engage them at a local level. For despite all the Democrats’ messaging about grass-roots organizing and small donors, they don’t seem to be getting their pitch for President across. You can knock doors, you can buy TV ads, you can do everything in your power to get across to them using traditional means, but at the end of the day, the people who get sticker shock when they go out to buy candy as a small reprieve from the horrors of the world won’t want to vote for a person who doesn’t speak their language.

But before we get into that, we have to explain why this is even worth doing, rather than what the Democrats are seemingly stuck on doing: Eating the progressive wing of the party. Right now, at this very moment on November 12, people are responding to AOC’s Instagram post asking for their reasons for splitting a ticket. And that is exactly what happened across the country: A lot of voters split their tickets. They voted for progressive policies like enshrining abortion rights and then turned around and voted for the very people who are trying to take away those rights. What those people are saying seems to be similar: They don’t trust what the Democrats are selling because it’s too polished. AOC’s constituents who split the ticket between her and Trump said that they like her and Bernie because the two of them talk to them at their level and their concerns. Harris, for all intents and purposes, did not. If you were really paying attention, she did, but most people don’t pay attention to that degree. Most people, they get off of work and they’re exhausted. They have responsibilities to attend to or they’re too dog-tired to do anything but veg out or listen to something brainless (i.e., Joe Rogan). They don’t have time to sit there and watch rallies, or listen to debates. That’s just not the way life in the 21st century operates.

But you know who gets that and shows up, and talks in common-sense language about the problems people are facing? The progressive wing. AOC, Bernie, Rashida Tlaib? These are people who keep getting re-elected to their districts even as the American electorate apparently shifts to the hard right at the Federal level. And, even though he is remarkably full of shit, Trump speaks at a level people can understand. (Kind of. Sometimes. Most of the time it’s a rambling, incoherent mess, but surprise, surprise, CNN didn’t spend nearly enough time talking about that as they did covering Biden’s stutter, so here we are.) Their voting base feels a connection with them and knows that, at the very least, they’re not mainstream politicians, which they respect.

This is, further, borne out in some of the surprises across the country. Surprises like the one city council race in deep-red Kentucky where an openly transgender candidate was elected. This is, admittedly, a sample size of one, but it does show that such things are possible. You can get progressive, marginalized people elected at the grass roots level if you are willing to stick your neck out on the line and support them.

As another indicator of this, in my town of Portland, voters brought in a surprisingly progressive city council. (This might partly be a result of people not voting down-ballot, but, in my opinion, I think that view assumes that people have a conservative slant and were too flummoxed to vote with the new rank-choice voting system, which I disagree with. But that’s another essay.) The new councilors showed up in multiple venues, threw parties, talked to people in neighborhoods, and schmoozed in a way that you don’t typically see from candidates. The new mayor, too, showed up at the recent Book Festival early on and just quietly hung around, letting people come up to talk to him for a quick chat and made connections that way. It was a surprising blind spot for a lot of other candidates: One of the points of Portland’s pride is Powell’s Books – the city loves books! Why didn’t you show up to the damn book festival, bud? Schmucks, I tell you.

All of this, then, leads me to wondering what, exactly, the Democrats could possibly do to win over the “apathetic vote.” (This, of course, assumes that we will have a free and fair election in four years’ time, which is very much in doubt.) Well, those thoughts will be in part 3. And apologies in advance, but that one’s going to be much, much longer.

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November 11, 2024

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After the election – Part 1

It’s been six days since the results started trickling in and we, as Americans, have to face exactly what we’ve allowed to happen. As many people have reminded me over the last week, we don’t know what will happen. It can’t be done. By his very nature and temperament, Trump invites chaos. “Capricious” is not enough of a descriptor of what goes on in that man’s head, and I don’t see any reason why prognostication about his plans in office should be taken at face value. (Especially given his new inner circle is wildly egotistical and will [hopefully] turn on each other very quickly.)

But with that said, the stakes are high enough that it is worth taking him and his friends at their word. They campaigned on promises of mass deportations, on stripping away the rights of women, on threatening the lives of anyone who does not fall into the cishet bucket that forms their voting base, and thinly-veiled threats to the lives and liberties of anyone who is not an evangelical Christian. If you apply a disaster preparedness mindset to all of this, then it’s obvious what we have to do: Figure out what to do if the worst comes to worst and we’re faced with a thoroughly-entrenched, effective authoritarian regime. For my money, I’m not confident that the national Democrats will learn any lesson from this – indeed, they’ve seemed to repeat past mistakes and begin assigning blame to the trans community, the nebulous “left,” and anyone who didn’t attempt to court the Republican vote.

I don’t think I’m in a space to talk about what preparedness in the face of a Trump regime will look like, but I can attempt to work out my thoughts about the Democratic strategy. I’ve had a fair few sleepless nights since November 5, and a lot of that liminal space has been dedicated to thinking about stuff like this. (It should not be surprising to anyone who knows me that this is what I’ve thought about while I’ve lain away at night.) So, here we go. This post will be about my thoughts on the Democrats’ attempt to court Republicans and Independents and, later on, I’ll post something about how, I think, they should approach voters going forward. (Spoiler: Actually embrace progressive causes and talk to people on their level.)

So much of the Democrats’ strategy since Obama’s second term has been to attempt to appeal to the reason of “moderate Republicans.” For my money, this grew out of the otherwise rational reaction that the Tea Party could not possibly represent the average Republican voter. The Democrat strategist strawman in my head saw the Tea Party and thought, “Well, these people are lunatics,” and reacted against them. This, after all, seemed to work to get Obama elected in the first place. And yet, according to stats from Cornell, what you saw was a 93/6 split in favor of Romney among Republican voters. Which, fair enough. Romney was a boring and, in relation to today’s standards, moderate candidate. Not too surprising that he captured such a huge proportion of the GOP vote.

What I’m getting at, for 2012, is that Obama’s progressive platform was wildly tamped down and moderated in order to appeal to moderates and conservatives. Yet what that got him was barely over half of moderate voters (56/41 split), a roughly even Independent share (45/50 in favor of Romney), and barely anything from the GOP. Yet, Obama was elected, so one can imagine Democrat strategists doing a victory lap and entrenching the methodology in The Books.

Let’s now fast-forward to 2016. The election that broke tons of hearts. The Democrats wound up with Clinton via the primaries. She ran a pretty bog-standard Democrat platform: center-left, very moderate on most issues, and insisting that policies would be enough to appeal to the average American voter. And you know: That should have been enough. She was running against a maniac. A guy who bragged about assaulting women (and, indeed, in a matter of years would be proven to be a rapist in court). The Democrats were, indeed, sure that they could court the moderate and Republican voters who were, as they said in their own words, disgusted by Trump. And yet, Clinton lost with a similar share of moderates and a slightly-improved share of Republicans. But only slightly.

Okay, sure. That’s fine. Let’s assume, for the moment, that Trump’s charisma was enough to appeal to those disgusted Republican voters. (The guy was on TV after all, and we Americans love our TV personalities.) Clinton lost the campaign and the Democrats immediately turned on the progressive wing. People in my immediate social circles blamed Bernie Sanders (specifically “Bernie bros”) for the loss, as if the left in America is substantial and the electoral left is anything more than a drop in the bucket. The Democratic party at a national level did not spend time thinking that their insistence on policy was enough to get people’s attention. They didn’t seem to consider the reality that, to most people, anything more nuanced than an acknowledgment that the rent is too damn high and eggs cost $6.50 at 7-11 (!!!) is too much to handle.

And so we had four years of Trump in office, leading the country to massive deregulation, near-critical events on the international scale, and a global pandemic that killed thousands in short order. And yet, despite his many failures, the 2020 race was a close one! The Democrats wound up with Joe Biden who, to his credit, won. The party managed to keep voter turnout high and get people to bite their tongues and vote. And to Biden’s credit, he did a decent job of delivering on some of his progressive platforms. He shored up the NLRB, had a consumer-friendly FTC, and mitigated the absolute worst impulses of the government. (But only the absolute worse.) The thing we’re concerned about here is: Did he manage to pull Republican voters more than Clinton did? The two had the same opponent and Biden, arguably, had an easier time since so many people died under the watch of Trump.

Let’s look at the numbers. He did worse than Clinton! So much worse! Trump’s Republican base snapped back from an 88/8 split to 94/5! Credit where it’s due, Biden did pick up an extra +12 on the moderate side, but that sill kept him under 2/3 of the moderate vote – a number you’d hope would have been much higher. Biden saw a similar gain among Independents over Clinton, but, again, not substantial and in this case, well under 2/3 of the Independent vote.

As I write this, votes are still being tallied and it’s not clear how the Republican/Independent/Moderate vote share will shake out, but it’s clear that the Harris strategy of courting Republicans and moderates did not hand her the victory the campaign thought it would. Early numbers I’ve seen point to Trump retaining that 94/5 split, maybe even a little higher, with a substantial drop from Biden among independents. The moderate vote was roughly similar to Biden, maybe a little more, but still: Nowhere near what the Democrats needed and were trying to get with all of their positioning of Harris as someone who would lead, essentially, a coalition administration.

What does all of this mean? Well, to me, it tells me that the strategy of courting potential converts from the other political party does not work. A couple of months ago, one of the execs at my company had a brief spiel about how difficult it is to get people to shift from Android to iOS and visa versa. People are attached to their brands. The brands are part of their identity, and separating themselves from that aspect of their lives is like asking them to slough off part of who they are. American voters’ identities are roughly the same – especially for Democrat and Republican voters. That’s been proven election after election. The fact that the moderate vote is, consistently, either near an even-split or just over that, should imply that the moderate vote is really people who would be Democrat or Republican, but don’t want to register as such. In other words: They should be treated as a 50/50 split.

The game, ultimately, is getting more of your party and that 50/50 share to turn out for the polls. That’s always been the game. That’s why you used to have local parties bus people out to polling stations. You need to ensure that you have your base on lock and turning out, otherwise you’re screwed. As I told my Dad on the phone the other day: This is less of a problem for the GOP than it is the Democrats. The GOP has evangelical churches do that work for them. (i.e., Protestants voted for Trump at a 63/36 split and evangelicals in particular went for him at a whopping 82% of the vote.) The Democrats, locally and nationally, must come up with an answer to that. They ran on a platform of saving democracy and that was, apparently, not enough to get their people to turn out or to not switch their vote to Trump.

So, what does that strategy look like? Well, in the next post – soon™ – I’ll talk about what I think that looks like. (For all the good that’ll do.)

The key point here, though, is that continuing to appeal to the center and the “reasonable right” is a lost cause. You can’t get people to switch their phone OS, and getting people to vote against their party is harder still.