2020: The Next Democratic Candidate

It isn't too early.  Indeed, the campaign is underway.   Democrats have some work to do.

Beginning election night, 2016, a new chapter in American history was beginning.  It was the Trump presidency.  Simultaneously, it began day one of the re-constitution of the Democratic Party. 

It turned out that the Obama coalition was not robust enough.  There were political weaknesses.  It showed up most dramatically in the Upper Midwest, the so-called Rust Belt.  Virginia--with its northern counties filled with educated office workers--stayed blue, but Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin went for Trump.

Democrats are now re-thinking who they are what they stand for.  The least useful thing for them to conclude was that it was all just Hillary, an unappealing candidate, and their party is just fine, because after all they won the popular vote.  It is least useful because it ignores the fact that she was defeated by Trump who defeated some 15 Republican Senators and Governors, candidates who were at least as competent and plausible a candidate as their previous nominees, Dole, McCain, Romney.  Trump was exposed as vulgar, temperamentally mercurial, and divisive, yet people voted for him.  There must be a lesson there, and maybe it goes beyond Hillary.

Democrats are divided.  Their most active members, ones who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, generally want the party to push left.  That means become "less corporate", more populist.  This pushes them in the direction of their college-town wing, a wing on the leading edges of cultural war fights on racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual identity, and the role of immigrants.  

Their establishment wing had been led by Hillary Clinton, and it includes most of the Senate liberals, exemplified by Chuck Schumer, people with a liberal agenda who have credibility with business interests, which is why they were able to run credible, victorious political campaigns in blue and purple states.  Members of this wing believe that those states are blue and purple because the candidates are perceived as reasonable, moderate, establishment liberals.  States with two Democratic Senators have happily elected Republicans in the past and might again.  These Democrats might consider themselves realistic and balanced and they are electable because of that.  Their detractors on the left might consider them corporate sellouts.  Still, those Democrats can maintain credibility with the progressive left by being stalwart on social issues, i.e. support for Planned Parenthood.

I saw Oregon Senator Ron Wyden doing just this.  Answering questions from a liberal crowd of supporters of Planned Parenthood, he was careful and open to all potential health care solutions, avoiding getting onto the Sanders bandwagon on that issue.   He was unequivocal in his support for women, for reproductive choice, for Planned Parenthood as an organization.

Democrats are less divided on the culture war issues.  Trump has created a wedge and it tends to push everyone in the Democratic Party into an anti-Trump position.  Politically, it is almost inevitable.  If Trump asserts it, it must be racist, misogynist, hateful, sexist, homophobic, stupid, and jingoistic.

It makes good sense--and it is very genuine for someone like Senator Wyden--to support Planned Parenthood.  I personally agree.  However, like any good trap, the bait must be attractive and the way into the trap must be much easier than the way out.  Cultural issues are a vulnerability for Democrats.  It is a way for an establishment business friendly Democrat like Wyden to show common cause with his progressive friends, but it is one of the issues that it available for Trump to exploit.  The wedge issues divide the college-town people from rural-suburban-noncollege voters.  Fundamental issues of tax policy, regulatory policy, healthcare policy, and trade policy are complicated.  Reasonable people disagree.  But issues of whether somebody stands for the national anthem or a woman talks about harvesting stem cells from aborted fetus parts while eating a salad at a white-tablecloth restaurant are simpler and more politically motivating.

I am not suggesting Ron Wyden or any other Democrat back off on Planned Parenthood.  I support the organization whole-heartedly.  But I recognize the value of supporting them, and its perils.  Reproductive rights are one of a suite of cultural issues that divide.  And Donald Trump is a divider.  

The great challenge for Democrats, as this blog sees it, will not come from finding someone who can bridge the pro or anti business issues.  A progressive left candidate can find the right language there.  The great problem will come from whether a candidate can be a credible liberal progressive and keep the support of the educated, modern, liberal, multi-cultural college town left without estranging those culturally conservative voters in the heartland swing states.  What seems only fair and just to the college-town liberals seems wrong to a great many cultural conservatives.

Donald Trump knows just how to divide, then conquer.  A candidate Trump will assert that he has made the economy better, that his tax plan is great for the middle class, that the health care is a big improvement over the Obamacare disaster.  The actual "truth" of those assertions is irrelevant.  Trump will be claiming it, loudly and clearly and persuasively to his base.   What Trump will be saying to expand that base, and to divide Democrats, is that Democrats coddle America-hating black athletes, America-hating Islamic terrorists, freedom-hating gun confiscators, and crazy professors who insult the common sense of regular patriotic Americans.  

Democratic candidates will be appearing in New Hampshire in less than two years.  They will have advance people, they will be scheduling rallies, the will be raising and spending money.  In order to be in Manchester, New Hampshire in the fall of 2019 they are doing things right now.

Thad Guyer, a whistleblower plaintiff attorney, does some thinking about the Virginia primary.  He praises a move to Democratic "centrism."   My own feeling is that Democrats must avoid making reference to "move to a center" because it will be perceived as a sellout by progressives, and a great many of them are ready to sit out what they perceive as another iteration of rejection.  I urge Democrats to affirm their positions as reflections of true liberalism and progressivism and stick to that.  If the meme of "move to the center" becomes current, then I predict Democratic defection and loss.   The Democrat must embrace liberalism, then define it.

Guest Post

Centrism Part 2:  As Obama Arrives in Virginia, Democrat Ralph Northam Moves to the Center 

Guyer

In all three special elections for Congress this year, Democrats moved to the center and did well though losing.  Most disappointing was Jon Ossoff in Georgia, a near winning campaign engineered from the start to avoid trash talking Trump and articulating centrist bipartisan positions.  Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam is late in his move to the center, but on the eve of Obama’s arrival to stump for him, the candidate this week flip-flopped declaring in the final debate:  “I don’t support sanctuary cities”.  See, “Gillespie pressures Northam on sanctuary cities”, Wash Times, Oct 9, 2017, https://goo.gl/GzLSkp.  In an earlier debate, he stated his opposition to single payer healthcare.  I am optimistic that Democrats may be shaking off their Trump Derangement Syndrome, see the progressive movement as a losing course, and continue steadily to the center.

In my first centrism post earlier this week, I argued that (1) frenetic anti-Trump media is publicly viewed as an official spokesman of the Democratic party with Trump-trashing journalists interviewing each other nightly on MSNBC and in mushrooming podcasts;  and (2) support for “sanctuary cities” will doom our efforts to return to power. “Sanctuary cities” is a particularly toxic label for Democrats because in just two words, it embodies a whole set of immigration, globalism and workers rights policies. In the New York City mayoral forum last week, a loud denunciation of the city’s allocation of $26 million to a deportation defense fund drew loud applause. Listen, Radio Lab, October 12, 2017, http://www.radiolab.org/story/father-k/. 

As to the media, in a very hopeful development on Friday, the New York Times announced a broad set of prohibitions on its reporters and editors waging Twitter and Facebook wars against Trump.  See, NYT, “The Times Issues Social Media Guidelines for the Newsroom”, Oct 13, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2z53U0v.  Like the NFL, the NYT admonished journalists that their celebrity is attributable to and owned by the company that employs them.  As with almost all media policies, other outlets are sure to follow the NYT lead. 

Lowering the rabid anti-Trump volume will help Democrats in 2018 and 2020 in swing states. Like pragmatist Bill Clinton stealing the 1992 nomination from a slate of Reagan-bashing liberal candidates, Ralph Northam’s late move to the center may deliver a much needed Democratic win in Virginia. With Obama, George Bush and President Trump all taking an active role in the race, the stakes are high.  After Trump tweets and GOP attack ads on sanctuary cities began reducing Northam’s comfortable polling lead, his flip-flop is a welcome shift.  Indeed, in the final debate this week, Northam refrained from making a single anti-Trump comment.  In the first debate three weeks earlier, Northam (a physician) broke with progressives in the legislature pushing for single payer healthcare, and announced he strongly opposes it as contrary to consumer rights to pick their insurer. See, Wash Post, “Va. gubernatorial contenders clash over monuments”, Sept 19, 2017, https://goo.gl/i9bZmQ. And while progressives and illegal immigration activists denounced Northam’s sanctuary cities shift as a slap in the face to Obama’s visit, the Virginia democratic base is relieved.

Obama is still going to Virginia to support the now centrist Northam.  Stopping Trump is more important than progressive ideology.  Hopefully the Democratic Party will follow Obama’s lead.  In part 3 of my centrism posts, I will highlight Colorado’s centrist governor as a possible challenger to Trump in 2020.