Advice for Democratic Candidates

Democrats don't know how to talk.   Lose the Democratic accent.

They say things that are irritating and off-putting to too many voters.   That is why the area is red on the map.

Get the message right.  

Democrats in a Republican area

I am meeting with candidates and trying to coax the good ones into running and winning.  

In general it is a Republican area.  The Congressional District looks like the big red Mountain State rural areas that give huge majorities to Republicans--the red and pink area on the map here. 

My goal will be to see which candidates know how to talk in a way that doesn't inflame and motivate Republicans to turn out to vote against them.   There is a school of thought that hardly anyone is actually persuadable.  Democrats will vote for Democrats, if they vote.  Republicans will vote for a Republican even if it against their economic interest and moral principles.  Middle class Republican voters are cheering a tax bill that raises taxes on themselves while ending the inheritance tax, and they voted for a man heard on tape bragging about kissing women and grabbing their genitals. This isn't intuitive. 

Republicans get the messaging right; Democrats sometimes reinforce an un-electable caricature of themselves.  People vote accordingly.  The best solution:  support progressive things using language that sounds reasonable to a Republican.  Make it hard for them to hate you.

Reproduction.   Don't say you are "pro-choice."  The word choice comes across as trivial, like choosing a favorite flavor of ice cream.  Besides, it asks others to trust the woman's judgement, but many have in their minds some weak, confused young woman who will have future regrets. Instead, create a different image, of nosy, coercive government in the most personal part of ones life.  Instead say, "I support reproductive freedom from government coercion."   Make it about privacy, not abortion.  

Why would Walden take away a child's health care?

Health Care.  A great many voters--including ones fully enjoying government benefits--resent paying for benefits that go to others.  Trump focused voter attention downward, onto the supposedly undeserving--and dangerous--immigrant workers, immigrant criminals, the poor, the people of color, the people who got affirmative action benefits in some form.  He blamed them.  This worked politically.  In fact, the ACA primarily helped the native born working poor by expanding Medicaid. Facts don't matter enough.   

A Democrat will be tempted to talk about the right of health care, the cruelty to take away health care from the deserving poor.   A majority in red areas disagree with both premises.  They don't think it is a right, nor the poor deserving.

What to do?  Identify the beneficiaries as children.  Republicans are just as sentimental about children as are Democrats.  In Jackson County there are 51,000 people on the Oregon Health Plan--a quarter of the population.  Some 15,000 are children, and 4,800 are adults with children.  The ACA repeal reduces the Medicaid eligible and endangers those 15,000 children in Jackson County alone.  Children.  How cruel.  Here is the data:   http://www.oregon.gov/oha/HSD/OHP/Pages/Reports.aspx

What about the bigger goal of normalizing the idea that every resident of America deserves health care as a right?  Don't push it.  The blue areas on the above map have about 80% of the state's population and 4 of the 5 US Representatives.  Let them argue that point.  They have the constituency for it. In the bright red area the message should be about the children.  Voters have sympathy for children but not for their parents working for $11/hour.  Those they would willingly vote to kick off health care.  Stick to the cruelty of hurting children. Rub Walden's nose in that fact.  

Taxes.  The tax bill that is getting passed is not "major" except in two big areas.  It reduces the corporate tax rate and it eliminates the inheritance tax.  It has some minor cruelties, by attacking higher education, education debt, the deductibility of medical expenses for people facing medical calamity, etc., but these are just tinkers around the edges.  The two big things are lowering corporate taxes and eliminating the inheritance tax on estates of more than $10.5 million.  

Eric Trump, inheritor

There is opportunity for a populist, Democratic message here:  the tax bill primarily helps the very wealthy, protecting dynastic wealth. It isn't draining the swamp.  It is feeding the crocodiles.  

A note of caution.  Democrats must not sound anti-getting-rich nor anti-business.  A Democrat cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business. That's where jobs come from.   Most Americans think that getting rich is a very nice thing, otherwise they wouldn't buy lottery tickets.  Don't attack wealth. Praise hard work. Praise getting rich.  Attack unearned dynastic wealth.  There is a sweet spot there.

Democrats are easy to caricature as office worker coastal elites, who don't get their hands dirty, who attack business,  and who are insufferably politically correct, and who want hard working regular people to pay for a soft life of undeserved benefits for the undeserving and improvident and criminal.   

Confound that impression.

The message can be that Democrats want government out of our underwear, that we want children not to suffer, and that we don't want regular taxpayers to be sacrificed for the benefit of billionaire inheritors.