Democrats need to shrink the red zone

As they lose more of the working class, they might try diagnosing their problems, not bemoaning them.

Colorado governor Jared Polis

What did Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana and West Virginia have in common in 2007? No, they were not states in which George Jones failed to show for a concert. They were all states that had two Democratic Senators: David Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, Max Baucus and Jon Tester, and Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller.

That was only 17 years ago. That list is down to zero, with Tester’s loss in Tuesday’s Montana election. Not only that, Indiana had Evan Bayh, South Dakota had Tim Johnson (and had Tom Daschle before that) and Louisiana had Mary Landrieu. Yes, those are blue lawmakers from fire-engine-red states, and voters gladly split their tickets to elect them.

You might have noticed that today’s politics are a little less chromatic. On Tuesday, Donald Trump got over 64 percent of the vote in each of the following: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. The latter two gave Trump 70.1 and 71.6, to lead the country. Kamala Harris carried no counties in Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia, even though Kentucky has twice elected Andy Beshear as a Democratic governor. With that exception, you’re more likely to see a Cape buffalo than a Democrat in any of those states, primarily because the Cape buffalo is not hiding his identity.

Except for Utah, every one of those states has increased its Republican percentage since 2008, when Barack Obama defeated John McCain. Obama actually carried Indiana with 48.9 percent. On Tuesday, Trump got 58.6 from Indiana, and the networks gave him the state about two seconds after the polls closed. Obama also got 49.5 percent in Montana 16 years ago, and Trump got 58.9 this time.

It’s true that Joe Biden won in 2020 under the same conditions in those states. It’s also true that Trump is the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004. But the Dems, who count on coastal strengths, generally know they have to show up big in the “battlegrounds,” the seven-state turf on which this Presidential election was exclusively staged, to have a prayer. Since they have also watched Ohio and Florida slip from friendly territory to disputed territory to quicksand, they have a vulnerable foundation, with storms in the forecast.

Trump’s victory, which includes a Senate takeover and a very possible retention of the House of Representatives, prompts the usual agonized lookback by Democratic executives, all of whom are circling to find the right set of vertebrae into which to sink the steak knife. They have narrowed down the reasons to a few dozen, including (A) Joe Biden waited too long to get out (B) Joe Biden shouldn’t have run in the first place ( C) Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her V.P. instead of Tim Walz, the better to win Pennsylvania (D) Harris should have bitten the bullet and spent three campaign hours doing Joe Rogan’s podcast in Austin (E) Harris should have distanced herself from Biden (F) the Dems should have let a Palestinian address their convention (G) and the Dems should have brought Tim Hill into the ninth inning instead of Nestor Cortes.

But this isn’t about Harris. She learned Biden was getting out on July 21. The next day she was in Washington and gave a rousing pledge to “earn every vote” on the way to the nomination. On Aug. 6 she picked Walz and the next week she was the star of a harmonious, rousing convention. Time and again she listed the specifics of her economic policies, and time and again someone on the networks or in the influential papers wondered why she wouldn’t list the specifics of her economic policies. She made one damaging mistake, telling a co-host on “The View” that she really couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from Biden. That became the theme of Trump’s most effective ads, even though she could have used it as a chance for an affirmative defense. 

It’s an occupational hazard for a vice president. Hubert Humphrey was shackled by Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policy until he spoke against it on Sept. 30, 1968. He was closer to third than first when he made that speech in Salt Lake City, and he wound up losing to Richard Nixon by a half-point.

Of course, no candidate would make a speech in Salt Lake City today, not when Utah is 60 percent GOP, and that leads to 2024.

Just as Democrats attack the unemployment rate and bring manufacturing back to Midwestern and Southern states, they keep watching the working-class voter unfurl the Trump flag. Harris never mentioned the economy without lamenting the high costs of  everything. She had proposals to fight it, including help with new home purchases. They didn’t take hold. If they were heard at all in red-country homes, they sounded like lectures from the daughter of two professors, even though her own economic situation was modest.

Do Democrats need a message for the middle of the country? Of course. But they can’t wait until Presidential campaigns to deliver it. Their leaders need to visit Dubuque and Enid and Topeka and Great Falls when there aren’t elections going on. They need to talk to hardware-store owners and teachers and farmers. They need to conduct Town Halls, except they themselves need to be in the audience asking the questions, and the townspeople need to be on the stage to answer them. And they need to bring detailed knowledge of local problems with them.

Bernie Sanders

It’s not policy. If it were, Harris would be President-elect today. It’s presentation. Trump himself never talks with the common folk, only at them. But he does show up. There is one Democrat who invariably connects with working folk. He was re-elected to the Senate Tuesday at age 83. His name is Bernie Sanders and instead of dismissing him as too old, which he is, maybe some of these smoothly-programmed young Democrats could borrow some of his unrelenting passion and clarity. The audience says it wants emotional understanding, not just statistics. Bernie never has a problem delivering both.

The instant analysts say Democrats are becoming prisoners of their own higher education. The only group Harris really won on Tuesday, the way she needed to, was college-educated women. Her people shouldn’t have been shocked when 45 percent of Latinos favored Trump. With everyone else, “democracy” was the No. 1 issue, which means Jan. 6 but also takes in Trump’s “deep state” nonsense, and the idea that Democrats were railroading Trump in his criminal cases. But with Latinos, economy was No. 1, and they are just as antagonistic toward undocumented immigrants as most Republicans. That needed to be part of the Democrats’ prognosis, not the autopsy.

Latino radio personality Victor Martinez told MSNBC that Latino men were still reluctant to support a woman for President, because they still prize the roles that many American women left in the previous century. Maybe they heard Harris say, “We’re not going back,” and decided they actually wanted to. It’s hard to know what Democrats are supposed to do about that one.

Harris did advocate free community college, and the growing realization that you don’t need four years at $70,000 a pop to get the necessary education for a good life. But she didn’t mention it enough and she didn’t mention it in the places where it would be heard.

There is also an “overreaction Monday” aspect to all this, in NFL parlance. This wasn’t Nixon vs. McGovern. At the moment Trump is ahead by 3.3 points in the popular vote. Democrats excelled in Colorado and Minnesota. Other than the Presidential race, they did well in North Carolina. They really should study Colorado, which is not a particularly diverse state and voted for Bush The Younger twice. It also has the same rural truculence as Southern and Midwestern states, as exemplified by Lauren Boebert. But Colorado has two Democratic Senators, two Democratic House stars in Jason Crow and Joe Neguse, and a popular and pragmatic (and gay) governor in Jared Polis. Harris won Colorado by 11.4 points.

In Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senate candidates ran ahead of Harris. Two of them won, one probably will win and one is still statistically alive. Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, a Latino with a military story who may be in the process of ending Kari Lake’s political mischief, will be the only Democrat who could possibly use 2024 as a personal springboard. The GOP did well in state legislative races but Democrats appeared to break supermajorities in Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Crimson states Missouri, Nebraska and Alaska all endorsed paid sick leave in referenda, and Missouri and Alaska voted for hikes in the minimum wage that will bring it to $15 in 2026 (Missouri) and 2027 (Alaska). Like other Democratic core principles, these are stoutly popular everywhere in the nation until and unless a Democratic Presidential candidate actually endorses them.

Another question for the political-science department: When all the counting is done we might discover that we had millions fewer voters than in 2020, and why is that? Never have more people spent more money and air time urging Americans to vote. Again, maybe it’s an electoral-college thing. For Californians and New Yorkers, the Trump-Harris race was a distant rumor. The decreased vote also might pertain to anti-political despair. Bomb threats at certain polling places weren’t helpful. We’ll wait for California to get out of yoga class and finish counting before we generalize.

In the end, Joe Biden continued to loom. If people are actually capable of independent memory 100 years from now, Biden will be lionized as a high-achieving  President. Today, Democrats toss and turn when they remember Biden’s implied promise to be a stop-gap President and let the younger ones fight over 2024. He changed his mind, the story goes, because he saw that Trump would be the GOP nominee and he thought he was the only person to beat him.

Several Democrats urged Biden not to run, and Dean Phillips, a rich and quixotic Minnesota Congressman, actually tried to run against him. Phillips left the House and will be out of action for at least two more years. Judging from the sour impatience of the American voter, that could put him in scoring position.