The state of the democratic party

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/opinion/democrats-biden-voters.html?smid=url-share

Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?
Feb. 19, 2022
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist

It may be a TikTok world, but sometimes old hacks know best.

James Carville helped Bill Clinton get elected against stiff odds. David Axelrod helped Barack Obama get elected against stiff odds. And Stan Greenberg was the first to identify the fateful trend of Reagan Democrats.

All three Dems are speaking out with startling candor about the impending Repubocalypse. Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that.

The Democrats are stepping all over themselves. And Republicans are doing all they can to prevent the Democrats from accomplishing anything, and then are trashing them for not doing anything. Voters like to punish the people in power. So if the Democrats don’t figure it out, Jim Jordan is going to be running the House and pushing investigations of Biden and Hillary. They can’t quit her.

Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look.

Biden’s superpower was supposed to be empathy, but nobody’s feeling it.

“He is depriving himself of his strongest assets: empathy and an identification with the day-to-day lives of people,” Axelrod said. “One of Biden’s strengths is that, at his best, he speaks the language of America, not Washington. But he has been speaking more in the voice of government officials than he has of Scranton Joe. He needs to get back there.

“Gary Hart told me the smartest thing I ever heard in politics: ‘Washington is always the last to get the news.’”

Axelrod understands, from his days in the White House, that the Biden team is frustrated because they feel the public doesn’t appreciate their achievements, and they don’t understand why. Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: “You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.”

In a Times opinion piece, Axelrod said Biden should avoid “off-key” triumphalism in his State of the Union address, and remember the country is traumatized.

Carville, still a Ragin’ Cajun, took time out from his Mardi Gras planning to reiterate points he has made in a Vox interview and elsewhere: Democrats should not be defined by their left wing or condone nutty slogans like “Defund the police.” They should work not to seem like an “urban, coastal, arrogant party” indulging in “faculty lounge politics” that appeal to reason rather than emotion and use “woke” words like “Latinx.”

“Seventy percent of the people in San Francisco tried to warn us,” he said of the battle among Democrats that ended up with voters firing three far-left school board members who mandated a long break from in-person learning during the pandemic and who wanted to rechristen schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

“They’re not popular,” Carville said of such far-lefties, adding in a line spoken directly to them: “People don’t like you.”

Right now, he said, Americans are seeing “confusion and disorder.”

“You’ve got to give people the sense that they may not be all that happy in 2022 but if they vote for the Republicans, they’re going to lose a lot of the things they have now,” Carville said.

He’s mystified about the Trumpified Republicans. “If there’s one thing we were kind of united about, it was that you couldn’t trust the Russians,” he said. “Now people on Fox are pulling for the Russians. Go figure.” (Tucker Carlson asked, “Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?”)

Carville is also flummoxed that Republicans could defend the Jan. 6 madness as “legitimate political discourse.”

“Ninety-eight percent of people on the Mall on Jan. 6 were white,” he said. “We need better white people in the United States.”

In a blunt piece in The American Prospect, Greenberg warned Democrats not to use Obama as a closer in campaigns anymore or to present themselves as the party of Obama.

Once, Democrats believed that Obama’s multiracial coolness would animate his party. But his failure to prosecute any bankers after the near-collapse of the economy solidified fears that Wall Street and Washington were in cahoots.

“Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” Greenberg wrote, adding that Democratic leaders “stopped advocating for workers against corporate excess and stopped challenging the exceptional corruption that allowed billionaires and Wall Street to dominate politics. The result is that the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people, including its own base.”

An Associated Press story’s headline echoed his point: “‘The Brand Is So Toxic’: Dems Fear Extinction in Rural U.S.”

Greenberg said he’s tired of trying to warn Democrats that they’re driving people away. Fretting about the threat of Trumpism, given that the Democrats are bleeding working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic ones, he told me, “If they don’t listen this time, we’re going to end up with fascism, dammit.”

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. @MaureenDowd • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 20, 2022, Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?





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https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...ion-that-could-cost-them-2024-new-study-says/

Democrats are engaged in a ‘new politics of evasion’ that could cost them in 2024, new study says
Trump and the GOP represent a danger to democracy, the study says. Democrats must win in 2024, but first they have to reorient on cultural issues and question whether there really is a progressive majority emerging in the country.

By Dan Balz
Chief correspondent
Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EST

Three decades ago, Democratic policy analysts William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck published a bracing critique of their party, warning against a “politics of evasion” that they said ignored electoral reality and hindered changes needed to reverse the results of three losing presidential races in which the party had won a combined total of just 173 electoral votes.

Now the authors are back, with a fresh analysis of their party. This time it comes in the wake of President Biden’s victory over former president Donald Trump in 2020, but it is an even starker warning about the future than the one they issued in 1989 after Michael Dukakis’s landslide electoral college loss to George H. W. Bush.

“A Democratic loss in the 2024 presidential election may well have catastrophic consequences for the country,” they write, arguing that the Trump-led Republican Party presents the most serious threat to American democracy in modern times. The Democrats’ first duty, they argue, should be to protect democracy by winning in 2024; everything else should be subordinated to that objective.

But they argue that the Democrats are not positioned to achieve that objective, that, instead, the party is “in the grip of myths that block progress toward victory” and that too many Democrats are engaged in a “new politics of evasion, the refusal to confront the unyielding arithmetic of electoral success.”

“Too many Democrats have evaded this truth and its implications for the party’s agenda and strategy,” the authors add. “They have been led astray by three persistent myths: that ‘people of color’ think and act in the same way; that economics always trumps culture; and that a progressive majority is emerging.”

Galston and Kamarck served in the Clinton administration, and Kamarck is a long-standing member of the Democratic National Committee. Both are scholars at the Brookings Institution, and their new study is published on the website of the Progressive Policy Institute, where they are contributing authors.

Their analysis is a centrist critique of a party that they fear has moved too far to the left and in the process increasingly has lost touch with the swing voters who still have the power to decide elections. Its publication comes a week after voters in San Francisco recalled three members of the local school board in a battle that underscored the limits of left-wing politics even in such a liberal city and an outcome that set off alarmsinside the party.

Galston and Kamarck argue that in an age of close elections (five of the past six were decided by five points or fewer), mobilizing base voters is not enough to assure success. “Even though deepening partisanship has reduced the number of swing voters, the narrow margins of our recent national elections have made these voters more important than ever,” they write. “This reality will dominate national politics until one party breaks the deadlock of the past three decades and creates a decisive national majority.”

The authors are especially pointed in their analysis of Democrats’ vulnerabilities on cultural issues. They argue that too many Democrats continue to believe that economic issues “are the ‘real’ issues and that cultural issues are mostly diversions invented by their adversaries for political purposes.” But for many voters, cultural and religious issues are more important than economic issues, and for those voters, those issues “reflect their deepest convictions and shape their identity.”

Trump’s appeals on cultural issues, and his anti-immigrant and nationalist posture moved voters in states with a higher-than-average percentage of White working-class voters, especially Ohio and Iowa, to the point that they are now difficult for Democrats to win presidentially. “And it has made the upper Midwest fiercely competitive, a face-off that is likely to persist until the battle lines between the parties are redrawn,” the study says.

Democrats, they argue, must balance appeals to their base voters with a message that also appeals to enough working-class voters to win elections. In 2020, Biden was able to do that, but Galston and Kamarck argue that success “must not blind Democrats to the fact that these voters often have found Republicans’ cultural claims more persuasive than the Democrats’ economic arguments.”

Galston and Kamarck have joined what is a rising debate within the Democratic Party about the road ahead, and while they offer recommendations from their centrist perspective, others see economic issues as still the core of the party’s message and agenda.
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