The Only Path Forward Is for Democrats to Return to Their Roots

I love all the inspiring songs, poems, and thoughts people are sending around right now. My favorite was from an old friend who sent around a piece with the subject line “Suck it up, buttercup,” making the point that sometimes we lose, but we have to keep fighting the good fight. 

However, I am going to let other people be inspiring in this moment. That good task is not what this column is about. There is so much work to do. We have to rally our troops, and dig in for a long, painful fight ahead. We have to protect the most vulnerable among us with every fiber of our being. We have to fight effectively in one court battle after another. We have to organize mass demonstrations bigger than any ever seen as the Trumpistas move to take away our freedoms. So much work.

But in this piece I want to outline one of the central tasks ahead, one that we have to succeed at or we will ultimately lose all the fights in the future.

Donald Trump just ran a campaign that, especially at the end, could only be described as a dumpster fire. It was the most openly racist and sexist campaign in modern political history, and Trump talked openly about taking dictatorial powers and killing or jailing his political opponents. He clearly was suffering severe mental decline as he swayed to random music on stage for 40 minutes and pantomimed giving a blow job to a microphone. His crowds towards the end were mostly small and lifeless, with people streaming out mid-speech.

Kamala Harris’ campaign, on the other hand, ended strongly -- big crowds, great speeches and ads, big armies of volunteers knocking on millions of doors and making tens of millions of phone calls and texts. It was inspiring to see and I thought that enormous effort in the field would carry us to victory.

But here we are with Trump again. And a Republican Senate. Painful as f**k.

Why in God’s name did this happen? Part of it is that voters here and around the world are in a grumpy mood in the post-covid, Ukraine war, high inflation years -- incumbent parties have been losing all over the globe. Part of it is the stunning fire hose of disinformation garbage social media companies are allowing to go out freely from their platforms. Part of it for sure is the built-in racism and sexism of some voters. Part of it is that a bunch of billionaires spent extraordinary amounts of money to help Trump. There’s a lot going on here. But our loss comes down to one main thing.

Working-Class Blues

I will not be the first and definitely will not be the last to note that Democrats have a working-class voter problem. And in case you haven’t noticed, not just a White working class problem -- the Black and Latino men moving toward Trump and the Republicans come from the working-class portions of those demographics.

We are not going to solve our fundamental electoral problem by building an urban/suburban strategy, squeezing every last vote from urban liberals and college campus precincts while winning over college educated Republican women who find Trump and fascism distasteful. As we were reminded once again last night, the numbers just don’t add up.

This is a long-term problem. The Harris-Walz campaign was facing trends in the media landscape and party branding that are deep and challenging. But I don’t for a minute think these challenges are impossible to overcome. Here is what the progressive movement and Democratic Party needs to do in order to make real progress with working-class voters:

1. Old fashioned, ongoing, long-term investments in issue based community organizing. Labor unions especially, but also other local organizations, used to drive organizing and community building in the mid-sized working class towns Democrats used to do well in, but no longer do -- places like Scranton, Bethlehem, Youngstown, Dubuque.

   
   

   Democrats need to get over the idea that they will do well in these places just by showing up with field staff (from out of town) and sending doorknockers (from out of town) the last few weeks of the campaign. We need local institutions that build solidarity and create networks of trusted people that can talk politics with folks. That kind of organizing in blue collar neighborhoods, in small and medium sized towns, is going to be critical.

2. We need to build a media/social media infrastructure to get real news to people, and combat the massive waves of disinfo they are getting. In many counties in America, local newspapers have gone out of business, or been bought up by hedge funds which suck them dry and don’t care about getting real news into people’s hands. Local radio stations are either gone or bought up by huge conglomerates. Local TV stations in these communities are often owned by Sinclair Broadcasting or other rightwing news sources. No wonder people aren’t hearing about the good things the Biden-Harris did for them, or the terrible things Trump was saying on the campaign trail.

   
   

   Democrats and progressives need to build our own network of locally based social media networks that have local people moderating them, and can get actual news into people’s hands, places that provide information, but also build that sense of community I was talking about above.

   We need both the first and second projects built out at scale, a Manhattan Project type of major investment, but for places like Manhattan, Kansas, not Manhattan, New York.

3. We need to lead with economic issues, talked about in a populist style. Pundits and political consultants who live in big cities, hang out with big donors, and have relatively high incomes themselves often forget how tough the lives are of working-class folks, especially those who live outside of big wealthy metro areas. In an early survey my Factory Towns project did of these kinds of voters, more than half had experienced major economic and/or health hardship in recent years: job loss, retirement income loss, health care insurance loss, foreclosure, addiction or other mental health issues. As a result of this kind of hardship, they are very focused on economic issues, and get very impatient with politicians they don’t hear talking about those issues.

These voters don’t like either political party and are cynical as hell about politics, but they also have a progressive populist orientation about economic issues. They think the wealthy and big corporations have too much power and use it to abuse them and their communities. They are winnable, but only with real engagement from people they trust.

And yes, these voters are affected by the culture war bullshit like the Trump trans ad, but our reseach was very clear: if we lead with the economy, we can still compete effectively with the Republicans in spite of those issues.

I think the Harris-Walz campaign did many things well, but I also believe they made a mistake by softening the economic populism of the early part of their campaign, and not talking much about economics for a stretch toward the end. I get the impression that they were not wanting to scare off the higher income Republican voters they were courting with populism, but that decision cost them with working-class swing voters. Harris came back to economic issues in the last week, which was good, but it wasn’t enough. 

Which side are we on?

Working and middle-class families want someone who will be on their side, who will be a fighter for them. We didn’t give them enough of that in this campaign. Working-class folks who have hard lives, but don’t follow politics that much don’t care about kumbaya and bipartisan love. They just want their lives to get better. What these voters like about Trump is that, for all his faults, they think he will be a fighter. And let’s face it, not that many Republicans cared either: the gamble to emphasize picking up Republican votes mostly failed.

That’s what our base voters wanted, too. Union voters, Blacks, and Latinos never liked Liz Cheney all that much, and promising Republicans roles in the administration doesn’t do anything to fire them up. 

We as a political party and a progressive movement, did not invest anywhere near enough in a long-term strategy around deep organizing and community building in small and midsized towns. Most people don’t realize the tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade the Koch brothers and other conservatives have made in Latino communities with the LIBRE Initiative, and it is paying for Republicans in a big way right now. We need to make our own investments in working-class communities, and it needs to start now, not wait until right before the next election.

When I was growing up, the way I learned politics was that Democrats were the party of working people and Republicans were the party of Big Money, businessmen and bankers. The Democratic Party was quite literally founded as the party of the farmers and workers, in reaction to Alexander Hamilton’s cozy relationship to Wall Street bankers. We were the party of the progressive income tax, the labor movement, the 8-hour day, Social Security, the Civil Rights movement, Medicare, and Medicaid. We were the party that represented and fought for working families.

Until we embrace that heritage and renew it again, we will keep losing elections, even to ugly fraudsters like Donald Trump.