The Democratic Party is Not Working

At least not as it should if they want to win.

Every step of Donald Trump’s plans have been predicated on the assumption that the Democrats cannot or will not oppose him. And every time, he has been right.

If the goal of a political party is to win elections, enact good policy, and defend it then the Democratic party is failing. If, however the goal is to enrich a privileged network of campaign consultants, senior advisors, snug incumbents, and the people who run Act Blue, then they are doing great.

For ten years now the Democrats have waged expensive, flashy, and star-studded holding actions against Trump's reactionary politics. Two failed, one almost did. In the most recent cycle they lost the White House, The House, The Senate, as well as most of the state legislatures to say nothing of the judiciary. They literally ran a prosecutor against a rapist, spent 1.5 billion dollars to do it, and still came up short. And now, as they always do, the consultants and the superdelegates have emerged from the wreckage to talk about demographic change, punch "the radical left" and ask for money. In short, to do anything and everything but look in a mirror and make a change.

It is Consultants all the way down.

The party is apparently run by and for consultants (or Superdelegates). Harris raised 1.5 billion dollars, and still overspent, two to three times what Trump and his owner put in. After all the expensive dome promos, star-studded concerts, and airtime, she wound up with fewer votes than an off-putting criminal and a nice man who campaigned from his basement. Did the events even matter? Or, like renting the Dome at $450k per day, were they just a costly way for those inside the campaign to feel good about themselves while working voters felt left out.

After 2016, and 2020 (which should have been a warning) a sane party would have done some honest soul-searching, some open accounting, and come up with a clear cost-benefit analysis for the events, the expensive airtime, and the endless calls for just $5 from people who have none. Had they done so, they would have realized that the expensive paid-media does not reach most people who now get most if not all their news online, and that they could promote ideas for pennies on the dollar. But doing that would cut into the ad-buy, and ad-buy is how consultants, superdelegates, and friends of superdelegates get paid. Win or lose, the lucre must flow.

Not one of these superdelegates or consultants have ever lost their position because the party lost an election. But they will if the donors walk away. So they have built a system that is geared to that purpose with strict demands for fundraising and spending, and strong rules to protect the incumbent brands. The end result is a party that can burn a King's ransom on fancy stunts and then turn right around and fund-raise on the ashes.

At this point no sane voter should donate to the national party ever again. Not when there are real, local, honest campaigns that might actually be won.

Fighting on Bad Terrain

To be fair to the party, these races are tight, and expensive, because they are fought on bad terrain. In 2000, 2010, and 2020 (and even after) Republicans have worked in a coordinated way at the state level to gerrymander their way into power, carving and re-carving districts to ensure that they do not answer to general elections, only extreme primaries. Highly popular Democratic governors face guaranteed super-majorities and thus every state house and house election will always be a game of inches.

What do Democrats plan to do about it?

Yes there have been lawsuits. Yes there have been some small and short-lived gains. But there is no semblance of a real plan to change the map, or the sustained will to carry it out because bitter state-by-state fights don't sell airtime.

Consider Ohio. On paper Ohio has nonpartisan redistricting but the process is a joke managed by and for the Republican party grandees. As a result, despite having 5 million unaffiliated voters in a state of 8 million, it is still noncompetitive and locked to a single party. A constitutional amendment was on the ballot that could have fixed that. It failed by 400,000 votes while the Harris campaign spent $450,000 per day on the Vegas Dome (a state she also lost), and $20 million on concerts.

What would have happened if the Harris campaign had done a few of those concerts in Cleveland (where turnout dropped) or sent a few million to the state party so that local officials and unaffiliated voters could barnstorm the state for the amendment. She still would have lost Texas and even Ohio, but in 5 years the state might have become competitive, and Sherrod Brown might still be in the Senate.

Changing the terrain means making long-term investments in unsexy state races like Ohio's amendment or the ranked choice voting in Alaska, Arizona, and Idaho. These races don't juice up Act Blue, and they don't provide berths for expert consultants but they make the landscape more competitive, less partisan, less divided, and ultimately better for all. Failure to prioritize that is not just incompetent, it is almost criminal.

Culture

Even if there is a plan to change the terrain we must also have a plan to change minds. Politics is indeed downstream from culture. It is culture that shapes what we do and do not value. It is culture that guides how we look at the world, and at each other. And it is culture that determines what messages will land with the voters, what problems we will even acknowledge, and what solutions we can consider.

You cannot impose culture, certainly not at the last minute in an election season. But you can shape it over time rally, after rally, podcast after podcast, until you have an army at your back. Culture must be seeded over years with sustained contact, preferably at the community level with sustained outreach around issues between campaigns, and through media that voters actually use. (X Pew). If you don't reach the population where they are and respond to them, then it does not matter how young, brown, or female they have become, especially when you are still an 80 year old incumbent who talks about Jack Kennedy.

Joe Biden could not have changed the voters' identities. Nor could Harris. But if they had been going on podcasts every week, going out and selling their accomplishments every single day, then they might have brought a few new people in. They might also have gotten the message out about who they were before everyone had made up their minds to double hate. In that case then the people who want higher taxes on the rich (79%) might have heard about the 15% minimum and the people who want drug price negotiation (88%) might have backed the party that brought it.

But its too late now.

"Low information Voters" may be a euphemism for many things but it also includes a whole lot of people who just live their lives and don't spend their days seeking out news but want the news, and the politicians to seek out them.

Part of coming to them is physical. In the run up to this election Biden, and then Harris launched a thousand campaign offices in almost every county of at least 7 states. That's a great start, but where are those offices in the off-season? What sustained effort is the party making to exist in these small towns, exurbs, and city wards each and every day? Where are the cultural centers and the listening sessions and the small-scale activism that moves people from votes to be captured to constituents with roots?

Again, no campaign consultant gets a fat check for running the corner office in small-town strip mall and it requires a lot more work that a few well-lit coffee stops. The DNC and DCCC has a deep love for candidates who are made in the McKinsey factory and look good in wine caves. Voters on the other hand, do not. They want people who are of the community, who represent their roots and their interests, and that requires a sustained engagement that has yet to take place.

The Democrats are not one branding exercise away from victory, and they cannot get by on hope and "demographic change". Until they stop being so obviously consultant-driven, DC-centric, and yes, old. They will continue to lose ground and Trump's culture, misogynistic, bullying and corrupt, will continue to win.

Edit: Just to add another perspective look at Mike Madrid’s excellent piece simply titled: Devastating. As he highlights the same consultants keep screwing up over and over and over. But thanks to incestuous relationship between the party superdelegates and the consultants they never pay a price. Only the rest of us do.

Devastating

Edit2: And just to add more evidence consider this point from JVL:

Biden Has Presidential Immunity. He Should Use It.

The Democrats fought hard internally to keep the seniority system so that Pelosi, Schumer, Clyburn, and the consultants and hangers on around them could remain the center of the party. An 82 year old woman with a broken hip worked the phones so that a 77 year old backbencher could beat out a younger woman. But, when faced with an authoritarian president who packed a court with judges then got those judges to sign off on him killing people without restraint they … ask nicely for him to behave.

At some point the Democratic party is just dead weight, not an actual fighting force. This is a point that Chuck Schumer in particular seems hell-bent on reinforcing.