The Makeover Democrats Need is Not the Makeover We're Debating

Yesterday was the first candidate forum among the candidates to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee. While I plan to go to the one in Baltimore, believe it or not, i'm not overly focused on the race. The chair will pay homage to the village wisdom (known as DC-speak), regardless of who wins the race, and the DC narrative is already set in stone- Democrats need a makeover. Ultimately, we're going to get one, one way or the other, no matter who wins. What kind of makeover we get is going to be very important to how well it works though.

The Berniecrats of the party are making a lot of noise about the kind of party they want, and they are aiming their guns at Cory Booker and others for taking campaign donations. Their basic argument is that they are the inevitable future of the party, a more "progressive," class-driven party that demands purity not unlike the Tea Party on the right. Of course, what they miss is that "white liberal progressivism" is not the growing portion of the party's votes, the party is increasingly a party of non-white, identity driven activists. They aren't identity driven because they "don't get" that class is the real issue, they're identity driven because they literally have to be- whether it's an unfair criminal justice system, LGBTQ people facing workplace discrimination, or Latinos who have an uncle or mother who will be deported by the Trump Administration. You can't tell the growing portion of your party to "quiet down" on their issues, because you think it's more convenient to talk about the 1%. Politics doesn't work that way. Of course, "identity politics" driven people also have to realize that we don't have a nearly large enough non-white base to win national or Congressional elections without white, suburban votes, and if we don't win some elections, we aren't going to make any progress as a country. Which gets to my real point.

The real issue, the real makeover for the Democratic Party is staring us straight in the face, if we actually look at Hillary's electoral map- geography. She barely won a county without a significant sized city in it anywhere in the country, and we barely hold any Congressional districts that aren't urban based. We have to start winning suburbs. Suburbanites aren't a bunch of raging hillbilly racists, but the identity driven issues that face our less white, urban base simply don't really apply to them. Let's be honest- in Bucks County, PA, Black Lives Matter, immigration reform, marriage equality, bashing the 1%, and "Love Trumps Hate" might all be things that they can agree with, but almost none of them are all that relevant in their lives. These are educated people, they support diversity on a surface level, but they don't really care about these issues on a day-to-day level. They care about schools, wages, water and air quality, infrastructure, taxes, and jobs. Democrats have a lot to offer these people on these issues, but they aren't really trying to- because we're speaking to our base.

You see, we took all the wrong lessons from President Obama's two wins at a staff level. We behaved like activists, and not like operatives, and we internalized the themes we wanted to internalize. In both elections, President Obama beat his opponents down on bread and butter issues, and made himself the person who could fix problems for "people like me." He did this with minority voters, obviously, and he turned out record numbers of these voters as a result. He also did it with white voters, and if you look at his map next to Hillary's, it's much bluer. The lesson we wanted to learn was that the emerging American electorate was rising, and would carry us to victories for decades. In reality, that is not at all the whole story.

My general belief, looking back at the 2016 election, is that we had a bit of a candidate problem, but she did win almost three-million more votes than the new President, but we really had a party branding problem. Our messaging, our marketing was poor. No well run business tries to sell a product to consumers that the consumers in a given market don't want- but we did that anyway. We have to be nimble enough to sell the issues that matter to the communities that matter- where they are. This requires different strategies in different states, and even in different parts of states. Our messaging has to be more adaptive to the public we have.

So, I don't care much who the chair is. I have opinions of course, but they aren't critical. I do care who the staff is. I do care what kind of people are guiding the new chair, and doing the work on the ground. I do want people who think about rural organizing differently than urban organizing, and who can speak the language. The staff will be crucial to not running a "cookie-cutter" party. They will be the one's guiding the ship, every day. We have to put forward a different image of the party, one that is relevant in every community, and cares about every community. The makeover we need is not the one we're debating. That's just a bunch of activists re-hashing the primary.