The November 19, 2016 Thread

Matt Yglesias on the smoking pile of rubble that is the Democratic Party right now.

Every bad electoral defeat is overinterpreted by some circle of pundits as signaling the death knell for one party or the other, and the loser always comes back.

Indeed, given the existing down-ballot weakness of the Democratic Party after the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Hillary Clinton’s loss does more to hasten Democrats’ resurrection than to delay it. A Republican president in office will tarnish the brand of blue-state Republican parties, making it easier for Democrats to regain ground in their own turf. At the same time, the absence of a high-profile national Democratic leader will make it easier for state parties in more conservative regions to build up independent identities.

But while Democrats shouldn’t be left for dead, it’s also the case that resurrection takes work and specific action. Party leaders who a week ago were confident they were leading the blue team to yet another presidential victory are going to look around and realize they didn’t just lose, they got essentially annihilated — even though the presidential election itself was close. They’re going to have to start doing something different. In particular, something that takes note of the fact that whether you think the constitutional system is fair or not (I don’t, personally), the existing setup simply doesn’t allow you to run up the score in California to compensate for weakness in the Midwest.

More broadly, the Obama-Clinton style of liberal incrementalism promised that while it wouldn’t deliver utopia, it would deliver wins and concrete results. And for a while, it did. But no strategy can guarantee an uninterrupted series of presidential election wins. And the withering of the down-ballot party paired with the failure to create entrenched policy accomplishments means much of Obama-era policymaking will have vanished without a trace within six months.
To make its comeback, what’s left of the Democratic Party establishment — not just its elected officials but the leaders of its aligned institutions and its major donors — need to recognize that a strategy they believed was working as recently as Tuesday afternoon has in fact failed quite badly.

Matt Bai: “Clinton’s campaign was effectively nothing but a giant turnout operation, crunching data on reliable Democratic voters while simultaneously keeping the candidate herself from saying anything remotely interesting. She ran on a database, rather than on an argument; the more Trump alienated and motivated her base, the less she felt the need to make any discernible case.”

“The bottom line for Democrats ought to be this: You can’t really count on winning elections without persuading anybody of anything they don’t already believe. You can’t be a truly national party if you need 90 percent of a single minority’s votes just to be competitive (any more than you can be a national party relying only on white voters) …Democrats should find a new story in the months ahead. Because demography by itself isn’t actually destiny, and disdain isn’t much of a strategy, either.”

Playbook: “Trump has spent the last year controlling the narrative. He’s lost it. Oh, and by the way, Trump is about to face a new normal. He spent the year worrying about crowd sizes and rallies. That delivered him the presidency. But now a single senator could stymie his plans. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said yesterday that he would do anything in his power to stop John Bolton from being secretary of state. All he has to do is place a hold on his nomination, and Trump has to grovel to his former rival. And this isn’t even coming from Democrats yet!”

“Why would the Democrats stubbornly not have an economic message? Sixty-seven white papers don’t make an economic message. Thirty-seven bills you’re going to introduce in the first 100 days do not make an economic message. What we as Democrats really have to deal with is the fact that we didn’t have an economic message.”

— Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, quoted by the Washington Post.

Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Ultimately, what happened to Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party is what happens to most third-party candidates: They fade at the end. Johnson flirted with 10% national support for much of the race but ended up with just 3.3% of the national vote, while Stein got 1% despite reaching nearly 5% in the RealClearPolitics average in early summer.”

Jonathan Chait: “Health-care coverage is a relatively straightforward problem of resource allocation. Tens of millions of Americans can’t pay for the health care they need, because they either have low incomes or expensive medical needs. There are many different ways to fill in the gap between what they need and what they can afford on their own. You can do it through straight taxes and spending. Or you can do it through regulation, forcing insurers to charge healthy customers more than they cost so they can charge the unhealthy ones less. Obamacare uses both of these methods. Republicans oppose both of them.”

“The Republican approach involves endless rhetoric about ‘choice,’ ‘competition,’ ‘markets,’ ‘patient-centric’ care, and so on. But none of these concepts has the magic power to conjure resources out of thin air. So when Republicans design alternative plans, and they have sketched out quite a few, inevitably they just provide fewer resources.”

Senator Orin Hatch makes pretty clear that he supports the Ryan Medicare Phaseout plan (phasing out Medicare and replacing it with private insurance and vouchers), but he also makes clear that he’s reluctant to do it unless Democrats give Republicans cover. LOL.

We won’t.

Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith: “Donald Trump’s election as president startled many Americans. A number of observers commented that Trump’s campaign represented a set of illiberal values and policy positions far outside of the United States’ political traditions of individual rights, equality and democracy.”

“But in many ways, Trump represents a return to the historical norm. Such classical liberal values have often not predominated in the United States. In fact, they have always logically competed against — while being politically intertwined with — a set of commitments to hierarchies of race, nationality and religion, among others. Indeed for much of American history, these illiberal values held sway.”

Ruy Teixeira, who co-wrote the Emerging Democratic Majority, on the election:

Here’s one way to think about the 2016 election. We are witnessing a great race in this country between demographic and economic change that’s driving a new America, and reaction to those changes. On November 8, with a tremendous burst of speed, reaction to change caught up with change and surpassed it.

But is that advantage sustainable over the long haul, as change continues and reaction has to run ever faster simply to keep pace? Probably not. Those old legs will give out eventually, though we do not know exactly when. In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is.

Eric Levitz on the road ahead for Democrats:

Their story of what went wrong is simple: Trump, per Sanders, “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media.” But instead of channeling that anger toward real, progressive solutions for the middle (and working) class’s legitimate problems, Trump directed it toward the most vulnerable people in our society, as right-wing populists always have.

Clinton failed to counter this appeal, because she refused to embrace populist, class politics. While she adopted an economically progressive platform, she didn’t center her campaign on an economically progressive message.

She lost the Midwest because she failed to energize younger voters and win a significant share of the white working class — precisely the demographics that responded most enthusiastically to Sanders’s message during the primary.

In an era of widespread distrust in America’s governing institutions — and widespread disdain for the financial industry — Democrats’ path to power cuts away from Wall Street and toward a populist grassroots movement. They don’t need to compromise on social liberalism. But they do need to reclaim their identity as the party of the working man and woman, and center their message on economic populism. […]

The upcoming DNC leadership election is expected to be cast as a struggle for control of the party’s future. For now, the party’s Sanders-Warren wing appears best positioned to win that civil war.