<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

Democrats failed to make case for their party

The Columbian
Published:

Like the Republicans after 2012, Democrats surveying the wreckage from last week’s midterm elections have launched a “top-to-bottom assessment” of what happened. Their problem: turning out their voters in non-presidential years.

But the study undertaken by the party chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, might prove embarrassing for the national party and the White House. After all, the most significant Democratic failure may have been the inability — indeed, the refusal — of top Democrats to make a positive case for their party.

Republicans ran on a clear-cut theme of rebuking an unpopular president. Democrats neither defended President Barack Obama’s achievements, such as the significantly improved economy, nor presented new ideas to tackle persisting problems like income equality, concentrating instead on picking apart the record and views of their rivals and their financial backers.

But negative campaigns go only so far. As former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean put it on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, “You’ve got to stand for something if you want to win.”

The results of that failure were obvious: A smaller, less favorable electorate with reduced participation by key components of the Democrats’ 2008 and 2012 victories — Hispanics, African-Americans, unmarried women and, most of all, younger voters.

Exit polls showed Hispanic voters down 2 percent, African-Americans down 1 percent, voters younger than 29 down 6 percent and unmarried women down 2 percent — producing an electorate 3 percent more white and 6 percent more older than 65, both Republican-leaning groups.

Eye on 2016

Still, most GOP Senate gains came in so-called “red” states that backed Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. Only Iowa and Colorado were “blue” states Obama carried, with both reflecting superior GOP candidates and inferior Democratic campaigns.

Republican victories in major governor’s races show it’s possible to make a positive case, even amid difficulties. GOP incumbents won several “blue” states by defending controversial records and making a successful case for their re-election. The GOP captured two “blue” states — Illinois and Maryland — where, again, Democrats had weak candidates.

The strong GOP showings left the Democrats at their weakest since winning only 188 House seats and 45 Senate seats in the first post-World War II midterm election, about the number they won this year.

Back then, President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 campaign against a “do-nothing Republican Congress” enabled the Democrats to rebound by gaining 75 House seats and 9 Senate seats. Current district lines favoring Republicans won’t allow the former, but Democrats will have a decent chance to regain the Senate.

Still, their best chance will be to win the presidency again, thanks to an electoral map that gives them an easier path to 270 electoral votes than the Republicans. Democrats carried 19 states with 242 electoral votes in each of the past six elections, while Republicans won 13 states with just 102 electoral votes.

This year’s election showed Democratic vulnerability in some “purple” swing states that have gone back and forth in recent elections. Democrats lost two of the four Senate races there and almost lost a third.

Still, while the Democrats know where to go to win the White House, they need to remember how: By developing a rationale for voters that was absent this year.

Whatever the review panel concludes, the burden of carrying out a strategy might fall largely to the party’s clear presidential front-runner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

She’ll need to offer a way for Democrats to regain the economic issue by going beyond lower unemployment with proposals to spur growth and increase household income. That’s what was lacking in 2014 and will be necessary for the party’s 2016 nominee to avoid the fate of many Democratic candidates this year.


Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Email: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com.

Loading...