![]() ![]() And I wouldn’t make it an ideological referendum.Īnd what do you think it would take to appeal to more of those white working-class voters? I’d probably suggest that they were a young person. So if I were a Democrat, I’d be looking for someone who has that combination of appeal-someone who has the ability to reach out to moderates on pocketbook issues, who has a compelling biography. They see him as someone who is fighting for working people in much the same way that Democrats have traditionally been thought to fight for working people. There are conservatives that see him as a conservative, but there are a lot of white moderate voters in the Midwest who voted for Barack Obama who don’t see Trump as a conservative extremist at all. And I think that Donald Trump is a similar candidate in his own respect. If you were a progressive, you could see him as a progressive. You know, if you were a centrist, you could see Obama as a centrist. ![]() I mean, one of Obama’s great strengths was that he managed to sort of be something for everybody. To me, it’s not all that different from what Obama did. ![]() It’s just that I don’t think there’s necessarily all that much upside if you can excite people by other means. That’s not to say, by the way, that you can’t win doing that. And so if I were a Democrat looking at 2020, I would look to the people who did best in this year, and I would say that they are young, and that they still manage to excite people without listing off every policy dream of the left. A lot of them were just compelling candidates, really talented candidates who came forward in a year when Democrats needed them to. Both to the progressive base and to moderate voters. And yet something about their biography still made them really compelling. I mean, they weren’t necessarily centrist or something, but they weren’t running as progressive firebrands. The Democrats that I saw who outperformed the most were people who were relatively moderate. There were a lot of progressive candidates who won primaries this cycle on some sort of argument that if we mobilize the base, we can transform the electorate and win places where we don’t usually win. I would point out two things about what we see in the results so far: One is that just being a progressive superstar is not enough to fundamentally transform an electorate and win a race. While I think they showed strength there, I’m not sure that they showed enough strength to indicate the Democrats were gonna do better there than they would in the national popular vote, which had been the case before Trump was the president.ĭoes this election give you any kind of insight into the type of candidate you think Democrats should run in 2020? But if the Democrats want to win through the Midwest, they need all of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Scott Walker did lose in Wisconsin, and that is important. The Democrats fell short of reclaiming the governorship in Iowa. Given that it was a wave election, where the Democrats won the national popular vote by 7 points in the end probably, an incumbent Democrat winning Michigan by 7 points or so does not impress me all that much. ![]() I thought that Debbie Stabenow’s performance in Michigan was pretty disappointing. But I don’t know that I thought that it was a very impressive performance, Isaac. That said, I thought the election results were broadly consistent with the view that the Democrats could win those states back. There is no reason to suppose that 2016 was the floor among that group, and there are additional electoral votes for the Democrats to lose in a place like Minnesota or Maine. And the final thing is that if the Democrats don’t have a strategy intended to stem the bleeding on white working-class voters, it could get worse for them. The Sun Belt states I think offer relatively limited upside for Democrats. Well, first let me say, and you know this because we talk all the time, that I have always felt that the Democratic path is in the Midwest. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |