I Want To Be One In A Million. How About You?

[stevenkesslar]

The Republican Party Is Doomed

This is a transformational moment. Do the Democrats understand how to take advantage of it?

I think Stan Greenberg hit the ball out of the park with this article.  At least I hope he did.  We'll find out in a little more than a year whether what he writes about is a dream come true, or simply wishful thinking.

For those of you not familiar with him,  Greenberg is a center-left Clintonista pollster.  Greenberg worked for Bill Clinton back in the 90's.  Him and his wife, U.S Rep Rosa DeLauro (D-NJ) worked hard to help Hillary in 2016.  Like helping her on debate messaging against Trump.  And sponsoring private town halls with constituents to help Hillary think about how to address the real economic pain of working class voters without seeming like she was trashing Obama and the Obama economy.

My point in saying this is that Greenberg is no lefty dreamer.  But I think like many of us, after the frustration of 2016 and everything that has followed, it has changed his perspectives both on what is possible, and what is necessary.  I agree with his fundamental premise:  now is the time to think big, and fight for big changes.  Thinking big may in fact turn out to be the only way to win and really take back power.

The whole article is great, but here are the core ideas from the article that really resonate for me:

Quote

The Democrats watched in frustration as the government was presumed to be impotent to address wage stagnation, surging inequality, climate change, the slaughter from automatic weapons and the flood of dark money into politics.

 

But this dam has burst. With Mr. Trump’s ever-escalating assault on government, the proportion of Americans who say that government “should do more to solve problems and meet the needs of people” surged to the highest level in 20 years. Democratic candidates who understand this political moment will push for a government that changes the country’s course, as it did under Democratic presidents after the progressive victories of 2008 and 1964 and especially after the 1932 triumph of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

There's been a whole bunch of articles in the last week saying CNN did Trump a favor with their climate change town hall.  Because it got every Democrat - even Biden - on record as being against cheeseburgers, or cows, or airplanes, or whatever.  That's of course an oversimplification.  Which is what Trump is good at, and will use in 2020.  And you can go down the list of every other major issue and suggest that the best way for the Democrats to win is to play it safe and propose nothing that sounds like real change , or that actually moves people. 

I just don't buy it.  Greenberg is right that Democrats won back some Trump voters in 2018, and can win some back in 2020.  If we want to do that, I think we have to go for it, just like Trump did in 2016.

There is another great article Greenberg wrote a few weeks back which is more backward looking.  I think it is a great companion piece to the more forward-looking and hopeful article above:

The Tea Party–Trump Decade

The Republican electoral sweep of 2010 set up a decade of anti-democratic destructiveness culminating in Donald Trump. But the tide’s about to turn.

There's a lot of good history and analysis in this article, too.  But the main idea I took out of it is that it sort of boils down to 1 million people.  Which is to say that, starting in 2010, about 1 million Tea Party types dug in and started to take over.  And it was not fundamentally that they wanted checks and balances and compromise.  They wanted obstruction.  They wanted to stop Obama in his tracks, and block everything him and the progressives around him were trying to do.

My experience is that this happened organically, and gradually.  I know this like I know what it feels like to fuck or cum, because for years my life was full of right-of-center clients who fit into this profile.  And what took me a while to figure out is this paradox.  To a one, they hated the Tea Party, which they viewed as a distortion of their Republican Party.  And to a one, they gradually sounded more and more like the Tea Party, until they actually sounded worse than my stereotype of what Tea Partiers sound like.  Examples:  Obamacare is evil.  Obama is evil.  Obama is a traitor.  We should have killed the pro-democracy protesters in Egypt.  We should have bombed the fuck out of Syria, just like we bombed the fuck out of Iraq.  Susan Collins is a RINO and people like her should be thrown out of the Republican Party. They are not really Republicans.

It very gradually dawned on me that the sentiments of the hard core Tea Party types were taking over the hearts and minds of people that I thought I knew:  lifelong "moderate" Republicans who spoke the language of compromise, bipartisanship, and comity.  Trump's birtherism and racism wasn't really the cause of what happened in 2016.  It was the symptom of something that had started much earlier.  He gave voice to what had been going on since Obama was elected.

I think Greenberg is giving voice to the reaction that has been building since 2016.  And his math matters.  What I took away is that it took about 1 million Tea Party types to fuck up US politics for a decade.  If you read his whole article, that's actually overstating it.  The true number may be closer to 250,000 people - predominantly old White men - who joined local Tea Party groups and marched and worked to get obstructionists elected.  One Republican stated the goal was to make anything close to Obama sound like Ebola. 

In a nation as big as our's, 250,000 or even a million is not that many people.

What these two articles helped clarify for me is that it's going to take maybe 1 million "progressives" to turn this around.  And it's going to go way, way beyond one candidate, one election, or one issue.  

The articles reinforced where I've been headed anyway.  I want to be one of those 1 million people.  Because just like it took the Tea Party the better part of a decade to clog everything up and make government impossible, it's going to take 5 to 10 years - hopefully - to make government work again on the things people care about.  Even if the Democrats take The White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020, there is no question that the Tea Party types will go back to resistance, obstruction, and destruction.  It is what they know, and what they are good at. 

These days, my sense is that they don't even harbor the illusion that they are about compromise anymore.  That is why Trump is their perfect spokesman.  He just wants to crush anyone or anything that gets in his way.

In my mind, it follows that the Democrat that wins will be the one that inspires, organizes, plans, and compromises.  I don't think the Democrat that wins in 2020 will be the left wing mirror image of Trump.  He or she will more likely be the opposite.  We're seeing that already.   There's the Bernie dreamers, the Elizabeth planners, the Mayor Pete thinkers.  They are talking about big ideas, and real change.  They are the ones, so far, who are lighting fires and capturing hearts and minds.  They are thinking big.

About half the challengers I gave money to in 2018 won.  The largest groups were moderate Democratic types who swept California and Orange County in particular.  So as much as I love AOC, the reality is she won't get past Square One unless she convinces people like Rep. Harley Rouda, a former Republican who ran and won as a Democrat in Orange County, to come along.  The people that I gave to that lost?  Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Amy McGrath - the pilot and warrior from Kentucky who is married to a Republican veteran, and will challenge Mitch McConnell in 2020. 

It remains to be seen whether moderate women in places like Kentucky, or Missouri, or North Dakota are ready to dump Trump and ditch Mitch.    One Republican I know very well used to love insisting that Claire McCaskill was one of the most liberal members of the US Senate.  In fact, she was one of the most conservative Democrats - not far apart from Susan Collins, who was one of the most liberal Republicans.

I think what the Republicans have proven over the course of a decade is there is no room for moderation or compromise left in their party.  But I don't hear that from the Democrats, at all.  Not even from the AOC types.  And certainly not from all the women from the suburbs who took the House in 2018.

Like Greenberg, I'm hopeful.  Worst case scenario is it's like 2004 all over again.  Somebody who should lose will barely squeak by.  But even if that's true, it will actually be like 2004 all over again.  It will set up the Republicans to get clobbered to shit in 2022 and 2024, just like they did in 2006 and 2008.

Right now, I want to be one of the one in a million who takes back power and fights for progressive change in 2020.  How about you?

 

[AdamSmith]

Agree entirely.

Wonder, yet again, whire you cannot summate more concretely?

[Lucky]

The Democrats need to focus on defeating Trump. We don't need long, drawn-out impeachment investigations. The people will decide on Trump in the election.