Stop Venting and Start Voting!
It's Still the Dog Food Problem
The headline in The New York Times got my attention, as well as one of my readers (someone, by the way, who always clicks on the carefully curated and usually unusual Song of the Day—just saying):
Venting at Democrats and Fearing Trump, Liberal Donors Pull Back Cash
Demoralized donors are frustrated with Democrats’ failings and worried about retribution from the president. Their frugality has left liberal groups struggling to fight the new administration.
The article says liberal donors are “frustrated with what they see as Democrats’ lack of vision,” and “they want to know what, exactly, Democrats plan to do differently in the future.”
And today’s paper (yes, I’m still clicking on “today’s paper” on the NYT website when I can’t get an actual physical copy of the increasingly elusive print edition—did you know you could do that? You’re welcome!) has this:
Democrats Fear They Are Missing the Moment to Remake the Party
As President Trump steamrolls over their priorities, Democrats say they could miss the opportunity to learn lessons from their defeat and undertake needed reform.
Some favor shedding unpopular policies or reprioritizing new ones. Others focus on improving the messages deployed to sell those policies to voters — or on how to deliver the party’s message, whatever it turns out to be, in a fractured media environment. Already, a blizzard of organizations are holding focus groups, conducting polls and studying voting patterns to assess the severity of the situation, especially the party’s worrisome decline with groups where it once held sizable advantages, like younger voters and Latinos.
I hear a lot of complaints about what Democrats should do, could do, are doing wrong or not doing at all. Don’t you?
I’ve previously shared my appreciation for folks like
, and , and while I'm still tuned out from MSNBC, I do still read smart thinking about politics from them, and sharp observers like the New York Times’ Peter Baker. Here’s his latest.As someone who’s worked for liberal groups since we were trying to stop Ronald Reagan, I know from venting. My crowd couldn’t make it through a conversation without the words, “why don’t you,” or “why aren’t you.”
But maybe there’s a better use of our time, energy and frustration. Otherwise, we’re just talking to ourselves, and to the dwindling number of people who still think Joe and Mika are worth getting angry about. (I’m still looking at you,
).All the focus groups, polls, deep thinking and clever consultants can’t solve what I’ve called in this space the Tom Davis Dog Food Problem. Skip over this sentence if you’re tired of me quoting the former Virginia Congressman who said if the Republican Party were a brand of dog food, “they'd take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill."
Now that disregard bordering on contempt applies to Republicans, Democrats, Congress, elections and the very idea that politics could have anything to do with making people’s lives better.
If your audience thinks they’re watching a clown show, or an institution with less authenticity than the WWE, no change in messaging strategy will clean up the mess.
All those sentences that begin with “Democrats should” presuppose that we can actually mobilize voters who are not buying the dog food! They’re not voting, and they don’t see voting as anything that matters.
So please, all you writers and critics who prophesize with your pen…
don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
Let’s figure out how to make politics look relevant, interesting, and important. That’s the only way to elect lawmakers who will vote for the things we want and need, instead of doing favors for their donors and Donald Trump.
A few days after the election, the Times reported this:
Mr. Trump won the White House not only because he turned out his supporters and persuaded skeptics, but also because many Democrats sat this election out, presumably turned off by both candidates.
Counties with the biggest Democratic victories in 2020 delivered 1.9 million fewer votes for Ms. Harris than they had for Mr. Biden.
Want to know why we lost Pennsylvania? From that same reporting:
In Pennsylvania, the biggest electoral prize on the battleground map, Mr. Trump’s victory received an outsize boost from an unlikely place — the five counties with the highest percentage of registered Democrats: Allegheny, Delaware, Lackawanna, Montgomery and Philadelphia.
Ms. Harris won these counties, but not by the margins needed to overcome Republican-heavy areas of the state. Total turnout was down from 2020 in all five Democratic strongholds, which could partly explain how Ms. Harris received 78,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes to his total in these same counties.
This gap left Ms. Harris with little chance of winning Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin?
Voters in Democratic-heavy counties simply could not keep pace with gains from their Republican counterparts. In the eight counties that include Milwaukee, Madison and the surrounding suburbs, Ms. Harris surpassed the Biden totals by about 20,000 votes. But Mr. Trump gained about the same. In the rest of Wisconsin, Democrats were drubbed.
And Michigan.
In Michigan, Mr. Trump’s victory was mainly a result of the drop-off in Wayne County, home to Detroit and diverse suburbs like Dearborn and Hamtramck that supply the state with its most significant source of Democratic votes.
While Ms. Harris easily won Wayne County, she did it with 61,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden had, a decline of about 10 percent, while Mr. Trump added 24,000 votes, a jump of about 9 percent.
That swing limited Ms. Harris’s hopes of winning Michigan, where Mr. Trump was ahead by about 81,000 votes.
Don’t blame Joe Biden or Kamala Harris for what happened in November. The fault is not in those stars, but in ourselves.
Spin out a scenario where Biden announces earlier that he wouldn’t run, endorses Kamala Harris and we see a cluster bleep of a Democratic primary, as prognosticated here back in January 2023:
Say that either a weakened Kamala Harris or someone else, like Gavin Newsom, is the Democratic nominee. Would such a candidate be any less susceptible to Trump’s “California liberal” smear campaign, even if they weren’t the present Governor of the state?
Kamala Harris ran a pretty good campaign based on the assumption that the electorate would look like the Biden coalition, and turn out at the same rate or greater. We did not anticipate the first-time voters Trump energized through bro podcasts and attracted to Trump’s politics of grievance. And we didn’t know how many Democrats would stay home.
This report from Brookings tells us
Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. He was right: If the exit polls turn out to be accurate, he made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12% to 20% and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54% to 45%.
The Trump campaign also believed that they could improve their performance among young adults, and they did—from 35% in 2020 to 42% this year. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of this gain reflected a shift toward Trump among young men. Trump spent lots of time on podcasts, such as Joe Rogan’s, whose principal audiences are this otherwise hard-to-reach group.
The election night coverage from NBC included this:
First-time voters broke for Trump, 54%-45%. That was a huge reversal from four years ago, when new voters strongly favored Biden, 64%-32%.
And it’s always worth repeating what CIRCLE found about youth voter turnout:
Young people’s electoral participation dropped notably in 2024. After historically high youth voter turnout of over 50% in the 2020 presidential contest, our early estimate is that 42% of youth (ages 18-29) voted in 2024. And after several cycles of overwhelming support for Democratic candidates, exit poll data suggests that young voters supported Vice President Harris over President-elect Trump by just 4 percentage points.
These voters didn’t turn out because they were inspired by Donald Trump’s positive vision. No “acts of courage and belief” for this crowd.
A former Republican congressional staff member, Mike Lofgren, calls out the
tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type.
Are there more of them than there are of the disaffected voters—particularly young voters—on our side? That’s what I want to know—not how to make better TV ads.
Who has the answer? Maybe David Hogg. More on that next time.