I'm coming back to the midterms for this week's post, simply because there's a lot to unpack from the results, as well as the fact that we're still in the process of unpacking them.
I want to start with the bad Senate news for Democrats: specifically, the losses in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. As things stand at the moment, the next Senate will have at least 51 Republicans and 47 Democrats. The fact that it will be under Republican control in any case can be largely laid at the feet of the three incumbent Democrats who lost their seats: Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Claire McCaskill. McCaskill made a post-election appearance on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program, in which she laid the blame for her defeat, and that of other Democrats, on the increasingly popular view that expertise (legislative, in her case) is on the decline as a quality people look for in deciding how to vote.
I don't disagree with her on that point entirely. After all, a declining respect for the value of experience plays a large role in getting self-interested imbeciles like T**** in office, where they don't belong, but where their "outsider" status allows them to "shake things up" (usually, for the worse). But I don't think the voters of Missouri "fired" her because she was inexperienced. Rather, they did so because they tried to pretend that they wouldn't be Democrats if they were elected. This was most notoriously tried by Heitkamp, who boasted in ads about how frequently she voted with T****, before she decided to roll the dice and bring out Resistance voters by voting against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination. But McCaskill wasn't much better; in a dead heat in the polls, unlike Heitkamp, she decided to run a series of commercials in which she proudly boasted that she wasn't one of those "crazy Democrats." Presumable, this meant that she wouldn't stand for the things that Democrats now routinely stand for, despite the fact that those "things" poll very well. Donnelly's campaigning was basically the same.
I can understand why, in purple-to-red states, moderating one's tone matters. But it's possible to moderate your tone without moderating your substance. If you do that as well, you end up with a political universe in which you have, for all practical purposes, two Republican Parties (as the late David Brinkley once pointed out). Or, to use Harry Truman's formulation of this approach, given a difference between a Republican and a Republican, people will pick the Republican every time--by which he meant the real Republican, not the ashamed-to-be-a-Democrat.
Of course, at this point, this is little more than 20-20 hindsight for Democrats in Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri. But it is food for thought for the next election, which will be upon us sooner than you think. Moderation as a political philosophy may be the media's favorite flavor of politics, even when they can't tell us what it tastes like. But there's a lot to suggest in last week's results that it may not be a flavor that people want to buy, in any case. After all, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke created a Senate race that none of the "experts" thought could possibly exist, and he did it in part by not shying away from progressive policy stances. On the other hand, in Tennessee, Phil Breseden ran a more typical, Blue Dog, all-things-to-all-people campaign--and, despite being a popular former Governor, spectacularly lost to a bat-sh*t crazy Republican candidate who will help push the Senate event further to the right.
My point: Maybe it's OK for Democrats to be Democrats going forward from here. The key is to do what O'Rourke (no known relation, BTW) did in Texas to come within 3 percentage points of unseating Cruz, the Republican even other Republicans love to hate. Go out to the people. Get to know their concerns. And explain what you have in your policy bag to help them. Our bag has better ideas than the other sides' has. Trust that. And go help others to do the same.
Maybe it helps--or should help--that people are gradually coming around to our ideas. On guns, for example. And, even in California, the birthplace of the so-called "tax revolt," a referendum to repeal a new gas tax to fund infrastructure projects failed by ten percentage points.
Maybe the fact that they're coming around to our ideas is the reason why the only thing the Republican Party now stands for is dark money, gerrymandering, and straight-up voter suppression. As of this writing, all three of those things have carried them across the finish line in the gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia. Will they continue to do so in 2020?
As always, that's up to you. Keep doing what you did this time. Encourage others to do the same. And, as Barack Obama, a real President suggested, be the change you want to see.
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