Baaaad news for Democrats
Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:45 am
Matt Yglesias seems to have taken notice of the fact that Democrats are getting electorally slaughtered all over the country:
This has perplexed me for a long time. Why is it that Democrats are pushing ever more extreme, far left liberal positions ("Rights for trans women of color! $15 minimum wage! Gun confiscation!") when their existing positions seem to be losing them every election held in a place that's not dominated by a dense, liberal urban area like NYC or Chicago or Seattle? The Democrats' base has always been smaller than the Republicans' base; pandering to it while ignoring the moderates and the middle seems like it's proving to be a near-fatal strategy for Democrats.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9565119/d ... ep-trouble
The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.
[...]
In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.
[...]
On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.
Whatever you make of this agenda substantively, there's no way to actually enact it without first achieving a considerably higher level of down-ballot electoral success than Democrats currently enjoy.
But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama's or drastically to its left.
This has perplexed me for a long time. Why is it that Democrats are pushing ever more extreme, far left liberal positions ("Rights for trans women of color! $15 minimum wage! Gun confiscation!") when their existing positions seem to be losing them every election held in a place that's not dominated by a dense, liberal urban area like NYC or Chicago or Seattle? The Democrats' base has always been smaller than the Republicans' base; pandering to it while ignoring the moderates and the middle seems like it's proving to be a near-fatal strategy for Democrats.