How Democrats Can Recover
Democrats running in rural and working-class white districts usually end up as roadkill. But political researcher Robin A. Johnson of Monmouth College in Illinois spoke with scores of such lawmakers in ten Midwestern states who have survived and even thrived. Their collective wisdom, he reports, holds the key to how Democrats can gain durable majorities in Congress and statehouses across the country.
It’s no secret that vote by mail scares the bejesus out of Donald Trump. But some Democrats are resistant, too, out of fear that it disenfranchises Black voters. That myth was shattered in 2020, when the District of Columbia, which is 43 percent Black, ran a high-turnout election in which every registered voter received a ballot by mail. As Ellie Creamer reports, a bill before the D.C. city council to make its vote-by mail system permanent could change the national conversation.
Back in 1989, Elaine Kamarck co-authored “The Politics of Evasion,” a scathing indictment of the Democratic Party’s losing electoral record and a battle plan for winning. Her work presaged the rise of Bill Clinton. In our new issue, the Brookings Institution scholar updates her thinking in a review of historian Michael Kazin’s What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.
Finally, I take a stab at writing the State of the Union address that Joe Biden should give.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/01/18/how-democrats-can-recover/
= new reply since forum marked as read
'Collins voters' story in their intro (hover over it and you will see) on their website. It linked mistakenly to the article I posted in reply #2 on this thread.
Good catch!
HERE is the Collins story:
Do Democrats Who Supported Susan Collins in 2020 Regret Their Vote?
Nope.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/01/17/do-democrats-who-supported-susan-collins-in-2020-regret-their-vote/
Mary Ann Lynch, of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, is a model Democrat. She began her political career as a staffer for Democratic Governor Joe Brennan and has supported the party with donations and volunteer work for more than 40 years. In the past two elections, she voted a straight Democratic slate—Joe Biden, U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree, Governor Janet Mills—with one exception. Last fall, with control of the Senate on the line and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings a traumatic recent memory, Lynch cast a ballot for Republican Senator Susan Collins. She has no regrets. “I’m a ticket splitter,” Lynch told me. “I don’t often split, but I do split. I vote for the person who I feel would be the best for Maine and for the country. Instead of saying we need more Democrats or more Republicans, I would say we would need more people like Susan Collins who reach across the aisle to get things done.”
Lynch does not share the ominous feeling, increasingly common among Democrats, that time is running out. A paper-thin majority in Congress is likely to disappear next year, leaving just months to pass paid family leave and protect voters from conservative attempts at disenfranchisement. As the likes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema pettifog and delay, many Democrats wish for just one more Senate seat. And as Texas and other states pass restrictive abortion laws unchecked by the Supreme Court, frustrated Democrats turn to voters in Maine, who returned Collins to the Senate last fall despite her vote for Kavanaugh and the Republican tax bill, and ask: Why?
Exit polling indicates that 13 percent of Collins’s support in 2020 came from registered Democrats. Women overall broke for Collins over her challenger, Sara Gideon, 49 to 46 percent. How did these constituencies make a decision seemingly so against their own interests? How do they feel about it now? Ask them, and their answers often evoke nostalgia for things lost—paper mills, union jobs, and a bipartisan, collegial Congress. They also share a lack of urgency about the slow-moving constitutional crisis instigated by Donald Trump, a sign, along with the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia this fall, that Democrats will have to do more to win than point to Trump’s misdeeds, especially now that he’s off the ballot.
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Collins’s votes in the Senate since her reelection have been just fine with Green, too. This summer, she helped defeat the For the People Act, arguing that its sweeping voting rights provisions—making Election Day a federal holiday, restoring eligibility to felons who’ve served their sentences, keeping names on voting rolls, automatically registering eligible voters—went far beyond preserving the right to vote. Green wasn’t convinced either that such sweeping action was necessary in response to laws such as Georgia’s, which forbids giving water to people waiting to vote. (With many polling places closed in Black areas, lines are often long.) Should people be allowed, Green mused, to give voters even such small gifts as a bottle of water? “What is that law saying? I don’t know,” he said. “Leave it to Susan. I trust her.”
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