Ain't No Party Like a Democratic Party...

...Because the Democratic Party don't VOTE.

Pardon the bad turn of song lyric, but it really just popped in my head as I was thinking about today's blog.  Then I found a graphic, too!

It is exceedingly frustrating that people, especially ones within the Democratic Party apparatus, just choose to accept the conventional wisdom that the Democratic base doesn't "do" midterm elections. The fact is that if they do not vote during midterms then the party is failing to engage them.

I get it.  Presidential elections are much sexier than races further down the ticket.  Take my home state of Indiana in 2014, the highest level race was for House of Representatives, and then the next step down was Secretary of State, which unlike at the federal level has nothing to do with foreign policy.  In 2015, all we have are municipal elections, specifically Mayor of Indianapolis, which as of yesterday is without an incumbent.  I can see why it would be difficult to get people motivated. However, what is the point of having a cohesive political party if  you're just working from presidential campaign to presidential campaign?

Of course, you could say this falls to the state parties to get things together, but for the most part, those parties are terribly underfunded, especially when you have the national organizations sucking up all the money, and for this blog, I am going to disregard the obstacles to voting that the Republicans have put into place across the country.  It certainly does have a chilling effect on things, but it is too complicated of an issue to handle at this moment.

Doubling back, what do we do to get people to vote in midterm elections?  It really comes down to educating the younger and minority voters on their vote's importance.  Unfortunately, it has to be quick and concise, and major issues like gerrymandering power and judicial nominees is pretty difficult to whittle down to fun size.  It needs to happen though, because midterms are just as important, if not more so, than electing the president.  The senatorial and congressional campaign groups touted how they kept raising more money than the Republicans, but what happened to it?  How was it used?  If it was just ad buys, then it was money poorly spent.  It should have been used for GOTV (Get Out The Vote) campaigns.

Using Indiana as an example again, we currently have Republican super-majorities in both houses of the legislature.  This didn't happen until the 2010 midterm election.  Of course, that coincides with another Republican wave election on the national stage, but with the Democrats losing their slight hold on the House by a wide margin, they had absolutely no say in district mapping.  Consequently, the it is going to take a major act of change to get some of these joker's out of office.  Democrats have a real chance of defeating Gov. Mike Pence in 2016, especially if he goes off and runs for president, but what good is a Democratic governor if he or she has to work with super-majorities and wields a very weak veto pen?  No one in their right mind would run for that.  So, no attractive candidates, no turnout, and the cycle continues.

We should be seeing turnouts in the 80% to 90% for every election, but we struggle to get over 50% even in the presidential elections and 35% in the off years.  It is galling that the cradle of democracy has one of the lowest turnouts.  The first thing that needs to happen is that the Democratic Party needs to stop trying to be Republican-lite.  Get out there and educate the voters as to WHY we have the best ideas, and frankly, show them that their ideals match up more with us than with the Republicans.  The Republican Party is much better at telling lies than we are at telling the truth, but the raw material is there if we just embrace it. As I said yesterday, running away from President Obama was the worst choice they could have made. Every election should be about what makes us better than the other party, as well as furthering educating people on the importance of voting.  It needs to be innovative, too, because incessant campaign commercials and mailers aren't going to do it.

Giving up and just saying "the young and minorities do not vote in midterms" is not enough anymore. Get those groups involved to find the best way to engage them, because if we can get them moving towards the polls, this Republican winning streak can finally be broken.