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.

Another Election; Another Frustrating Night

It is hard to know where to start in all this.  There were so may failures up and down the line, from people not voting all the way up to President Obama, and there are little things, terrible things, that are so much out of our control, such as the specter of racism, that it is really hard to pinpoint where everything went wrong.

Despite a lackluster second term that has been more about reaction than action, President Obama is still a successful president, seemingly against all odds.  From the very beginning of his presidency, Mitch McConnell vowed to make him a one-termer, and failing that, he would obstruct obstruct obstruct to the point that it would cripple the administration.  It became so bad, that Harry Reid, who is someone I do not love, had to take the nuclear option on filibusters, otherwise no one would have been appointed to do the government's work at all. Anywhere else in the world, this kind of obstruction would not be rewarded.  However, the people of Kentucky, where over 400,000 people enrolled in insurance under the Affordable Care Act, re-elected McConnell, the same person who attempted to kill the program at every step of the way.  How does this make sense?

Frankly, it doesn't.

The list goes on: Scott Walker, Sam Brownback, Rick Scott.  These are all Governors that have done harm to their states - Wisconsin, Kansas, and Florida, respectively.  However, all three were re-elected.  Why is this?

There are certainly many possible answers and many tracts to take.  However, the root problem is one that is years in the making, and unfortunately, it is one that we cannot change without years of sustained "re-education" of the electorate. The Democratic Party has failed to make the case for electing its candidates.  Of course, one could say Barack Obama is proof that I am wrong, but I would posit that he is an anomaly and so is Bill Clinton, for that matter.  Both of those individuals were elected because of their personality, or at least the personae that they portrayed on the campaign trail.  It wasn't because they were particularly "Democrats." Yes, they stood by party principles, but the power of their charisma is what elected them. Once you take them away, what do we have? After overwhelming majorities in the 80's and early 90's, there has been a chip, chip, chipping away of the Democratic foundation, with major wave elections in 1994 and 2010 in favor of the Republicans.

In the past 20 or 30 years, we have seen massive polarization of the left and right, but where the left tends to be more pragmatic and open minded (not always, mind you), the right has become more hard-lined.   The conservatives and their propaganda arm, FoxNews and the Koch Brothers funded Super PACS, have defined the words "Democrat" and "Liberal" as designations so fallow that they are used as epithets, even though large numbers of the rural, poor Republican base, specifically in the south, benefits from programs Democrats champion.  Democrats have become synonymous with "big government" and "freeloaders," even has Republican's plan greater intrusions into our lives and prop up businesses in greater proportion to money spent on the social safety net.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing what makes our populist and liberal stances great, the leadership of the party has decided they need to hew closer to the center right to win over conservatives instead of educating people as to why our way is better.  There is empirical data ad infinitum that proves that Republican economic policies have not worked, and the proof is in the economic data out now about the successes of the Obama administration. However, instead of running towards our sitting president and helping cultivate his message, the majority of candidates ran away from him, precisely as the Republican's made it all about him.  If the time and money had been spent drilling home a message of success, then maybe we could have had more wins in these midterms.  Instead, the party threw up their hands in defeat, and consequently, they never defined where we stood.  Sure, the Republican's didn't either, but the onus was on us.  The party failed.

There is not much left for Obama to do except to ride out the next two years.  He's essentially a lame duck now, but he might be able to make some changes within the party to get the ball rolling for a competitive 2016.  If I knew where to begin, I probably wouldn't be blogging about it (I would be trying to get a job to fix it), but for Hillary (or any Democrat) to win and actually have a shot at the history books beyond the gender milestone, then the Democratic Party needs to win the message war.  It needs to fight, and it needs to start now!

***Note:  Part of the reason I haven't been blogging on the regular is because most of my quick bites go out on Facebook.  However, with the turn of the election screw, my political bent is in full force.  If you come here, you should expect a lot of politics from here on out, but I'll try to break it up. ***