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WASHINGTON – As the election approached, Democrats dreamed it would turn out something like Star Wars, with rebel forces blowing up the Death Star and celebrating in the streets as a blue wave swept them into power in Washington and in state capitals across the country.
But President-elect Joe Biden’s victory ended up being more like the horror film Alien, with the scruffy last survivor throwing the monster out of the airlock, then drifting to an uncertain fate in deep dark space. And wherever they end up, there would likely be another alien.
Yes, Biden firmly beat President Donald Trump – and there were even street parties – but the results were brutal for Democrats in a way that could haunt them for years to come.
The party has escaped key Senate races, lost ground in the House and failed to capture state legislatures in a year of redistribution despite political winds at its back, more money in their bank accounts and a hyper-activated base that had spent four years preparing. for the moment.
If this wasn’t the year for Democrats to win big, then when can they?
“It’s really hard for the psychology of our party to learn any lessons when we keep winning,” Democratic strategist Danny Barefoot said, referring to the presidential race. “But someone has to have the tough conversation to say, that’s not enough.”
In interviews with more than two dozen officers and elected officials, Democrats said they feared the 2020 results would hamper the party and the progressive agenda, setting up a grim next decade of difficult fighting in which ones to gain viable legislative majorities will be difficult at both the national and federal level.
The party’s mediocrity in state legislative races was of particular concern, not only because the GOP will once again gain the upper hand in drawing districts, but because it has exposed a fundamental problem in communicating the Democratic Party’s brand.
“We have to show that we are the party that sits on the side of working families,” said State Representative Chris Turner, the Democratic leader at State House in Texas.
In Washington, the plan for many Democrats was to capture the Senate and go through a lightning round of reforms, from the franchise to the admission of new states into the Union, that would help the party overcome structural limitations and put them in place not only for radical political victories. , but new electoral gains across the board.
“2020 was the last best chance we have of having a real viable Senate majority. Here we go,” said Sean McElwee, founder of the left-wing think tank Data for Progress. “We still have two years where we can try to work within the structure and win these elections. And then I’m a little lost.”
There’s still a lot that isn’t known about the 2020 election, but conversations – and finger-pointing – have already started as the party begins to learn lessons.
Demography is not fate
For a long time, Democrats took it a gospel that their future was secure as the country became younger and more diverse, provided they got rid of these voters.
But turnout has broken records this year, and Democrats not only fell short of their hopes, Republicans reaped Democratic advantages with non-white voters they saw as part of their base.
Some fear that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, could lose touch with blue-collar workers of all races outside of major metropolitan areas.
“We’re such a Beltway party that we can’t even imagine that there are many Mexicans in the (Rio Grande) Valley who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who heads a great PAC. focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won and it’s great, but everything under Biden has been a huge disaster.”
White working-class voters started dropping out of the party decades ago and some Latinos and African Americans, especially men without a college degree in more rural areas, have followed suit this year, shifting a heavily Latino rural county in Texas after voting for Democrats by a large margin in 2016.
LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, said young black voters in particular were less tied to Democrats and the party could not take them for granted in the future. She noted that Trump had made a concerted effort to attract them by highlighting his support for a criminal justice reform bill, even as his “law and order” message portrayed black activists as violent extremists.
“It’s walking hypocrisy, but Trump is a master at being able to sound bites and tell people what they want to hear,” she said. “It was no different for black voters.”
The fault here has been made on both sides of the party’s ideological divide, from party leaders who can at times seem out of touch with the daily struggles of American workers, to a militant class who push Democratic candidates to take sometimes unpopular positions that cannot reflect – not even fully. the opinions of the groups they claim to represent.
All politics are national
The goal of the Biden campaign was to make 2020 a referendum on Trump’s chaotic tenure and it was successful, but the results were much worse on the ballot.
Republicans have barred swing neighborhoods with ads linking moderates to the party’s most far-left voices, leading to bitter recrimination between factions.
“When you’re Joe Biden, you’re 47 in public life, and have a billion dollars behind you, you can build your own brand,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president of centrist think tank Third Way. “But when you’re down, it’s hard to outrun that mark in the red and purple districts.”
Left activists claimed they were unfairly distinguished. They claim they delivered progressive voters to Biden and helped take youth participation to a new high.
“We cannot let Republican narratives drive our party,” left-wing groups Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, New Deal Strategies and Data for Progress wrote in a post-election memo.
But a surprising number of Democratic thinkers and strategists, including some on the left, are starting to wonder – delicately and often in private – whether the party should downplay some of the divisive cultural struggles that are taking place, especially on social media.
After all, six in ten voters do not have a college degree. Over 40% live in a house with a gun. And while atheism and agnosticism are on the rise, non-religious affiliates still make up just over a quarter of the population.
This does not mean abandoning the policies of social justice, simply spreading the word about popular policies and not necessarily bringing to the fore those which divide the most.
“We should care more about what the Latina who works at two jobs thinks than the Brooklyn hipster whose all public engagement is on Twitter,” Barefoot said.
The unknown future
While Democrats are already arguing over what went wrong in the polls, clear answers can take time.
Some states are still counting votes, and analysts still look at constituency data to determine where the party has underperformed. Until pollsters find out why they missed key races, it will also be more difficult to determine which issues resonated with the public and at what points in the race.
Then there are the two biggest unknowns that only future elections will solve: Trump and the pandemic. Trump has driven turnout to levels not seen in a century on both sides, and it’s unclear what happens if he left.
“Republicans don’t get that hot when Trump isn’t on the ballot,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said, highlighting Democratic gains in 2018.
The coronavirus also makes the 2020 cycle difficult to judge. Democrats have mostly halted traditional in-person participation operations for fear of exposing volunteers and voters.
“This is perhaps the only campaign in history where we can identify that, overall, candidates from one party knocked on many more doors than candidates from the other party,” said Daniel Squadron, former New York State senator and founder of the Future Now Fund. , which targets state legislative races.
Arizona and Georgia have shown a potential roadmap for the party’s future, but the victories have been the fruits of the seeds planted years ago with high-profile campaigns to register and organize voters. In Arizona, it started ten years ago with efforts to overturn strict immigration law and oust former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, while Stacy Abrams began her job in Georgia in 2014.
“If you want to earn and maintain your victories, you have to maintain your investments,” said Perez, who will soon step down as DNC chairman and, he says, will leave the party in much better shape than he did. find. “You can’t just invest every four years and hope to win.”
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