Opinion | This is not the ideology that sank House Democrats. It was a bad strategy.

It was a weak strategy, based on bad polling information and bad decisions from the National Party that left Democratic candidates in shifting districts – and candidates of color in particular – unable to defend themselves against a massive Republican voter. and massively underestimated. push. The point is, if you want to win a campaign, you have to campaign, which means standing in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing the Democratic congressional candidates couldn’t do this year, ordered by the party’s campaign arm in Washington, DC.

In each electoral cycle, the Democratic Congress Campaign Committee (the DCCC), along with the Democratic National Committee (the DNC) and their largest and most influential allies, wield disproportionate influence through the weight of their supporters and their stock market power. Often working in concert and getting big donors to follow, they decide which candidates are “viable”, who deserves full financial support, how their campaigns should work, and which consultants they can hire. And this year, the direction given by the DC Democrats turned out to be a very large part of the reasons House Democrats were far from the blue wave they hoped for in 2020, instead diminishing their hard-fought-won majority. in 2018.

Their data was bad – the result of a poll that vastly underestimated the number of Republicans who would vote and how their growing loyalty to President Donald Trump would cause them to support GOP candidates throughout the process. Their understanding of the very specific beliefs of voters in very different local districts was even worse – which is why Hispanic voters, lumped into an undifferentiated bloc, supposedly pro-immigration and anti-Trump, offered the party such dire surprises. in South Florida. and the Texas border areas. While the party is not solely responsible for using bad data, it should have known better than to use polls as the primary indicator of future success and voter preferences. Indeed, 2016 had widely warned that the polls were unreliable.

And the messaging dictates from Washington – conveyed to all Congressional campaigns through conference calls, memos, and advertising advice from consultants – often missed their mark. The Democratic campaigns we have endorsed and communicated with frequently have been ordered to hit Republicans hard for their mismanagement of the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Yet swing voters did not view their candidates or local GOP officials as accomplices in the Russian roulette that Trump’s White House had played around Covid. And the advice on conference calls we attended, which encouraged contestants to run TV commercials saying they were “angry,” “tired” and “frustrated,” was ridiculously ill-suited to contestants of color – especially black women – showing up in almost all – white neighborhoods.

Washington guidance generally understood by campaigns as a ban the solicitation in person was the most damaging decision of all – a mistake that made all the others worse. It seemed to make sense at first glance. But it was also – as the lack of masks at Trump rallies is for Republicans – a form of Democratic branding: They walk in the footsteps of typhoid Mary, we take the high road with Tony Fauci. Applied to campaigns across the country, it has turned terribly against it. Instead of finding ways to campaign safely in vibrant neighborhoods and talk to voters, wearing masks and social distancing, in the weeks leading up to the election – as the presidential campaign did Joe Biden – Democratic campaigns have had to rely on second-hand information, filtered through false perceptions. pollsters and politicians in distant Washington, DC They had no choice but to rely on poll data, which a more robust ground operation would have revealed to be inaccurate: nothing better for measuring voter sentiment than meeting voters in person. And so they had to connect with voters through the largely impersonal means of TV commercials, email blitzes, and massive social media spending.

Again, based on our experience working with Congressional campaigns, meeting a Congressional candidate on screen just doesn’t work – and especially not for candidates of color, who are considered “the black candidate.” Or “the Hispanic candidate” Or “that Asian candidate” when seen on TV, but simply becomes “the candidate” when met in person. The lack of direct contact is what allowed the label of “radical left” to be applied to the Midwest. Lauren Underwood, who grew up in her nearly 90% white neighborhood, shares her neighbors’ health, economic and safety concerns, but has been portrayed as years in television commercials that have darkened her skin, made a caricature of her features and linked her to anarchic “riots”. This is also why Gina Ortiz Jones, despite her military service and long-time home base in South Texas, could be portrayed as a carpet saleswoman for owning a (rented) condo in Washington, DC, and being painted as almost irreparably “other” By attacking advertisements centered on his life with a female partner.

Now that party leaders in Washington are embarking on (yet) another high-profile ‘deep dive’ into their failures, we’d like to suggest that they start with a few tough questions: Why do Democrats know so little about our counterparts? republicans? how far to find them and how to talk to them so that we can conduct accurate polls? Why doesn’t our national party trust individual campaigns, especially promising campaigns of candidates of color, to hire their own people and make their own messaging and strategy decisions?

The leaders of our party must respect the judgment of candidates who run in cities, suburbs and rural areas far from the ring road. In particular, they need to do a better job of listening to candidates of color, who are currently not well served by the “best” professionals sent from DC to advise them. And they need to loosen the reins considerably when it comes to imposing potentially destructive one-size-fits-all national strategies on the local races of Congress.

Washington is a top-down city, but today’s electoral landscape is a bottom-up, bottom-driven world that both reflects and rewards diversity – not only that of candidates, but also that of ideas and strategies. Losing sight of this truth is how we fail to win elections.