How What Is Happening In Texas Lays Bare The Biggest Weakness The Democrats Have Had In The Age of Trump – And How A Far Less Public Outreach Might Help Solve It

 

 

There are many lessons to be taken from the autopsy of the 2024 election and the math doesn't lie. Harris received only 33 percent of white-working class voters and 8 percent of rural America overall. These have been weaknesses the Democrats have been suffering from for years but that the far-left wing of the party has never thought is a real problem.

In this article I'd like to talk about the struggles the Democrats have been having in these two critical areas, why the actions of Texas Democrats in the last few weeks are a response to this weakness that is pure political theater that won't help the party and touch on a far less publicized attempt to try and help by a once prominent Democrat that might be a long-term solution for the party.

If you are familiar with the messaging of MoveOn and other progressive articles (and at this point I am excessively aware of them) you know the laundry list of how the GOP managed to gain its toehold in the South and rural America. However because these articles are just as biased and one-sided as what you will get from Fox News and the Washington Examiner, it eliminates the role that Democrats have played in that gap over the years.

Much of this predates the 2016 election. It includes the abandonment by the DNC of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy after Obama won election in 2008, despite the fact that it had led to the Party's return to power in all three branches of government for the first time since 1992, the fact that for years the Democrats increasingly drift to urban centers has led to gaps in Rural America that has made it increasingly difficult for Democrats to win in smaller, less urban states. But this essentially became supercharged in 2016 not just by Trump's surprise victory but Hilary Clinton's defeat of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary several months earlier.

As I've written before members of the Sanders campaign founded the Justice Democrats almost immediately after Trump's swearing in with the purpose of endorsing Democrats at a state level who would support the policies of the Sanders campaign. I've mentioned repeated how massive the scope of the failure of the 2018 campaign was, with the Justice Democrats winning a grand total of four seats in Congress out of the 78 offices they attempted to run for. All four of their candidates for Senate lost their Democratic primaries, only two of their gubernatorial candidates managed to win Democratic primaries (both lost and aside from the four Democrats known who would become known as 'the Squad' as well as two members who had identified before the 2018 election only 16 won their primaries.

'The weaknesses were apparent from the start. They were completely unable to win in red states such as Indiana, Iowa, Montana and Utah and couldn't even win primaries in deep blue states such as Illinois, New Jersey  and California. AOC's victory in New York was the only one of the five Democrats to run in primaries to win in that state and they couldn't win in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or North Carolina. Even in the few red states they won primaries  - James Thompson in Kansas and Kara Eastman in Nebraska, they still lost in the general. If nothing else the fact that Christine Halquist, who won the Democratic primary in Vermont but was flattened by incumbent Phil Scott, should have been a warning flag as to just how limited the reach of the Justice Democrats was. They couldn't even win elected office in the state of Bernie Sanders.

I really think it was the factor of the Democrats still reeling from the loss of 2016 and the surprise victory of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the Democratic primary that led them to more or less fully embrace and put front and center members of the Justice Democrats from the 2018 election forward. That none of this helped them with their two biggest weaknesses – white working class voters and rural America – was something they chose to ignore.

This was a huge blunder on their part. Historically the left has never hidden its contempt for red states and rural America. If one looks at any article by such outlets as Daily Kos over the years, they regard the citizens of Kansas and Louisiana not as fellow Americans but as barely human. Even the most scholarly books about them take the tone of anthropologists looking at an uncivilized tribe with primitive rituals. And ever since Trump won, they've made it clear that they view them with utter contempt.

Perhaps that's why over the years I've come to regard so many of the fundraising texts and emails I've gotten from organizations such as MoveOn arguing about how Trump will destroy America as dog whistles that basically say: "We have to save our nice, clean blue states and cities from the policies of these evil people from flyover country." Even if you agree with the sentiment, it makes it clear that they have no interest in saving these mouth breathing red staters from themselves, even though Democrats and so many of the people they claim to want to help live in these states and by their own words need more salvation then the ones who live in New York or California.

The reason I'm sure of this is that during 2021 I received dozens of emails from left-leaning groups as well as the DNC telling me frantically to contribute in order to help Democrats win the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, both of which are reliably Democratic states. By contrast in 2023, I received practically nothing from these same organizations to help Democrats win the governorship in Kentucky or Mississippi.

For those of you who might not be aware, Kentucky has a Democratic governor named Andy Beshear. Mississippi's current governor Tate Reeves was involved in a welfare scandal so cartoonishly corrupt that it received coverage from national news and John Oliver. Those states, by any definition, needed Democrats in charge more than Republicans. Yet even though polls gave the Democrats the best opportunity they had to flip the governorship in decades, progressives chose to sit on their hands because they found the Democratic candidate 'insufficiently progressive'. As a result Reeves narrowly won reelection and Mississippi was forced to endure another four years of corrupt leadership that will continue to hurt the citizens. Beshear did win reelection but with no real help or credit from the left.

This decision of the left to make clear that only progressive values were acceptable for Democratic candidates combined with Democratic neglect at a local level in rural states for years led to a stunning statistic by the Times last year: nearly 70 percent of the candidates in all elected offices in 2024 were running opposed, the overwhelming majority in deep red states. You can bet that the Nation or The Atlantic never ran that story in the leadup to the election.

It's for that reason I have come to question how much the left truly cares about things such as voting rights and redistricting. The majority of these decisions are made at a state level by governors and state house legislators. So it stands to reason if more Democrats ran at a state or local level in every state in the union, they would have more of a say in redistricting the state at a federal level, causing more Democrats to be elected nationwide. (It also might help all of those red states get the kind of help that progressives seem to imply they need when they point out their flaws in their newsletters, but let's focus on the more important thing which is getting more Republicans out of office.)

But I've never seen in a decade of receiving newsletter from so many progressive organizations arguing for the election of the governors in South Dakota or Idaho or state representatives in Kansas or Missouri. All of their interest is only focused on blue states or swing states and they never seem concerned about trying to win congressional or Senate races in red states.

 

And that pretty much leads us to what's going on in  Texas where several  Democratic members of the house of representatives fled the state in order to protest a decision to pass a bill redistricting the Texas map to favor Republicans. There are now warrants out for their arrest by the governor.

To be clear, I'm not saying what the administration is doing isn't despicable and hard to stomach. But in the long run none of what Texas legislators are  doing is likely to stop this from happening. It is pure political theater, the very thing we were decrying the GOP of less than a year ago but that now the Democrats are basically saying should be embraced.

Let's consider what's going on Texas. Is it morally wrong that the Texas Republicans are concentrating on shoving a gerrymandered map through their legislature rather than focusing on the well-being of the state's citizens? Absolutely. Can they still do it regardless of Democrats fleeing to another state? Again, absolutely. And the Democratic representatives in Texas and the party at large know this. Texas has been a fairly Republican legislature for years and they've been doing things that progressives in particular loathe. And they can do these things because they have the numbers. Morality has nothing to do with it; math does.

Now let's frame the question another way? How do the Democratic legislators fleeing to Illinois help their constituents in Texas who they say are suffering? Theoretically, the longer they stay out of Texas, the legislature is at a standstill and they can't move on to new business, some of which might end up helping their constituents.

To be clear what Governor Abbott is doing is playing politics and not taking the problems of Texas citizens seriously. That's exactly what the Democratic representatives also are doing by fleeing the state, only its being compounded by the DNC and the national party. They are doing so in large part because of the flaws of years of ignoring other states at a local level as I said above. That it might very well end the political careers of these Texas representatives  - whether by expulsion or reelection down the road – is less important because they want this issue to play their base. How this is going to help them win in rural America or with working class voters is impossible to see from this juncture.

It's also why I dismiss the arguments of people like Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hochul that if this is carried through they will deal with similar redistricting in their states. At best, this is the kind of petty childhood argument of "two wrongs do make a right' and it takes away one of the key selling points of the Democrats in the age of Trump: we're the grownups and we believe in the rule of law. If you don't think Republicans won't immediate seize on this as a campaign issue in the midterms, you've clearly been ignoring everything they've been doing to campaign for the last thirty years.

And I don't think Governor Abbott is wrong when he says that these deep blue states can't gerrymander their districts to favor Democrats any more than they already are. That's assuming that their state legislatures will go along with it – and what's to stop Republican legislators in these statehouses to flee to red states if they do? The Democrats have set the precedent already and they can't cry foul if it happens.

All of this is pure political theater that is designed to appeal to the base of the party which the last election has proven is smaller then the Democrats want to acknowledge. None of it deals with the problems the party already has – which is why I'm far more interested of the action of a once-prominent Democrat who seems to be working to try and solve it.

The same week everything in Texas began to play out there was an article in the Times saying that Joe Kennedy III was in the middle of touring the deep south, working in Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma and West Virginia to use his famous name to try and build a Democratic enclave in deep red states. Kennedy, it's worth noting, lost in Massachusetts running in a Senate primary in 2020 because he wasn't considered sufficiently progressive.

This may be less difficult then it seems. It's not just considered how well Brandon Presley did in the Mississippi governor's race in 2023 but Doug Jones did win the race for Jeff Sessions' seat in Alabama in 2017, the first real victory against Trump during his first term. Joe Manchin was successful until fairly recently at winning in deep red West Virginia, only leaving the party after being called a DINO in name only.

He's not engaged in political theater but doing the hard and difficult work of grass roots politics. He doesn't believe in symbolic gestures but rather the kind of slow coalition building that may someday bring results. Will he succeed? Who knows? But he's definitely trying to do something to help the people of these states as opposed to the legislators in Texas and the national party which is backing in them and  is mostly silent about what Kennedy is doing.

Now I won't pretend that these efforts are altruistic. Kennedy himself has mentioned that he might run for office again someday. But there are many paths to enduring yourself to the party faithful and the electorate. Practically none of them – certainly for a Democrat today – involve going through unfriendly territory the loudest members of his party say nobody lives in and doesn't deserve to be saved from themselves.

And to be clear, it's probable that we won't see the results of Kennedy's efforts for a while in the states he's working in. All four of these states have Senators running for reelection in next year's midterms. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia won her last election by twenty-one points. Tommy Tuberville is retiring to run for governor but considering he won with 60 percent of the vote in 2020, whoever takes this seat will have his work cut out for them. It's not yet clear if incumbent Markwayne Mulin of Oklahoma is planning to run for reelection but that state hasn't had a governor and it hasn't gone Democratic in any election since LBJ's landslide victory in 1964. Cindy Hyde-Smith might offer an opportunity: she won with 54 percent of the vote in 2020.

Still it might pay efforts down the road and the fact that this is the first time in decades I've seen any Democrat make even an effort to try and win back the south and rural America, it is something to be celebrated and admired far more than the political theater that so many progressives consider doing something. (There's a joke to be made about it being a Profile in Courage.) And it is the long, slow and almost certainly unappreciated work that is far more likely to play long-term dividends.

If the Democratic Party had any sense – something I have reason to  question more and more with each day – they would dismiss the gestures of so many progressives and spend all their time and energy doing the work that Kennedy is doing. Kennedy is trying to build something which should be celebrated rather than performing. The party used to understand this and it once led them to great electoral success. Perhaps they can learn this lesson again. For the sake of the nation – even those sections that the left despises without thinking – I hope so.