In this series, I’m attempting to analyze the source of the decline of the Democratic Party — and not just Hillary Clinton’s defeat last month, but the broader and more comprehensive decline experienced by the Democratic Party that began in 2010 and that has gotten steadily worse since then – and lay out a roadmap to a future Democratic resurgence.
As I’ve mentioned earlier in this series, the Democratic Party’s voters are too geographically concentrated to give it a governing majority — i.e., the presidency and both houses of Congress.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote (by almost 3 million votes), but that edge came mostly from the six states where we have complete dominance — she won California by a little over 4.2 million votes, New York state by 1.7 million, Massachusetts by almost a million, Illinois by just under a million, and so on.
A similar situation obtains in the U.S. Senate: while Democrats won a majority of the popular vote, a lot of that was because two Democrats were running against each other in deep-blue California, and by Democrats running up the score in other deep blue states.
The (geographically more diverse) House tells the more accurate story of the Democrats’ predicament: there, the Republicans won the nationwide, aggregate popular vote by just under 1.4 million votes.
If it wants to achieve a governing majority in the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party needs to become both more geographically expansive and more class-diverse.
One response might be that the Democrats don’t need to expand their base, but just get the base they have to actually turn out and vote —as many Democrats of my acquaintance say, “If we turn out, we win, because as an absolute matter, there are more Democratic voters than Republican voters.”
This isn’t actually wrong, strictly speaking, but the unavoidable fact is, basing your strategy on people who haven’t been turning out to vote — even when a candidate like Donald Trump is the Republican nominee — is part of the reason why the current situation of the Democratic Party is so dire. They need a big enough base of reliable voters that unreliable voters might be nice to get(in a “baker’s dozen” sort of way), but not structurally necessary to their strategy.
What this all points to is, the Democratic Party needs to pay far more attention to winning the votes working class and rural people.
Notice I didn’t say, “white” working people, and I also didn’t say rural “whites.” I really mean working class and rural people of every race. Previously in this series, I defined working class as:
“(P)eople living the usual situation of the 70 percent of the country that does not have a college degree.”
I’m defining “rural” in a similar way: “The people of every ethnic background living the typical, normative situation of rural people across the country.” In other words, the sort of people one would typically encounter in rural Iowa or Nebraska (or — worth mentioning — rural California, Illinois or New York State. It’s worth remembering that the territorial majority of almost every state is rural, so we’re not just talking about The Big Square Flyover States.)
I can already hear the objection from some fellow Democrats: “So, what you’re saying is, borrow some racists from the Republicans, right?”
Firstly: no that’s not what I’m saying. I didn’t mention race, because if the Democrats go after working class rather than just white working class voters, that’s way more people (70 percent of the country), meaning a greater chance of building that unbeatable coalition.
Secondly: Let’s be a little clearer on what we mean when we say “racist.” Do we make any distinction at all between Klan/White Nationalist types, and the vast majority of people of every race and educational level who have subtler but still socially corrosive racial biases in their heart of hearts? If all political parties purge themselves of all racists, the remaining voters in both parties wouldn’t fill Yankee Stadium, and the United States would cease to be a participatory democracy in any meaningful sense.
Racism — the kind of racism that pervades American life and crosses ideological boundaries — depends for its vitality on ignorance. I don’t just mean “ignorant hicks in red states” but ignorant app developers in San Francisco, ignorant college professors in New York, ignorant organic produce buyers in Chicago, ignorant artists in Boulder, Colorado, and ignorant everybody else, emphatically including me.
What we ignorant people don’t know, or at least haven’t fully, deeply realized, is that people of every race are intrinsically just like us, in every respect. “They” love their children just as much as “we” do, “they” suffer and bleed and ponder the abyss and love and strive and feel joy in exactly the same way as “we” do. (This, by the way, is more or less the entire point of the Black Lives Matter movement.) All of us suffer because of this ignorance, and I want to alleviate that suffering.
The only thing that will decisively undermine the ignorance I’m talking about is gaining knowledge. By that I don’t mean “education” in the formal sense, I mean acquiring knowledge in a deeper and more experiential sense — not just “learning about” people of different races, but having them integrated into the structure of your life.
For example, during the Second World War, there were chronic and serious labor shortages throughout the economy, and particularly for blue-collar type jobs — welders, machinists, pipe-fitters, production line workers, and so on. Early in the war, necessity dealt a serious blow to the pervasive employment discrimination of the day — if you showed up at the factory gates and had two arms, two legs and could see straight, you were immediately hired, trained and put to work, regardless of your ancestry.
While there were sometimes serious racial tensions in the production facilities, they actually lessened through time, because blacks (say) were transformed from an alien and threatening “them,” to a particular guy named Jake who worked at the work station before yours on the production line, and whose yells of “C’mon, Dave — you’re slowin’ me down!” had become a running joke that you both enjoyed, and your supervisor appreciated you both for your hard work.
Now, we are (for the moment, at least) not embroiled in a world war, but if we want to decisively undermine racism, the best way to do so would be to do everything we can to bring about a situation where people of every ethnicity work together as familiar and valued team members.
The problem is, the economy has been doing the opposite for the last 40 years or so. There is a crying need for jobs for the 70 percent of the country I mentioned previously that do not have college degrees. And not just any old job, but jobs that:
– Do not require a college degree;
– Pay middle-class wages;
– Are plentiful enough that employers have a hard time filling them.
This is already running long, so I’ll have more next week. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

Sharing is caring!