Some initial steps if the Democrats are really serious. Start by looking different.
By William Hausdorff
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I already miss the Mooch.
Unlike Spicer, Huckabee Sanders, Conway, and the
rest of that robotically mendacious crowd, Anthony Scaramucci, the effervescent
but sadly evanescent White House communications director, appears to be occasionally
capable of unprogrammed, human-like opinions.
Nevertheless, only after the Mooch was dismissed for delivering
his must-read interview-rant,
could I (momentarily) pull myself out of reach of the daily splattering of
untreated sewage that passes for White House communication. I decided to try to think about where Trump
and the Republicans are heading.
I started by pondering the already trite Presidential
conundrum: “Who would you rather have as President, the incompetently evil and
deranged Trump or the competently evil and theocratic Pence?” For the purposes of moving on, I accepted
Frank Rich’s sunny prediction
that, in the wake of a Trump impeachment or resignation-under-scandal, the
newly sworn-in Pence would be so tainted that he would be rendered ineffectual,
with potentially cleansing elections around the corner.
It’s not about Trump,
stupid.
The real story has been, since day one, not Trump but the
Republican party’s enabling and facilitating of Trump’s destructive behavior
and policies. On one hand, there are
numerous op-ed articles noting the Republican Party has become so ideologically
extreme in the last 30 years that it is doomed for extinction. While the shedding of long-term conservative
party members such as George Will and Joe Scarborough provides some hope in
that regard, their departures appear to be more anti-Trump than disagreement
with the Party’s increasingly wacko positions.
Our attention must thus turn to that other political party,
which will have to actually win elections instead of sitting forlornly on the
sidelines wondering why its often milquetoast candidates lose even in districts
Trump barely won in November. What would
the Democrats have to do to wallop the Republicans in the 2018 and 2020
elections?
The most recent official Democratic Party response has been to
propose a “new
vision” ideologically more to the left in an attempt to re-brand the Party. It’s hard to imagine that alone will cause a
significant shift in voting patterns.
What might convince the electorate that these Democrats are somehow an
improvement on the previous version?
A domestic
inspirational precedent
I sought inspiration from two huge electoral triumphs. Since the current Democratic share of national
and state government offices by some accounts is lower than it has been since
the 1920s—and
because I recently finished reading the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of
Lyndon Johnson--the first was the Franklin Roosevelt-led 1932 national
elections.
That year, more than 30% of House seats turned over, in
contrast to the <15% in each of the previous 4 House elections. 1932 was the
first of 3 successive elections
in which the number of Democratic senators went from 47, to 69, and to 76 by
1936.
It is still stunning to reflect that the Democrats crushed
Herbert Hoover’s Republicans so thoroughly that they established congressional majorities
lasting essentially from 1933 to 1994. Within that 62-year period, the
Republicans only managed to gain control of the House for 4 years, and of the
Senate for a total of 10 years.
It is, of course, fatuous to expect anything remotely comparable
in the upcoming mid-term, non-Presidential election, which fortunately is not
occurring in the midst of a horrible economic depression. But the lesson I drew from Caro is regarding how
FDR and the Democrats presented themselves to the exhausted country.
Clear goals, not
programs.
In Caro’s telling, FDR and the Party did not simply run as
“we’re not Hoover,” nor offered a catalog of specific programs. They outlined clear goals, but presented themselves
as essentially willing to actively try ANYTHING—obviously involving massive
government intervention-- to solve the country’s major economic problems. This stood in stark contrast with the
single-minded passive focus of Hoover’s Republicans on balancing the budget.
Democrats are currently flirting with the idea of coalescing
around offering a serious national health plan, like every other single
developed country has had for decades. Guaranteeing truly
universal health care, and cutting costs by streamlining the ridiculous health
insurance bureaucracy, with at least a public option, would be a clear goal.
While there may be disagreements about the political tactics
the Party should take to get there, it seems obvious that clear advocacy of a
Medicare-for-all as a goal, rather than mealy-mouthed advocacy of tinkering
with the ACA (who votes for tinkering?), would start to set them apart from the
Republicans.
A foreign inspirational
precedent
Another, more timely example of electoral triumph is that of
Emmanuel Macron and his party in France.
Not only did he personally triumph over the candidates of the
traditional parties, but in the subsequent legislative elections his party won
a clear majority
of seats.
In fact, fully 75% of the seats in the lower House
(Assemblée Nationale) turned
over. To put that figure in context,
there was 40% turnover seen in the previous French election in (2012), and 25
and 34% in the two before that.
Do these numbers have any meaning in the US context, as we know
that France is not the US, and that their parliamentary system differs significantly
from the US system? We might first
conclude no, since in the US elections in 2016, a Soviet politburo-level 97% of
House incumbents were re-elected.
But the French parliamentary elections have 5 year terms, vs
2 years in the US House, so a fairer comparison might be to look at how many US
Representatives re-elected in 2016 had been in office 6 years earlier (i.e., in
2010). The
answer is 57%, for a 43% turnover during that time period. For good measure, the average turnover for US
Senate seats (also a 6 year cycle) in the past 7
elections has been 38%. So in both
countries about 40% turnover is normal every 6 years (pre-Macron).
There may be some lessons here, because Macron, like the
Democrats, was trying to portray himself as “something different.” Without being reductionist in explaining why
Macron won, I think it is valuable to look at three of the wholesale changes
Macron made in the party and how it chose its nominees for parliament.
A new party. Or at least a new name.
First, he created a whole new party out of disaffected
individuals from other parties. The
renaming and restructuring of political parties seems to be a French
speciality. For example, the political party
of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy (L'Union pour un mouvement populaire [UMP]) was only created in 2002,
and Sarkozy himself led its subsequent re-branding as “Les Républicains” just a
few years ago.
This doesn’t seem likely to happen with the Democrats,
although maybe it should. And in fact,
in the US, when long-established companies really want to change their brand
perception, whether to escape the taint of scandal, following acquisition of
another company, or to reflect that their core business really has changed,
they change their name.
More women
Secondly, and more concretely, Macron was fully committed to
gender parity for his party’s candidates to parliament (as well as in his cabinet).
The following figure depicts the male-female
ratios in selected lower house of Parliaments and the US House of
Representatives in 2003 and 2017.
Unfortunately, the US, unimpressive 14 years ago, today looks pathetic compared
to France or its other peers in this rather fundamental measure of
progressiveness.
I would be delighted to attribute this solely to the
Republican house members. But the
following figure shows the male-female
ratios in the US House of Representatives vs those of the French
Assemblée Nationale in 2017, by political party (Macron’s coalition is LREM
+ MoDem, and Les Républicains campaigned alongside the UDI):
It is likely no coincidence that the meager proportion of
Republican representatives who are women is similar to the proportion of Trump
cabinet members who are women (2/15= 13%). But with 2/3 of their representatives being
male, the Democrats also have a way to go to reach parity.
There are, of course, fundamental differences
in how parties choose their candidates in various countries, and there is even
a law
in France mandating male-female parity in parliamentary nominations (the Républicains
+ UDI have preferred to pay million-euro fines rather than achieve that). Plus the US frenetic election cycle of every
2 years makes it quite difficult to abruptly change the House nominees. But if the Democrats are serious about being
a progressive party, why not openly declare a clear goal of male-female
parity within the next few years?
Younger candidates
A third way in which the 39-year old Macron directly changed
the face of his party was by nominating and electing a much younger set of MPs
(average age 45.5 years) than the previous Assemblée Nationale (average age 54
years). This was also significantly
younger than those elected within the largest opposition party, Les Républicans
(average age 52 years).
There have been a series
of articles
contrasting how old the Democratic House leadership is (average age 71) with
how young, for the most part, their counterparts in the Republican party are (average
age 49). It has been surprisingly
difficult, however, to find any article describing the average age of House
members in 2017 by party.
After some manual calculations based on individual member
birth year,
it turns out that the average Democratic representative turns 61 this year, and the
average Republican representative 57.
For a party looking to put on a fresh face, not to mention galvanize the
younger voters (meaning <40), this is probably not a winning
strategy. I haven’t read anywhere that
putting up younger candidates for Congress is a priority for the Democrats.
It is too much to dream for an FDR-like or even Macron-like
landslide that will send the Republicans into congressional oblivion in 2018
and 2020 for the next 60 years. But it will
be nice if the Democrats make a serious effort.
Changing the name, aiming for gender parity, and recruiting younger
candidates would be a start.
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