Democrat Rob Quist was beat by Greg Gianforte in Thursday's special election
in Montana. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The Democrats Need a New Message
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
27 May 17
After another demoralizing loss to a monstrous candidate, Democrats need a
reboot
The story of Greg Gianforte, a fiend who just wiped out a Democrat in a
congressional race about ten minutes after being charged with assaulting a
reporter, is déjà vu all over again.
How low do you have to sink to lose an election in this country? Republicans
have been trying to answer that question for years. But they've been unable
to find out, because Democrats somehow keep failing to beat them.
There is now a sizable list of election results involving Republican
candidates who survived seemingly unsurvivable scandals to win higher
office.
The lesson in almost all of these instances seems to be that enormous
numbers of voters would rather elect an openly corrupt or mentally deranged
Republican than vote for a Democrat. But nobody in the Democratic Party
seems terribly worried about this.
Gianforte is a loon with a questionable mustache who body-slammed Guardian
reporter Ben Jacobs for asking a question about the Republican health care
bill. He's the villain du jour, but far from the worst exemplar of the
genre.
New Yorkers might remember a similar congressional race from a few years ago
involving a Staten Island nutjob named Michael Grimm. The aptly named Grimm
won an election against a heavily funded Democrat despite being under a
20-count federal corruption indictment. Grimm had threatened on camera to
throw a TV reporter "off a fucking balcony" and "break [him] in half
like
a boy." He still beat the Democrat by 13 points.
The standard-bearer for unelectable candidates who were elected anyway will
likely always be Donald Trump. Trump was caught admitting to sexual assault
on tape and openly insulted almost every conceivable demographic, from
Mexicans to menstruating women to POWs to the disabled; he even pulled out a
half-baked open-mic-night version of a Chinese accent. And still won.
Gianforte, Trump and Grimm are not exceptions. They're the rule in modern
America, which in recent years has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness
to vote for just about anybody not currently under indictment for serial
murder, so long as that person is not a Democrat.
The list of winners includes Tennessee congressman Scott Desjarlais, a
would-be "family values" advocate. Desjarlais, a self-styled pious abortion
opponent, was busted sleeping with his patients and even urging a mistress
to get an abortion. He still won his last race in Bible country by 30
points.
The electoral results last November have been repeated enough that most
people in politics know them by heart. Republicans now control 68 state
legislative chambers, while Democrats only control 31. Republicans flipped
three more governors' seats last year and now control an incredible 33 of
those offices. Since 2008, when Barack Obama first took office, Republicans
have gained somewhere around 900 to 1,000 seats overall.
There are a lot of reasons for this. But there's no way to spin some of
these numbers in a way that doesn't speak to the awesome unpopularity of the
blue party. A recent series of Gallup polls is the most frightening example.
Unsurprisingly, the disintegrating Trump bears a historically low approval
rating. But polls also show that the Democratic Party has lost five
percentage points in its own approval rating dating back to November, when
it was at 45 percent.
The Democrats are now hovering around 40 percent, just a hair over the
Trump-tarnished Republicans, at 39 percent. Similar surveys have shown that
despite the near daily barrage of news stories pegging the president as a
bumbling incompetent in the employ of a hostile foreign power, Trump,
incredibly, would still beat Hillary Clinton in a rematch today, and perhaps
even by a larger margin than before.
If you look in the press for explanations for news items like this, you will
find a lot of them. Democrats may have some difficulty winning elections,
but they've become quite adept at explaining their losses.
According to legend, Democrats lose because of media bias, because of
racism, because of gerrymandering, because of James Comey and because of
Russia (an amazing 59 percent of Democrats still believe Russians hacked
vote totals).
Third-party candidates are said to be another implacable obstacle to
Democratic success, as is unhelpful dissension within the Democrats' own
ranks. There have even been whispers that last year's presidential loss was
Obama's fault, because he didn't campaign hard enough for Clinton.
The early spin on the Gianforte election is that the Democrats never had a
chance in Montana because of corporate cash, as outside groups are said to
have "drowned" opponent Rob Quist in PAC money. There are corresponding
complaints that national Democrats didn't do enough to back Quist.
A lot of these things are true. America is obviously a deeply racist and
paranoid country. Gerrymandering is a serious problem. Unscrupulous,
truth-averse right-wing media has indeed spent decades bending the brains of
huge pluralities of voters, particularly the elderly. And Republicans have
often, but not always, had fundraising advantages in key races.
But the explanations themselves speak to a larger problem. The unspoken
subtext of a lot of the Democrats' excuse-making is their growing belief
that the situation is hopeless and not just because of fixable
institutional factors like gerrymandering, but because we simply have a
bad/irredeemable electorate that can never be reached.
This is why the "basket of deplorables" comment last summer was so
devastating. That the line would become a sarcastic rallying cry for
Trumpites was inevitable. (Of course it birthed a political merchandising
supernova.) To many Democrats, the reaction proved the truth of Clinton's
statement. As in: we're not going to get the overwhelming majority of these
yeehaw-ing "deplorable" votes anyway, so why not call them by their names?
But the "deplorables" comment didn't just further alienate already lost
Republican votes. It spoke to an internal sickness within the Democratic
Party, which had surrendered to a negativistic vision of a hopelessly
divided country.
Things are so polarized now that, as Georgia State professor Jennifer McCoy
put it on NPR this spring, each side views the other not as fellow citizens
with whom they happen to disagree, but as a "threatening enemy to be
vanquished."
The "deplorables" comment formalized this idea that Democrats had given up
on a huge chunk of the population, and now sought only to defeat and subdue
their enemies.
Many will want to point out here that the Republicans are far worse on this
score. No politician has been more divisive than Trump, who explicitly
campaigned on blaming basically everyone but middle American white people
for the world's problems.
This is true. But just because the Republicans win using deeply cynical and
divisive strategies doesn't mean it's the right or smart thing to do.
Barack Obama, for all his faults, never gave in to that mindset. He
continually insisted that the Democrats needed to find a way to reach lost
voters. Even in the infamous "guns and religion" episode, this was so. Obama
then was talking about the challenge the Democrats faced in finding ways to
reconnect with people who felt ignored and had fled to "antipathy toward
people who aren't like them" as a consequence.
Even as he himself was the subject of vicious and racist rhetoric, Obama
stumped in the reddest of red districts. In his post-mortem on the
Trump-Clinton race, he made a point of mentioning this that in Iowa he had
gone to every small town and fish fry and VFW hall, and "there were some
counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of
50 points."
Most people took his comments to be a dig at Clinton's strategic
shortcomings she didn't campaign much in many of the key states she lost
but it was actually more profound than that. Obama was trying to point out
that people respond when you demonstrate that you don't believe they're
unredeemable.
You can't just dismiss people as lost, even bad or misguided people. Unless
every great thinker from Christ to Tolstoy to Gandhi to Dr. King is wrong,
it's especially those people you have to keep believing in, and trying to
reach.
The Democrats have forgotten this. While it may not be the case with Quist,
who seems to have run a decent campaign, the Democrats in general have lost
the ability (and the inclination) to reach out to the entire population.
They're continuing, if not worsening, last year's mistake of running almost
exclusively on Trump/Republican negatives. The Correct the Record types who
police the Internet on the party's behalf are relentless on that score,
seeming to spend most of their time denouncing people for their wrong
opinions or party disloyalty. They don't seem to have anything to say to
voters in flyover country, except to point out that they're (at best) dupes
for falling for Republican rhetoric.
But "Republicans are bad" isn't a message or a plan, which is why the
Democrats have managed the near impossible: losing ground overall during the
singular catastrophe of the Trump presidency.
The party doesn't see that the largest group of potential swing voters out
there doesn't need to be talked out of voting Republican. It needs to be
talked out of not voting at all. The recent polls bear this out, showing
that the people who have been turned off to the Democrats in recent months
now say that in a do-over, they would vote for third parties or not at all.
People need a reason to be excited by politics, and not just disgusted with
the other side. Until the Democrats figure that out, these improbable losses
will keep piling up.
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