re: Question for Democrats concerning strategy

quote:

---

I'm not sure how many DNC strategists will respond but I would also like to know.

---

As a left of center person (I voted for Bernie), I'll give it a shot because I think this is one of the few posts on the Poli board where someone is actually looking for real discussion.

The Democratic Party is well aware that there are basically two groups of people who are reliable Democratic voters:

1. White people with a bachelor's degree or higher who live in urban settings and care about social issues such as abortion, gay rights, etc.

2. Minority voters who see the GOP as a white nationalist party that is either consciously trying to damage minority communities or just completely uncaring about whether its policies have that effect.

There are lot of Millenials who also lean left due to social issues but they aren't reliable voters, especially in midterms.

The big problem is that there are very few reasons for any white people who don't care about social issues and/or don't believe that government programs can improve their lives to vote Democrat. Many of those people are older, and older people are the most reliable group of voters in all elections.

America is facing very real problems resulting from globalization. Our labor is so expensive that our workers are going to be losers in a truly global labor market due to lower costs and increasingly skilled workers in other nations. The Democratic leadership doesn't offer solutions to these problems for a couple of reasons. First, their reliable voters (educated whites and minorities reacting to real or perceived GOP racism) aren't very engaged by these issues. Second, the big donors that set the agenda for the party don't care about these issues because they've profited handsomely from globalization. Bernie Sanders tried to address these issues from a class perspective, but he lost in the primaries. Hillary Clinton is not only a terrible politician with a ton of skeletons in her closet, but she had no convincing reason that rural or working class whites unmotivated by social issues should vote for her that didn't include the words "Supreme Court justices."

The populist wing of the GOP offers solutions to the problems of globalization (build a wall, tax imports, kick out immigrants). I disagree with these proposals, but they are targeted directly at working class white voters who could realistically see themselves voting for either party. The DNC wing of the Democrats aren't addressing these concerns, the populist wing of the GOP is. This is particularly helpful in controlling the Senate and gubernatorial elections, because there are a lot of rural, low population states that skew heavily white and working class.

The sad thing (from my perspective as a Democratic voter) is that I don't think that the people who really run the party have learned anything from the 2016 election. This is the same group of people who replaced Debbie Wasserman-Schulz with Donna Brazile. The Democrats are going to have to come up with some believable solution to the problems that globalization is causing the working class and do a much better job of convincing white voters that government programs other than SS and Medicare can actually improve their lives. They're going to be in trouble as long as their presidential candidates have histories of being paid speakers at Goldman-Sachs conventions. I wish Bernie was ten or twenty years younger so that he could conceivably run in the next cycle, but it is what it is.