Presenting the Winner of the Midterms: This Message
All Democrats had to do was not close their mouths.
For a moment, after the Democrats’ unexpectedly good showing became clear last Tuesday night, I made the mistake of thinking it proved progressives right. Silly me, of course progressive and moderate Democrats would both take credit for winning, changing their narratives not at all.
But Lord knows any number of unexpectedly bad showings have occurred under those same narratives. It simply can’t be a case of either/or. In order to learn anything from this unexpectedly good turn of events we need to set aside preexisting narratives and look at what happened structurally. Only then can we come up with policy that is original, winning, and most of all, effective, which Democrats truly have not offered en masse in decades.
The structural forces that produced the result Tuesday did not depend on what Democrats did or didn’t do. Democrats only needed to repeat their message to take advantage, like a fish in a tank who only needs to open its mouth as the food falls. These forces were that 1) Trump policies actively hurt his own voters; 2) Black voters mobilized a la the 2020 election; and 3) Hispanics, due to the brutality of ICE and perhaps the weaker hold of white male supremacist-based propaganda on them, flipped back. The degree to which we learn from this will determine how successful Democrats are at keeping power.
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In general, if one intends to protect the status quo, they interpret voter appeal as a matter of style. The rich find candidates who seem culturally working class, a la George W. Bush, and Trump himself. If well-financed Democrats are beaten by opponents who appeal to voters’ faith, they decide they need to use religious language and actions themselves, no matter how stilted and artificial they seem doing it. This is why it seems our elections are always won by the more charismatic candidate, regardless of policy proposals. It’s not because voters are shallow. It’s because we usually are choosing between two rich representatives of the Capitalist class, and either they have personal charisma, or they are imitating the style of someone who does, which is the opposite of charisma. Both rightly approach it as a problem of style, though, because neither has anything substantive to offer voters who are not rich. The age of TikTok-length soundbites, facilitated by now-rich Capitalists, has only increased the effectiveness of this approach.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the chair of the Blue Dog PAC chalked the wins up to candidates promising they would be “independent voices, not putting parties and politics first.” Centrists did indeed win by wider margins than many candidates with a “Left” brand. Rahm Emanuel, lapping the faces of Republicans for giving Democrats a second chance (as if it wasn’t because they’d already botched up their own party so badly), warned “we don’t want to be identified with” socialism anymore. But socialist and socialist-adjacent candidates did win in places that weren’t New York, so it couldn’t have been the stain he thought. And whether moderate candidates misgendered trans athletes, blamed hyperpolarization (as if Democrats did that and not billionaire-funded shock media), or called it a “politics of love,” their actual message was lowering costs and taxing billionaires. The New York Times (and Chuck Schumer) noted this, but forgot to mention the message itself was not possible before Bernie Sanders normalized it—the message was a progressive one. AOC and Bernie’s crisscrossing Fight Oligarchy tour throughout Trump’s second tenure, in support of those ideas rather than a candidate, likely helped too.
It has become clear to most Americans that the group of billionaires standing behind Trump at his inauguration, most of whom had flipped from earlier “Liberal” incarnations, are no friends of ours. It was the first time the general population connected those billionaires to the reason we are so divided. In the words of Talarico’s campaign page, “That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way. The biggest divide in this country is not left vs. right. It’s top vs. bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them.” This time Democrats won because they had a winning message and Republicans only had Trump.
Democrats will be able to keep power for as long as they continue to look at the structure of things and how to change them to make them better for working class people, who constitute the mass of people who vote. I am not a “both-sider,” but Democrats are also culpable for the slow-motion fiasco that has been the last 50 years. They have not looked at the core of what was happening and stood up en masse for the people they represent. Only Bernie Sanders was crazy enough to do so. Most Democrats began with a reaction to their opponent’s strength instead of what was happening to their constituents, and agreed to a debate framed by style.
Specifically, it was Republicans who launched the culture war. Reagan introduced the narrative of the good, normal people of the past vs. the new, lazy weirdos, because he knew protecting the status quo would benefit from a debate framed along the lines of style. And for 50 years Democrats have taken the bait. Each time they accuse their opponents of sexism, racism, and homophobia they argue only for what to vote against, not for themselves or what they’d do for their constituents. Each time they dress up in plaid clothes and eat pork sandwiches to appeal to working class voters, they declare Republicans are right: the real issues are cultural. Working class people are and have been rightly offended.
This is not to say racism, sexism, and homophobia are not real, structural, and pressing themselves. But in the debate framed by Republicans in 1980, they are bait used to distract from the underlying issues facing voters. Focusing on them does not change the terms of the debate, it only plays into the opponent’s hands in this case.
The underlying issues for voters are economic and the real problem is that no one has a say in it except for the rich folks on top. Democrats should be arguing for democratizing the economic realm. Trying to address race, gender, and other issues before taking power from those at the top is like trying to pound a nail with an argument. On the other hand, turning racial, gender, and orientation groups into structural allies would help heal those divides, or at least not make them worse.
