The vote on the second ballot was 235-200 indicating that the rift between the old guard and the new left continues. So what does this mean for our party?
First, Tom Perez is a good guy. He’s smart, he’s well educated, he has held political positions (both elected and appointed) of increasing responsibility, most recently as Secretary of Labour. While his tenure at Labour was not a rousing success, he is in favour of the Fight for $15.
However, he was in favour of TPP. In addition, he feels that the Democratic Party does not answer enough to rural Americans, and that the DNC did nothing to help Hillary Clinton directly. And therein lies the problem with his election.
First, rural America is not the future of the Democratic Party. The future of the Democratic Party, if it is to ever be successful again, requires a push into the purple suburbs around the large cities, as well as outreach to people of colour and young people, plus making Working Class/Blue Collar needs a cornerstone of any policies.
Second, a lot of Democratic registered voters did not vote for the party up and down the ticket in 2016 for a lot of reasons, including the perception that the system was rigged in Hillary Clinton’s favour, and had been set up that way 4 years earlier when the primary schedule was determined. To reach those people we need a 50-state solution, á la Howard Dean, and we need policies and platforms dedicated to the needs of young people and minorities. Perez isn’t going to do those things.
The Democratic Party is currently a top-down organization, and under Perez’s leadership, will remain that way. Had Keith Ellison been elected, it would have been a very different situation. The people who voted for Perez were party regulars who have worked their collective way up the ladder from committee people to zone leaders to county leaders to state leaders. As individuals, they have a lot to lose if the status quo is upended.
Will the party survive? Yeah, but in its current corporatist state. The values the party stood for from the 1930’s through the DLC in the 90’s are still MIA. Outreach to youth, people of colour and the working class will be limited.
There is a silver lining in all of this, and that is that people on the ground are organizing. Some are making a push to be committeepeople and to work their way up so that they too will be able to vote in the DNC elections a few years down the road. Further, groups outside the party are organizing, and will likely run candidates to primary standard Democrats from the left, and will help to move the party back to what it used to be: the party of the people. ALL people.
It will be a rough couple of years as all of this settles out, but I personally take comfort in the fact that Perez’s intentions are good, and there will be people “helping” to adjust his implementation policies.
As always: REMEMBER TO VOTE, there are elections this year, at least two in every state. Mark your calendars and bring a few friends to the polls.
The question in rural areas is not whether we are going to start winning in rural areas in large numbers. The question is whether we can keep rural areas close enough to win some races. Today, rural America still has enough votes and enough legislative seats that ignoring rural America is a recipe for what we have gotten over the past eight years — significant losses in state and legislative races. Yes we need to do better in the suburbs and we need to maximize turnout in every election in urban areas, but that has been the emphasis of the Democratic Party in my state in the past eight years and it is a strategy that resulted in a spectacular failure in 2016. Every voter matters and we need to compete for every vote. There may be a date twenty years or so from now when we don’t need to do better with rural voters, but there are enough seats in the rural areas that the immediate future of the Democratic Party needs to include doing better with rural voters.
DocJess,
Thomas Frank has written today (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/09/dont-let-establishment-opportunists-ruin-resistance-movement) and writes, as you do, that the democratic party needs to answer to working class people.
You write “First, rural America is not the future of the Democratic Party. The future of the Democratic Party, if it is to ever be successful again, requires a push into the purple suburbs around the large cities, as well as outreach to people of colour and young people, plus making Working Class/Blue Collar needs a cornerstone of any policies.”
Thomas Frank writes: “That Democrats might resist Trumpist populism by getting in touch with the real deal hasn’t even occurred to certain liberals yet. According to recent news reports, House Democrats are conducting an election post-mortem in which they are considering what to do about the many hard-bitten rural areas that (as I described here a few weeks ago) have turned away from liberalism so decisively.
What is the solution these bold leaders have come up with? It’s to walk away from those places. If there is something Democrats once did to appeal to people like the ones I described, our modern-day Democrats don’t know what it is.
If there’s something Democrats once did to win the votes of people who didn’t go to college, it’s apparently not hinted at in the “350 unique characteristics” of political races that our data-minded Democrats are said to be sifting so diligently. Instead, our leaders believe, Democrats need to focus on seats in upscale suburban districts currently held by Republicans. Which is to say, to continue as before.”
It appears that “the working class” as Frank writes is a large subset of the rural vote. In fact, Frank appears critical of the Democratic leaders push in purple suburbs.
I would be interested in your comments on Frank’s analysis. As always, thanks so much for your excellent columns! I very much enjoy reading them.