Democratic Blues By JEFF GREENFIELD
As historians begin to assess Barack Obamas record as president, theres at least one legacy hell leave that will indeed be historicbut not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.
Legacies are often tough to measure. If you want to see just how tricky they can be, consider the campaign to get Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill 178 years after he left the White House. Working class hero? How about slave owner and champion of Native American genocide? Or watch how JFK went from beloved martyr to the man whose imperial overreach entrapped us in Vietnam, and then back to the president whose prudence kept the Cuban Missile Crisis from turning into World War III.
Yet when you move from policy to politics, the task is a lot simplerjust measure the clout of the presidents party when he took office and when he left it. By that measure, Obamas six years have been terrible.
Under Obama, the party started strong. When Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats were at a high water mark, says David Axelrod, who served as one of Obamas top strategists. Driven by antipathy to George W. Bush and then the Obama wave, Democrats had enjoyed two banner elections in 06 and 08. We won dozens of improbable congressional elections in states and districts that normally would tack Republican, and that effect trickled down to other offices. You add to that the fact that we would take office in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and it was apparent, from Day One, that we had nowhere to go but down.
The first signs of the slowly unfolding debacle that has meant the decimation of the Democratic Party nationally began earlywith the special election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedys empty Senate seat in Massachusetts. That early loss, even though the seat was won back eventually by Elizabeth Warren, presaged the 2010 midterms, which saw the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats. It was disaster that came as no surprise to the White House, but also proved a signal of what was to come.
The partys record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the partys wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a progressive agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decades worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.
When Obama came into the White House, it seemed like the Democrats had turned a corner generationally; at just 47, he was one of the youngest men to be elected as president. But the party has struggled to build a new generation of leaders around him. Eight years later, when he leaves office in 2017 at 55, hell actually be one of the partys only leaders not eligible for Social Security. Even as the party has recently captured more young voters at the ballot box in presidential elections, its leaders are increasingly of an entirely different generation; most of the partys leaders will fade from the national scene in the years ahead. Its two leading presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are 67 and 73. The sitting vice president, Joe Biden, is 72. The Democratic House leader, Nancy Pelosi, is 75; House Whip Steny Hoyer is 76 and caucus Chair James Clyburn is 75, as is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who will retire next year. Its a party that will be turning to a new generation of leaders in the coming yearsand yet, there are precious few looking around the nations state houses, U.S. House or Senate seats.
***
Barack Obama took office in 2009 with 60 Democrats in the Senatecounting two independents who caucused with the partyand 257 House members. Today, there are 46 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, the worst showing since the first year after the Reagan landslide. Across the Capitol, there are 188 Democrats in the House, giving Republicans their best showing since Herbert Hoover took the White House in 1929.
This is, however, the tip of the iceberg. When you look at the states, the collapse of the partys fortunes are worse. Republicans now hold 31 governorships, nine more than they held when Obama was inaugurated. During the last six years the GOP has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states: Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio. In the last midterms, only one endangered Republican governorTom Corbett in Pennsylvaniawas replaced by a Democrat. (Sean Parnell in Alaska lost to an independent.) Every other endangered Republican returned to office.
Now turn to state legislaturesalthough if youre a loyal Democrat, you may want to avert your eyes. In 2009, Democrats were in full control of 27 state legislatures; Republicans held full power in 14. Now? The GOP is in full control of 30 state legislatures; Democrats hold full power in just 11. In 24 states, Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislaturegiving them total control over the political process. That increased power at the state level has already led to serious consequences for Democrats, for their political future and for their goals.
Its almost a crime, Democratic Party Vice Chair Donna Brazile says. We have been absolutely decimated at the state and local level.
Taken as a whole, these six years have been almost historically awful for Democrats. You have to go back to the Great Depression and the Watergate years to find so dramatic a reversal of fortunes for a party. And this time, theres neither a Great Depression nor a criminal conspiracy in the White House to explain what has happened.
Some of the partys national erosion may well have been inevitable. The transformation of the South from a one-party Democratic region to a (virtual) one-party Republican region accounts for some of the losses to the Democratic ranks. That 2010 election gave Republicans in nine states control over redistricting, which gave them more seats in the U.S. House and state legislatures four years later. And the dramatic fallout in support from white working-class voters can be explained, in some progressives eyes, by a failure to address the plight of what was once the partys base.
These voters, pollster Stan Greenberg wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, are open to an expansive Democratic economic agendato more benefits for child care and higher education, to tax hikes on the wealthy, to investment in infrastructure spending, and to economic policies that lead employers to boost salaries for middle- and working-class Americans, especially women. Yet they are only ready to listen when they think that Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed. Championing reform of government and the political process is the price of admission with these voters.
Whatever the explanations, there is an unsettling reality for Democrats: While they may warm themselves over presidential prospectsdemographic shifts and a Republican Party deeply at war with itself and consumed by a chaotic primary highlighted by the debate earlier this month, starring Donald Trump at the center of the stagethe weather where so much of our politics and policies will be shaped looks distinctly chiller.
We are fooling ourselves, says one well-placed Democratic operative, if we think we can advance a progressive agenda in Washington, if half the Congress and half the states are controlled by a Republican Party enthusiastically working to undo every trace of progressive policy.
***
In facing midterms headwinds, every two-term president has had to reckon with his partys misfortune. The six-year itch, when voters punish the presidents party with congressional losses, has afflicted every president since Theodore Roosevelt with just one exception: Bill Clinton in 1998. In Clintons case, though, voters had dealt Democrats a crushing midterm loss four years earlier, capturing the Senate andfor the first time in 40 yearsthe House of Representatives as well. And since 1928, only one presidentRonald Reaganhas managed to leave the White House in the hands of an elected successor of the same party.
This historical record, however, offers little comfort to todays Democrats or to Obamas down-ballot legacy. No two-term president in recent times has seen his party clobbered in both midterm elections. In one casethe 1986 midtermsReag
ans Republican Party did relatively well in the House, losing only five seats. But it lost the Senate when seven GOP seats turned over, some by very narrow margins. Democrats gained five House seats in 1998, even though their president was in the middle of a major scandal. And while only Reagan saw his party hold the White House, three other presidentsEisenhower, Johnson, Clintonall saw their partys nominee come within a whisker of victory. Not only did Gore win the popular vote, but Democrats in 2000 picked up five Senate seats.
Wait, you are asking: Dont Democrats, with the demographic wind at their backs, have a good chance of holding the White House? Doesnt the Senate map give them a real shot at retaking the Senate? Dont national polls show that the GOP is far more unpopular than the Democratic Party?
Yesand a third term for Democrats along with a recaptured Senate would clearly affect Obamas political legacy. Even with those victories, however, the afflictions of Democrats at every other level would ensure enduring political trouble.
Looking out across the national landscape, the Democratic Party has a notably weak bench of top-level candidates. The losses of U.S. Senate seats and gubernatorial offices across the country have left the party starved for next generation leaders; stars like Californias Kamala Harris and New Jerseys Cory Booker are few and far between, and red-state success stories like Kentuckys Steve Beshear or Arkansass Mike Beebe are hardly household names.
There is no Unified Field Theory that accounts for all the Democrats woes, according to observers on both sides of the aisle. Even as the party has powered through to strong victories at the presidential level, Democrats down-ballot over the past six years have been hit with economic uncertainty, the realignment of many congressional districts and a midterm electorate that increasing looks different than the voter base of presidential elections.
The historic voter dropoff from presidential to non-presidential years, when most state elections are held, only compounded the challenge, Axelrod says. The electorate in non-presidential years generally is a third smaller, and the majority of the dropoff is among Democratic-leaning votersminorities, the poor, the young.
For longtime Democratic operative Joe Trippi, the problems began at the end of the 1980s, when Republicans, after decades in the minority, put everything in their energy and funding towards solving their problems in winning the House of Representatives. And [in 1994] it worked. And they also recruited for state raceswe didnt. None of the Washington committees of the Democratic Party really gave a damn who was running for attorney general or secretary of state.
For many Democrats, the 2010 results help explain 2014; when Republicans took over nine state legislatures after the first midterms, they took with them the power to redraw legislative and congressional districts; and that, in turn, guaranteed them more seats at both the federal and state level. That explanation, though, only goes so far. The big GOP gains in the House came in 2010, when Democrats lost 64 House seatsthe worst midterm showing for a party since 1894. Moreover, in 2014, the Republicans won nine Senate seatsand you cant gerrymander a state. (What did make things worse was the spate of retirements; likely Democratic holds in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Iowa all fell to Republicans.) Nor can Democrats take comfort in the constitutionally mandated structure of the Senate, where every state has two senators. Contrary to the assumption that this favors the GOP, the 10 least populous states are evenly divided10 Republicans and 10 Democrats (counting Angus King and Bernie Sanders). And among the 10 largest states? The split is exactly the same: 10 and 10.
For Republicans, the explanation for Democratic travails is more straightforward: Voters dont like what Obama and his party has been doing. Today, the greatest problem Obama has is that the economy has not gotten better in the Obama years, except for those at the top. For most people, its either the same or worse, says Stuart Stevens, who piloted Mitt Romneys 2012 campaign. And, he adds, the signature achievement of the president, Obamacare, proved so unpopular in 2014in large part thanks to the disastrous website rolloutthat Democratic candidates were wary of even raising it.
As just one example, Stevens points to the 2014 Alaska Senate race, where one-term Democratic incumbent Mark Begich narrowly lost his reelection bid. Begich ran ads defending many of the provisions of the law, but they never used Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, Stevens says. Anytime youre trying to defend something but wont use its name, youre in a tough spot.
Its a point given a nonpartisan spin by Norm Ornstein, whos been observing Washington from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute for decades and argues that the Obama administration has done a remarkably poor job selling even its top accomplishments to the American people. My puzzlement goes back to 2009, he says. From the beginning, it was clear that the Republicans had crafted the agenda. And Obama never offered a sense of what the stimulus did, or what his administration was doing. Its remarkable that a campaign with incredible communications skills more or less abandoned them; its not that theres magic in presidential communication, but they did nothing that was not related to the ordinary way of doing things.
And, Ornstein adds, the failure early on to haul at least one banker into court helped to trigger the populist uprising.
Beyond all of these explanations, however, does lie one key factor: In 2010 and 2014, the Republicans and conservatives reaped the harvest from years of effort at the state and local levelsan effort the Democrats simply did not bother to match until very recently.
Five years ago, as a revelatory New Yorker article by Jane Mayer chronicled, Republicans began to invest time and money in capturing state legislatures. In North Carolina, a multimillionaire named Art Pope channeled unprecedented sums into a series of races; enough to turn North Carolinas Legislature from blue to red for the first time in a century. It was an effort replicated throughout the country that year by Project REDMAP, the REDistricting MAjority Project, a GOP campaign that helped the party win 21 legislative majorities. That effort to reshape politics at the state level has accelerated over time. During the 2014 cycle, for example, the Republican Governors Association spent $170 million; the Democratic Governors Association spent $98 million. (The DGA has belatedly begun an effort to put governors in states where the chief executive has a voice in redistricting, in order to blunt the impact of gerrymandering).
I would be the first to concede that we had failed to build a sturdy infrastructure for Democrats from the bottom up, David Axelrod says. The Republican Party and supporting oligarchs like the Koch Brothers have invested exponentially more time and resources into building electoral strength from the grass roots up, concentrating on down ballot state offices, legislative raceseven school board and City Council races. This has helped turn more than a few legislatures from blue to red, and also had created a larger pool of potential candidates for higher offices in the future.
More than a decade agoyears before the successive midterm disastersone prominent Democrat sought to address his partys grass-roots weaknesses. In 2005, former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean became chair of the Democratic National Committee, and pronounced a fifty state strategy, looking to find candidates and foot soldiers even in deepest red America. It was a strategy that brought Dean into direct conflict with Rahm Emanuel, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who wanted resources targeted to the most winnable districts. In the short run, Emanuels approach worked; Democrats won back control of the House in 2006. In the long run, however, it left the party virtually disarmed against a determined GOP drive to win state and local contests,
For his part, Deanwho left the DNC chairmanship in 2009-told Governing Magazine back in 2013, It would be a terrible mistake to leave even one state out of a basic package of training, IT and staffing, he said. I dont advocate putting a zillion dollars into Alaska, but I do advocate having a competent, well-run Democratic Party in place, because you never know where lightning is going to strike.
The political consequences of the grass-roots Democratic weakness are clear. State control means a determined party can enact laws that severely weaken the opposition. Gerrymandering is just one example. If newly Republican legislatures undo a series of laws to make voting easierno more same-day registration, fewer early-voting days, more stringent voter ID lawsthe impact will be felt most among likely Democratic voters. If states like Wisconsin weaken the power of public employee unions, or free public and private workers from paying union dues, it will mean fewer union dollars and fewer union foot soldiers for future Democratic campaigns. Politics, however, is only part of the storyand not the most important. Republican domination of state legislatures and state houses means an approach to tax policy, corporate regulation, education, the environment and abortion that is at least as consequential as the proclaimed views of a future Democratic president.
There are signs that the Democratic Party has begun to respond to its grass-roots woes. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and EMILYs List President Stephanie Schriock have launched an effort to raise a multimillion dollar campaign chest to elect governors in states where the chief executive has a legal role in drawing congressional lines. (A governors veto over GOP-drawn district lines could put such disputes into the courts). And Donna Brazile has joined with Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear and others to form a task force to address what Brazile calls a decade-long neglect of the grass roots. Democrats, she says, are like cicadas; they come out every four years. The midterms, the state and local elections, theyre just not sexy enough.
Whatever these efforts, they come very late, making prospects for a sustained turn in the next decade a long shot at best. Come January 2017, the Democratic Party may find that celebrating its third straight presidential victory comes with a distinctly hollow ring.
Even Bernie Sanders says the real unemployment number is 10%. Which only makes sense with 93 million people not working.
