We Need 100 U.S. House Challengers in 2018.

There was an invisible anchor tied to the Democratic Party throughout this entire Presidential campaign.  Given the excruciatingly close nature of the final margin, it is no stretch to imagine that this anchor cost us victory.  Since they gained control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Republicans have created a situation whereby the Government has either had crisis or gridlock at almost all times.  Occasionally there were moments were some deal was reached to prevent chaos, but in terms of passing meaningful legislation things just ground to a halt.  Democrats did not have a serious plan to remove this gridlock because the “smart” people had determined that it was not possible. Perhaps it was impossible, but because this gridlock existed, Hillary Clinton was basically prevented from saying the words.” When I am President we will” and then stating her agenda. It was always about We will fight for, We will try.  Voters could never be certain about what she could accomplish because of this anchor.   

Republicans in the House also threatened investigations, impeachment, and grinding stand still if Hillary Clinton won. This was a very clever plan.  The middle class particularly in rural and shrinking parts of America saw very little progress under President Obama, in large part because of Republican obstruction. But whoever was to blame, the effect was the same.  This promise of unceasing Partisan War mattered.  The incredibly sad truth is that to a large degree despite the fact Hillary Clinton was much better prepared, knew more, cared more, understood more, it was likely Donald Trump and only Donald Trump who could pass big things because only he could have non-divided rule. In an era of hyper-partisanship, non-divided rule and only non-divided rule can actually get things passed.   So now Republicans have that despite not really having a popular mandate for it.  

How did we let the House get so out of range? There are a lot of answers but one of the biggest ones is simply about the level of effort we put in and how many seats and places we write off.  At the outset let us be clear, it is a nice idea and somewhat valuable to run people in all 435 seats. Perhaps some effort should be made to do this.  But the truth is very clear that about 150 seats are going Democratic and 150 seats are going Republican, and very little can be done about that.  But in the other 135 seats or so, Republicans hold an overwhelmingly lopsided edge, and Democrats compete in fits and starts. This has to change. Democrats have an obligation to run strong challengers in every single one of the seats which they could in theory win.  It is also incredibly important for the party to play the seat and not play the candidate. If based on past voting records, the district could send a Democrat, then a very strong incumbent may seem to provide a reason to back off but cannot be allowed to do so.  Because if we grant the premise of incumbent strength, then we cannot possibly gain the control we need. So we must ignore it

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          One of the major problems here is that we continue to place the burden of mounting a challenge on the challengers themselves. We tell candidates they need to raise huge amounts of money, and this scares off huge numbers of candidates.  It also dramatically limits who can run. We need to fix this. Our party now desperately needs challengers more than the challengers need us. It is therefore utterly essential that we find ways to encourage all kinds of candidates and help them raise money. We need to pledge to get every single one of these candidates who is willing to step up and run at least $ 1,000,000. We can ask them for a number of donors to prove they have sufficient support but not a dollar amount which only benefits the elite.  If we are looking for places to get this money, one good place to start is with our members of Congress who raise about a $ 1,000,000 a year and barely need a penny to get re-elected.  Democrats in safe seats should be putting 25% of what they raise into this sort of funding of challengers.  Huge amounts of the DCCC online money needs to sent to candidates, and local party organizations also need to step up and make sure candidates are funded.  We need to recruit 100 challengers in the seats we can win. We need to back them to the hilt, and we need to try in every winnable district and ignore any possible naysayers.  

Pillar 1. Permanent and Local.

In our first post on this blog we identified six pillars needed to revive the Democratic Party and chart a path to electoral victories.  We also briefly sketched some ideas about the costs and structure of reform.  

The Six Pillars for remaking the Party are

·      Permanent and Local,

·      Membership Driven and Service Providing,

·      Focus on Young People Constantly,

·      Communicate Information and not just Advertising,

·      Call Time is Killing the Democratic Party and 
        We need to innovate, innovate, innovate.  

     

These six pillars will help build a party that can do the hard work ahead of us.  Today we will dig into the first pillar.

 Permanent and Local.

          Many ideas and assumptions stand behind this pillar (and others), and we will expand on each as time goes on.  But the basics are really simple. There are way too many places in this country where the Democratic Party is on or near life support.  We don’t mean to denigrate some of the hard work being done by local Democratic parties in these areas. But despite this work in huge parts of the country, the Party seems not to exist.  For example, in Pennsylvania, one of the states that tipped the election, Trump took more than 60% of the vote in 49 out of 67 counties.  In a great many counties his totals were even higher.  We’ll tackle Pennsylvania specifics in a later post, but for now it’s important to note that the Pennsylvania pattern was repeated in hundreds of counties all across America. 

The goal of permanent and local is to reverse the downward slide.   Local is the first step.  We need to be in all of these counties. The danger we are fighting is very simple to understand.  A party culture can begin to dominate.  All of your neighbors start voting the same way, and the holdouts begin to wonder why they are holdouts. Even the people who stick with you become less likely to speak up because they don’t want to be the only one dissenting.  This process can turn a 2-1 county into a 3-1 county, and that kind of bleeding can kill you. Obviously, the Party’s challenge stems partly from the message and the issue set, and some of the noise that surrounds our national media environment.  We will address all of that later too, but as a clear first step up showing up in more places will help.

 We also risk a somewhat similar problem in our base areas.  This is where permanent is more important than local. Turnout will drop if voters sense that politicians only come around when they want a community’s votes but not the rest of the time.  Swooping in also has a generally disrespectful feel even if it works. The problems faced by people are constant. The Party’s ability to fix them should be too.  

          There is another key advantage of permanent and local.  By doing things this way, and by not skipping anywhere, we send an unmistakable message that we care about the entire country through our physical presence and people on the ground. This signal helps to short circuit the discussion of which groups the Democratic Party should focus on or care about. Obviously, as an election approaches, more resources must go to where Democrats do better.  But by starting with the signal that we want everyone’s vote equally, we skip difficult and potentially unproductive conversations by merely committing to be everywhere.  We tried being smarter and targeting only some voters. 2016 was the result.  

Conclusion:  Permanent and local will not fix everything.  We will need to flesh out the additional five pillars, but this is the place to start.