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.