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
.
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.
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