The focus on trying to moderate a message in order to attract so-called Biden Republicans. That was a failure. The data shows that the better strategy is to try to pull out your own voters and voters who haven’t been voting. And I do think the Democrats did a decent job of that. But the amount of money — and we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars that went into focusing on trying to appeal to a mythical Republican swing voter — the data shows that that was not a good strategy. Without having a strong economic message repeated over and over and over again, you saw an exit poll that showed Donald Trump won 82 percent of voters who said that the economy was their top issue. That is a huge problem. It was a huge problem in the election. I’m certainly glad that Joe Biden won. But moving forward, if the Democrats do not have a strong populist, progressive economic message heading into 2022 and 2024, we could get something worse than Donald Trump. No rest for the weary:
- Disengaging and “going back to brunch” is a formula for a repeat of 2010 and 2016 — commit yourself to being involved in causes and groups that will demand local, state and federal lawmakers enact policies that materially improve people’s lives.
- Participate in demonstrations and protests in your own community focused on concrete policy outcomes.
- Run for an office in the 2022 election — and don’t be afraid to run in a primary against a Democrat who is part of the problem.
Everyone is going to have to try to decide which specific organizations, causes and campaigns they are going to participate in. But the point is, that the next few weeks and months are going to determine the next four years.
Dave Sirota, Nov. 8, 2020
We’re all exhausted, and understandably so. It’s been an unspeakably horrific year. The election psychologically drained everyone, and we all just want a break. But here’s the thing: Money never sleeps, and money is already hard at work trying to make sure nothing fundamentally changes in politics — and if nothing fundamentally changes in Washington, then everything is going to change for the worse in the real world.
Since the election was called for Joe Biden, there has been a multitiered effort to blame disappointing election results on progressives, even as exit polls and voting results show that progressive organizing that rescued Democrats from the jaws of a presidential defeat. While the country was celebrating the defeat of Trump, here’s what the voices of Big Money have been doing since the election:
- Democratic leaders are insisting that the party must abandon modestly progressive health care positions in order to boost the party’s chances in Georgia, even though polling says exactly the opposite.
- Republican John Kasich — who was given a DNC speaking slot by Team Biden and who nonetheless failed to help Democrats win his home state of Ohio — went on CNN to bash progressives, insisting that Biden’s top priority should be appeasing Trump voters.
- Ian Bremmer — a Morning Joe character who is a reliable barometer of elite thought — echoed Kasich, suggesting that the first thing Democrats should do is reach out and appease Trump supporters.
- Joe Scarborough himself asserted that the election proves Democrats must run away from the left, even though their entire strategy was running away from the left, and that strategy resulted in disappointing down-ballot losses.
- Politico published a list of alleged frontrunners for Biden cabinet slots, filled mostly with corporate-friendly Democrats and Republicans.
- The American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are publicly offering to work with the Biden administration, pledging a desire to “support bipartisan policies” and “break through the gridlock.”
- As GOP operatives at the Lincoln Project explore turning their operation into a media empire, they are turning their attacks on U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the party’s few stars with a large national following.
- Democratic leaders and the House Blue Dog Caucus — the corporate wing of the party — have spent the week attacking progressives, blaming them for a handful of moderate freshman lawmakers’ losses — even as data show that Democrats in swing districts lost vote share as they moved further and further to the right.
They Are Blaming And Shaming The Left, As Predicted
Before the election, I told you that no matter the election outcome, the left would be blamed or shamed. That doesn’t make me Nostradamus — it was an obvious truth, even if it was taboo to dare speak. Just as Republicans always spin every economic policy as a reason to cut rich people’s taxes, corporate Democrats and their allies have a left-bashing propaganda machine powered by a finely tuned algorithm designed to silence progressive leaders — whether it’s AOC, Bernie Sanders or anyone else — and to turn every election result into a rationale to protect billionaires, corporate power and the status quo.
The election, though, was the opposite of a demand for stasis — indeed, Democrats almost lost because they once again let Trump portray himself as the candidate of economic change, and they only got away with that because COVID and organizing defeated Trump’s reelection bid. If they run back the same campaign in a COVID-free environment, there’s a good chance they would lose in a landslide. Here’s what I told NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday:
The focus on trying to moderate a message in order to attract so-called Biden Republicans. That was a failure. The data shows that the better strategy is to try to pull out your own voters and voters who haven’t been voting. And I do think the Democrats did a decent job of that. But the amount of money — and we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars that went into focusing on trying to appeal to a mythical Republican swing voter — the data shows that that was not a good strategy.
An inanimate object should have been able to win a landslide against Donald Trump in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis…The other thing that comes out in the polling data is that the Democrats paid a price for not having a very strong economic message. I mean, I do think the Biden campaign was shrewd in some of what it did, focusing on the pandemic and the like. But without having a strong economic message repeated over and over and over again, you saw an exit poll that showed Donald Trump won 82 percent of voters who said that the economy was their top issue. That is a huge problem. It was a huge problem in the election. I’m certainly glad that Joe Biden won. But moving forward, if the Democrats do not have a strong populist, progressive economic message heading into 2022 and 2024, we could get something worse than Donald Trump.
What Comes Next?
I’m sorry to be the one to deliver the news, but here’s the truth: As exhausted as you feel, as tired of this shit as we all are, there’s just no rest for the weary. Assuming you don’t want nothing to fundamentally change, then we’re going to have to fight — and the first way to fight is to know some basic truths.
- Disengaging and going back to brunch is a formula for a repeat of 2010 and 2016 — commit yourself to being involved in causes and groups that will demand local, state and federal lawmakers enact policies that materially improve people’s lives.
- Participate in demonstrations and protests in your own community focused on concrete policy outcomes.
- Run for an office in the 2022 election — and don’t be afraid to run in a primary against a Democrat who is part of the problem.
- Sending money to sham groups like the Lincoln Project for them to light it on fire or use it to set up a conservative media outlet is destructive — if you want to pitch in resources, give it to a news organization doing journalism that holds politicians accountable (may I kindly suggest The Daily Poster?).
These are not perfect solutions, and everyone is going to have to try to decide which specific organizations, causes and campaigns they are going to participate in. But the point is, that the next few weeks and months are going to determine the next four years.
If you hear people tell you to just shut up and celebrate and take some time off, they are ignoring the insomnia of money. Corporate interests don’t rest — they are like a T1000 Terminator interminably pursuing their prime directives, which is to continue enriching the billionaire class.
The election has not deterred them, which means we sleep at our own peril.
Dave Sirota Six Takeaways From Election Night
November 2020
Remember that no one is arguing that Trump will win the popular vote. He wants to win in the Electoral College. What we are seeing in this election is the result of voter suppression across the southern states, along with an Electoral College that has been corrupted from its original intent and is now artificially skewed toward rural states.
In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.
Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.
The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.
Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.
These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.
We should know the results of this election by Thursday night, I would guess.
Biden is still projected to win.
**
Dave Sirota Six Takeaways From Election Night Dems’ weak economic message helped Trump, the Lincoln Project embarrassed itself, and a ton of grassroots money was set on fire.
David Sirota, Andrew Perez, and Julia Rock Nov 4    |
This report was written by David Sirota, Andrew Perez and Julia Rock
As the country awaits the final results of the presidential election, there are already six key lessons to be gleaned from election, campaign finance and public opinion data.
1. Democrats’ Weak Economic Message Hugely Helped Trump
The Democratic ticket pretty much ran away from economic issues — sure, it had decent position papers, but economic transformation was not a huge part of its public messaging, and that failure buoyed Trump, according to exit polls from Edison Research. Trump won 81 percent of the vote among the third of the electorate that listed the economy as its top priority. Even more amazing — Trump and Biden equally split the vote among those whose priority is a president who “cares about people like me.”
2. The Lincoln Project And Rahm Emanuel Embarrassed Themselves
The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump cash cow for veteran Republican consultants, has raised $40 million from MSNBC-watching Brunch Liberals in just the last few months, and is now set to launch a media brand off the idea that its GOP operatives are political geniuses.
Their ads focused on trying to court disaffected Republican voters and attack Trump’s character, as Biden loaded up the Democratic convention with GOP speakers. When polls during the summer showed that the strategy wasn’t working, galaxy brain Rahm Emanuel defended it to a national televised audience, insisting that 2020 would be “the year of the Biden Republican.”
Now survey data show the strategy epically failed, as Trump actually garnered even more support from GOP voters than in 2016. Indeed, Edison Research exit polls on Tuesday found that 93 percent of Republican voters supported Trump — three percentage points higher than in 2016, according to numbers from the same firm.
The takeaway: There may be a lot of so-called “Never Trump Republicans” promoted in the media and in politics, but “Never Trump Republicans” are not a statistically significant group of voters anywhere in America. They basically do not exist anywhere outside of the Washington Beltway or cable news green rooms — and after tonight’s results, we shouldn’t have to see them on TV or even see their tweets ever again.
As for the Lincoln Project’s focus on trying to scandalize Trump’s character, the exit polls found that voters are far more concerned about policy issues than personality. Seventy-three percent of voters said their candidate’s positions on the issues were more important in their vote for president than their candidate’s personal qualities.
3. People Don’t Love The Affordable Care Act
While it may have made short-term sense for Democrats to focus on the GOP’s efforts to repeal protections for patients with pre-existing conditions, Americans actually aren’t particularly pleased with the Affordable Care Act at a moment when millions have lost health insurance and insurers’ profits are skyrocketing because people can’t or don’t want to go to the doctor.
Edison Research exit polls found that 52 percent of voters think the Supreme Court should keep Obamacare, while 43 percent said the court should overturn it.
A Fox News Voter Analysis survey, which went to more than 29,000 people in all 50 states between Oct. 26 and Nov. 3, found similar numbers but suggests the ACA’s support is fairly thin: 14 percent of people want to leave the law as is while 40 percent of people would like to improve it.
The same poll asked voters if they would support changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to — also known as a public health insurance option — and found that 71 percent of people support the idea and only 29 percent oppose.
Although Biden and Senate Democrats both supported a public health insurance option plan, their campaigns and outside spending groups spent more time messaging around protecting the ACA. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll has shown consistently middling support for the ACA — and showed that during the summer COVID burst, the law was underwater among Americans aged 50-64.
The ACA’s protections for patients with pre-existing conditions was a key topic in recent weeks in the lead-up to new Trump Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, with the court set to hear a challenge to the law soon.
In a speech that Biden gave from Wilmington on Oct. 28, focused on COVID-19 and his health care plan, Biden spoke about the importance of trusting science and mask wearing, and highlighted Trump’s attacks on the ACA, but he only mentioned a public option once.
4. A Lot Of Grassroots Money Was Set On Fire
Democrats raised roughly a quarter billion dollars for senate races in Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas and Alabama — and their candidates all appear to have gone down to defeat by 10 points or more.
These are tough states for Democrats, but there’s a cautionary tale about resource allocation among Democrats’ donor base. While grassroots-funded advocacy and media organizations are starved for resources, a handful of candidates can snap their fingers and be awash in cash at election time — and still get crushed.
Democratic Senate candidates saw a massive surge in donations after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September — before the party barely put up a fight and Justice Amy Coney Barrett was quickly confirmed to the Supreme Court.
5. Democrats’ Court Calculation Was Wrong
When Trump nominated right-wing extremist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the conventional wisdom was that Democrats shouldn’t seriously combat the nomination, because a court fight would primarily motivate conservative voters. Exit polls prove that false: 60 percent of voters said the court was a significant factor in their vote, and a majority of those voters supported Biden — who barely spoke up against the nomination. Had there been a more intense fight, it might have helped the Democrats. All but one of the top tier Democratic Senate candidates shied away from talk of adding new Supreme Court court seats if their party won control of the Senate — which doesn’t matter now, since many of them lost anyway.
6. A Large Percentage Of Americans Have Lost Their Minds
In mid-October, Bloomberg News reported that “the proportion of Americans dying from coronavirus infections is the highest in the developed world” — and yet exit polls show 48 percent of Americans believe their government’s efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic are going very well or somewhat well. After a season of destructive wildfires and hurricanes, the same exit polls show 30 percent of Americans say climate change is not a serious problem
