Message For Democrats From This Week’s Elections: ‘Effectively Communicate’ — Nothing Heavy!

November 4, 2021

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s debacle of keeping democracy alive in America a lot has been written about what happened, who’s to blame, and what can be done about it. Most are bullshit, but there’s a crack in the ugly wall of non-governing Republican political shenanigans and if Democrats don’t take action, democracy will easily be gone johnson.

And gone, too, but still in our face, is the T-Rump and from all indications, Democrats need to function without entire campaigns being just being against the asshole — Democrats have to squish T-Rump into the GQP nightmare.
Lissandra Villa at BuzzFeed News last night with a straight option:

Still, the data so far “doesn’t show that the Trump factor is a motivator the way it was a year ago,” Colin Strother, a Democratic operative who consults on races in the Democratic stronghold in south Texas where Trump made massive gains last year, said in an email.
“We stand for doing the right thing for every American, and right now that’s taking the form of addressing poverty and income inequality. The problem is that’s an amorphous stance to begin with, and then the White House is unable to effectively communicate how their plans will realize that goal.”

“We have to give structure to our values and goals. It’s got to fit on the bumper sticker. We just don’t have that right now,” he said.

Some other views off Tuesday’s elections are right on, but not pretty:

Major snip from Glasser’s piece at The New Yorker today:

At least we can agree that this week’s elections were a harbinger of Democrats losing the House and the Senate in 2022, and the White House in 2024. Unless they meant nothing at all.
Certainly, it’s fair to say the results were a shock — Republicans, after all, had not won a statewide election in Virginia in a dozen years, until McAuliffe lost his gubernatorial comeback bid to Youngkin, on Tuesday.
Things were so unexpectedly bad for Democrats in deep-blue New Jersey that the Democratic president of the state senate lost his seat to a Republican truck driver who spent only a hundred and fifty dollars on his campaign. But, then again, maybe it was predictable, given that the incumbent President’s party has lost eleven of the last twelve elections in Virginia. So much for clarity.

We’re in a world of hurt, that’s clear.

And it’s not just politics in the field –it’s politics and SCOTUS:

Snips from Molly Jong-Fast at The Atlantic today — no good here, either:

But I’m not here to pundit; I’m here to Cassandra. If we are to glean anything from this off-year election it’s that it’s much later than we think.
It’s End Times for democracy. It’s time to buttress democracy and codify voting rights. It’s use-it-or-lose-it time, folks.

Elections are fickle, candidates and parties win and lose, but we will be stuck with the Supreme Court justices Trump installed forever, or at least many decades. And they are going to undo everything Democrats do, if Democrats don’t do something to limit the power of those justices.
…
The grim 2021 elections should be a wake-up call. Democrats could easily lose their razor-thin majority in Congress come 2022. Republicans are now running on an anti-democracy message that includes consolidating power and claiming that all elections they lose are rigged.
Democrats need to be the grown-ups in the room, codifying voting rights and installing Supreme Court term limits before it’s too late.
Democrats could be democracy’s last best hope. Our republic calls desperately for the fortification it needs, but will they answer the call?

Another option same as the all the other options — Democrats need to get the shit out of their asses and go to work.

However, as far as good-as-shit-at-being-bad as-shit, Republicans pulls no punches and from education to voter fraud they’re well ahead of the voting game — Eric Levitz at New York Magazine yesterday described America for a time to come — go read the whole piece, but this is the saddest, and most frightening (h/t LGM):

If the GOP is not caught in an impossible bind — if it doesn’t actually need to choose between retaining the enthusiasm of the “Stop the Steal” crowd and winning over “moderate” voters — then it is poised to retake the Senate by 2025 and hold it for a long time thereafter.
In fact, if the party need not choose between these imperatives, it has an excellent shot of dominating federal politics for the better half of this decade.

In a similar vein, Chris Smith at Vanity Fair today sees Republicans as being in their element — especially this tidbit from Democratic strategist Lis Smith: ‘“This election was the revenge of the pissed-off suburban mom,” Smith says. “The suburbs largely delivered the White House to Joe Biden in 2020, and they almost cost Phil Murphy the election in New Jersey and helped cost Terry McAuliffe the election in Virginia. Cable news exists on obsessing over Trump and obsessing over January 6. But voters don’t. Voters obsess over gas prices. Voters obsess over whether they can afford their health care.”‘

And the terrible result:

This is both accurate and somewhat depressing, in that Republicans aren’t paying a price for their ongoing destruction of democracy. But it helped Youngkin pull off the delicate balancing act of keeping Trump at a distance while not antagonizing the MAGA true believers — chatting up Trump regularly but keeping the calls secret, invoking race while not coming off as overtly racist.
As my former boss Kurt Andersen pointed out on Twitter, “Brilliant of Virginia Republicans to run a black woman for lieutenant governor: if just 35,000 Trump-averse white swing voters felt comfortable voting for Youngkin instead of McAuliffe because they could also vote for Winsome Sears, that won the election for the GOP.”

Which points to an ongoing problem for the Democrats, beyond the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. Among the few bright spots on Tuesday were Eric Adams and Michelle Wu winning mayoral races in New York City and Boston, and Michelle Maldonado, who took a Virginia House of Delegates seat.
Adams, a relative moderate, and Wu, an unabashed progressive, were elected in thoroughly Democratic enclaves, but they are leaders of color in cities that reflect the diversity of many battleground states like New Jersey.
Maldonado beat a Republican in a majority-white district just south of Arlington, after rejecting a local NARAL endorsement over the group’s defund-the-police stance.
If Democrats are going to win statewide races where Trump isn’t on the ballot, they’ll do it by turning out not just the base but a coalition — and by fielding more candidates who aren’t old, male, and pale.

If one remembers 2022 is just next year, it gets even more shitty.

SCOTUS crashes the light without noticing the contrast of white on white:

And here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front is of a New York state high-school student exhibit: ‘The piece was displayed during student-driven art show at Shenendehowa High School. It consisted of at least 12 identical black-and-white pictures of Donald Trump. There was also a sign above the pictures that read, “Draw on Me.” Using markers from the art classroom, some students opted to scribble critical messages and profanities on the pictures‘ — and found here).

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