Ranting On...Democrats Getting It Wrong

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

I will put up with a lot from my politicians.  I occasionally have to groan as a major point is lost while trying to compromise and create a bipartisan bill.  I roll my eyes and grit my teeth when a sex scandal or an idiotic tweet is randomly leaked from a political office.  But the thing that I truly hate is idiocy.  And to be specific, I hate political idiocy.  The problem is that I've been hearing way too much political idiocy lately from the House Democrats, and to a lesser extent the Senate Democrats, and it needs to stop.  NOW.  Because like it or not America, the 2015 and 2016 elections are well under way and the Democrats need to quickly learn that they made some severe mistakes in the past election, or they are bound to repeat them in 2016, when the White House and any hope of regaining the Senate majority (perhaps for the next ten years) are at stake.

The political idiocy I am principally referring to is the illusion espoused by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DCCC Chair Ben Lujan that this wasn't a wave election, and wasn't an referendum against the Democrats.  Harry Reid has laid the blame of the election at the feet of the president, Nancy Pelosi on Citizens United, but the reality is that the Democrats ran a crumby campaign which cost us severely, and it's impossible to call the 2014 Midterms anything but a wave.  We lost NINE Senate seats.  NINE.  One more time in case someone in the back wasn't paying attention: NINE.  That included five incumbent senators (and quite frankly, it was nearly seven with incredibly close races in New Hampshire and Virginia).  This is the largest amount of Senate seats to exchange hands since 1980.  And they weren't, despite what many people would like to say, just in red states, unless we want to start conceding Iowa and Colorado as Republican territory.

The House may protest that losing thirteen seats is historically not that bad, but when you're already down by seventeen seats, adding another thirteen seats as a deficit is spectacularly awful.  The House Republicans now have the largest majority they have had since 1928, so we just gave the GOP their largest majority in almost 90 years.  That's pretty much unforgivable, and it shows how desperately we need a change of leadership in the House.  I have long admired Nancy Pelosi, but the Democrats made a severe mistake by not making some changes in the leadership team (if not Pelosi, than at least Hoyer or Clyburn so we're set up to oust Pelosi in two years if things don't turn around severely).  And it wasn't just that we lost Republican seats (though that was pretty bad, especially in seemingly non-competitive seats like GA-12 and TX-23), but also that we lost seats that had no business going red-we lost a seat in Illinois that went for President Obama by almost thirty points in 2008 and by nearly twenty in 2012.  That's insanity, and a seat we had absolutely no business losing.

Coupled with historically bad losses for the Democrats in a number of very blue governor's races (Massachusetts, Maine, and Illinois all spring to mind), and you're left with the bottom-of-the-barrel, and if the party doesn't see this as a wave, we should all be concerned.  The question now is not whether it was a wave or whether it wasn't (but it was a wave) it's how to possibly recover.  And here we run into some more issues.  If we've learned anything over the last few years when watching FOX News discuss climate change or the criminal justice system, it's that when you believe a lie, it's far more dangerous than giving out an uncomfortable truth.  And we cannot continue to believe that it was just Citizens United or President Obama that caused this loss.

After the 2012 elections, Democrats scoffed when Republicans claimed that it was their messaging that cost the election for Mitt Romney, particularly amongst Hispanics.  The party scoffed because A) this was not a particularly close election and B) because the message wasn't the problem.  Everyone knew it was Election Day, and where both sides stood on the issues.  It was that either Mitt Romney's message didn't compel them to switch to the other side or that they didn't agree with him-it wasn't a lack of knowing his message.  Do the Republicans have certain policies that may appeal to the Hispanic voting population?  Yes, of course (particularly on key social issues), but that gets outweighed pretty quickly when you compare it to the demonization that the Republicans have done toward immigration reform.

The same, however, goes for the Democrats.  It should frighten every Democrat (though it may not surprise them) to know that every Southern state has seen a gain in Republican seats in the House, and we now only have three Senate seats in this region (in Florida and Virginia, the two bluest of these states), and only one governor's mansion (again, in Virginia).  We frequently talk about the GOP becoming a regional party, but the reality is that ignoring an entire region of the country is political suicide, and we cannot just sit idly by for another decade while we wait for demographic shifts to maybe help us out in places like Georgia and Texas.  The Democrats need to realize that their current messaging isn't working, and that it's time to start taking advantage of, say, the economy improving dramatically across the country and actually running on that.  Running on defense or as the party that is the "lesser of two evils" isn't the right course of action, and demonizing our commander in chief just pisses off the base.  Looking at places like, say, Colorado with Sen. Mark Udall you can find that constantly distancing himself from the president barely helps him with the swing voters but it sure as hell makes base voters want to stay home.

The Democrats thankfully still have the President in the White House with a veto pen for two more years, but that's really the worst case scenario for the party.  We have so much to accomplish, that needs accomplishing NOW.  The incredibly warm December weather is deeply worrying, and the entire country continues to experience the dramatic effects of climate change.  We have what is clearly a major divide in our criminal justice system in terms of how white and black Americans are treated that needs addressing immediately.  Issues like immigration, contraception, the minimum wage, judicial appointments, and gay rights are still very much on the table and affecting millions of people.  We cannot just stop legislation, but actually need to win majorities so that we can affect this change.  And pretending that 2014 didn't happen isn't the way to do that.