The Path Forward for Democrats
It’s no secret that Democrats won small, but won big in 2020. Sure, they might have won in a photo finish in the end, but even that was a victory far bigger than a couple Senate seats.
Not only did the past election cycle bring some much-deserved attention to the grassroots fundraising and dirty work that gets done on the ground (especially for people like Stacy Abrams, who effectively spent a decade working to achieve what Georgians finally did in January), but the margin of victory was so small that the Dems have plenty of deniability for anything they can’t get done in the next four years, especially with the filibuster still hanging on by a thread. This isn’t even adding in the division in the Republican party right now, which if it remains as it is, will prevent wide-scale Republican wins over the next four years, to say nothing of the coming decade.
All of these factors effectively give Democrats a better-than-average shot at gaining ground over the next four years, but they have to play their cards right. Dems’ control over Congress is fragile, and the biggest mistake any party in power can make — especially in a situation where such a party has both chambers of Congress and the White House — is to leave people wondering what they ever got done. The electorate has to know, in a more tangible way now than ever, that Democrats are going to put out for them.
The number one challenge Democrats face every single election is that the party is full of minorities. Passing LGBT rights laws are massively important, but even a bill that affects every single queer person in the nation will only have the capacity to touch 5% of it. Passing racial equity laws and police brutality regulation would save lives and save livelihoods, but non-white people make up less than 15% of the total population.
There is an undoubtedly noble pursuit in standing up for the minorities that entrust the party with their votes, but these vast moral issues don’t bring in the much needed votes that can allow Democrats the opportunity for the long-term legislative change that Republicans have enjoyed since 1995.
If Democrats want to keep winning, they must enact changes that everyone can see.
This process must start immediately with COVID-19 stimulus checks in the bank accounts of as many Americans as possible. Warnock and Ossoff ran on giving $2000 stimulus checks to their constituents, and that’s what they should do. This debate about what income level you should start receiving a check at is ridiculous; if you got a stimulus check the first two times, you should get a third one. People get that the politics surrounding a stimulus are complicated, and frankly they don’t expect the world either. They just need some help to get through an economic crisis the likes of which haven’t been seen in more than a decade, and one for which everyone was unable to truly prepare for. The $2k checks are the least the feds can do.
Minimum wage needs to go up to fifteen dollars an hour. The beauty of a minimum wage growth plan is that they don’t happen overnight. They happen over the span of a few years, and this is undoubtedly advantageous for the group that passes it because no one can act unprepared for the legislation. It makes the political decision easy too; instead of worrying that a population of people with an all-too-short attention span will forget your achievements, you can ensure that business have ample time to adjust their bills to account for the new expense of a higher minimum wage, and you ensure that citizens don’t forget what is happening. People who see their bills become a little easier to pay each year will notice that it’s the people in charge doing it.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act needs to get passed without a fuss. Beyond the immediate factor that Republicans in state legislatures nationwide are gearing up to gerrymander the hell out of house districts following the 2020 census, it’s just the right thing to do. Voting should be easy, and Americans shouldn’t have to jump through a dozen hoops just to make sure their vote counts. Things like voter ID laws or reduction of multilingual voting resources not only discriminate against minority populations, but they constitute a continuation of Jim Crow that has no place in the 21st century. For Democrats, though, the equation is simple: when everyone votes, they win.
There is one other piece to the puzzle, though.
Democrats can’t do it all at once.
I know this drives most people crazy, but it’s the unfortunate reality of the modern day information ecosystem. I could write a book about the shift in news infrastructure in the digital era (I won’t, but I could), but the point really boils down to the fact that there is no weekly news cycle, there is no daily news cycle. There is no news cycle at all. This carnival ride isn’t a Ferris wheel anymore; it’s a roller coaster that zips down an infinite track with absolutely no end in sight.
The result? Because things move so much quicker, and because we consume them at almost the rate they fly at us, we also forget how the things that happened in the past made us feel.
Many would say we forget the things that happened, but that isn’t really true. We all remember way back in 2016 when Trump was obnoxious to Clinton on the debate stage. We all remember the covfefe gaffe. We remember the 100,000 Covid deaths milestone, and we remember the election week from hell.
We do remember the facts themselves, but we forget so quickly how much they made us feel, how angry or hopeless or afraid they really made us, when they happened.
And the truth about the ballot box is that you need people to be passionate about showing up and making their voice heard. People vote when they feel like there’s something truly at stake. Pro-lifers vote because they feel like they’re saving lives, and pro-choicers vote because they feel like they’re defending women’s rights. The constant news flow that we all get from our Twitter feeds numbs this passion that drives us to vote, and so getting people to their polling places looks a little bit different now.
So for Democrats to succeed in 2022 and 2024, they have to spread some of their issues out over the next couple of years. They need to get it done, no doubt, but trying to cram everything into a single bill just doesn’t work if Democrats want credit. As annoying or frustrating as some of this space between the inauguration and the passage of another relief bill may be, every day that passes clarifies the distinction between a Republican government and a Democrat one. This far out, it isn’t about what people see now, it’s about how they will see what happened now in two years.
This will need to take some different forms to be sure. Early passage of the stimulus is crucial, and so is that of the minimum wage (the more years Dems have with the minimum wage rising, the better), and things like the JLVRA can maybe hold off until the end of the year. There too will be things that need to be dealt with immediately if they arise, such as if a supreme court seat were to open up and Democrats were to pack it with the most liberal, abortion supporting, gay loving, blue blooded democratic judge they could find. (And yes, I’m still bitter about the rapidity of the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation.) Ultimately though, a big victory each quarter should be the goal, with some smaller wins sprinkled in the gaps.
It’s worth saying that this philosophy doesn’t hold up under every lens. It is morally reprehensible to play politics when lives are at stake, as they are with the pandemic. That’s why Covid relief has to go out fast.
Here’s the bottom line though — Americans want to see their lives go back to normal. If that happens under Democratic control, then Democrats will be rewarded politically. If not, people will give the other guy a chance to fix it. Unfortunately they just won’t remember that the other guy is who got us into this mess in the first place.