Democrats Defeating Themselves

E.J. Dionne recently wrote about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose re-opening of a collapsed highway in a mere twelve days made news. Dionne was  (properly) impressed with Shapiro’s general approach to governing, and the article is interesting, but what leapt out to me was the following:

You’ve got to show up everywhere, and you’ve got to speak to everyone, and you’ve got to speak in plain language and in practical terms,” he told me in an interview last week in the final days of settling a tough state budget fight. He noted that in his 2022 campaign, “I went to counties the Democrats had written off a long time ago and spoke about workforce development and spoke about how we’re going to bring back the economy and talked about it in very tangible, practical ways.”

The emphasis in that paragraph is mine, because in states like Indiana, the biggest problem Democrats face is attitudinal–they’ve “written off” their chances before they even begin.

Here’s an example that still has me steaming–a discussion with my youngest son, a staunchly liberal Democrat who contributes generously to political campaigns. I told him I was enthusiastic about the US Senate candidacy of Marc Carmichael, and suggested he make a contribution. His response: he will send his money to candidates who “have a chance of winning.” He had written off Indiana as a lost cause.

My son isn’t the only presumably “savvy” political observer who begins with that defeatist attitude, and in my view, it is far and away the biggest barrier to Democratic victories in this state. It prevents otherwise intelligent observers from recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. (I have allowed him a rebuttal to my view, which you can read at the end of this post.)

Is Indiana a hard state for Democrats to win? Yes. Does this year offer unusual openings? Absolutely– especially in state-wide races where the GOP’s extreme gerrymandering is irrelevant. (By the way, the Republicans who drew those gerrymandered districts had a problem last time, because rural Indiana is emptying out–they were unable to add to their existing Red districts, and the margins in existing districts were narrower.)

Why do I see an opening for Democrats, especially in the Senate race?

  • It’s an open seat–no incumbency advantage.
  • Jim Banks will be the Republican nominee. Banks is a culture warrior far, far to the right of even conservative Republicans. His positions–he’s for permit-less carry and banning abortion and he’s a full-throated endorser of Donald Trump– are at odds with positions held by significant majorities of Hoosiers. His attacks on gay children have been ugly and mean-spirited, and his entire focus is on culture war. (He’s basically Indiana’s version of Marjorie Taylor Green.)
  • The Democrats have another excellent statewide candidate in Jennifer McCormick, whose gubernatorial campaign is likely to energize the state’s teachers and librarians.
  • Carmichael is politically knowledgable and an affable and engaging retail politician.
  • Trump–four indictments or no– is likely to be the Republicans’ Presidential nominee.
  • The abortion issue has energized women and Red state voters who otherwise don’t turn out–from Kansas to Kentucky to Ohio.

Does any of this guarantee victory? No, of course not.

Carmichael needs to raise enough money to get his message out; he needn’t match the resources that the Club for Growth and other far-Right PACs will give Banks. I think he is on his way to doing that–we’ll see when the next financial reports come out– but the biggest barrier he will face is the self-defeating conviction held by people who agree with him on the issues but believe that a Democratic victory in Indiana is beyond hope–a conviction that ignores the Democrats we’ve previously elected, and shrugs off the fact that the state voted for Obama in 2008.

That defeatist attitude permeates the state: in gerrymandered districts, all too often the party doesn’t even run a candidate. Political pundits routinely characterize campaigns by Democrats as “uphill.” Then we wonder why Democrats have problems with fundraising and turnout.

Democrats need to stop defeating themselves.

Son’s rebuttal:

First, mom, thanks for letting me respond within the body of your blog. Second, I agree with your core message that we Democrats cannot win if we don’t show up and get out the vote. Everyone should – and I will – vote!  Where we differ is on our views of political reality, and where resources can be effectively deployed to maximize Democratic – and Democracy’s – chances of success.

You characterize my attitude as “defeatist” and as the biggest barrier to Democratic victories.  Respectfully, the barriers to Democratic victories in Indiana – a poorly-educated electorate, lack of diversity in this State, a fractured media that prevents “our” messages from reaching those who might otherwise agree with us – are more complex and mountainous than my attitude (and that of others like me) can overcome in a single election cycle.

As you note, I DO give to political candidacies I see as viable, even if “underdogs.” In the last election, I gave money to Democratic Senate candidates in Wisconsin, Georgia, and a few others with “close” but winnable races. I also donated to organizations that “get out the vote.” Not all of these candidates won, but their base-line numbers were within a few percentage points, not more than 10 points, below their opponents.  With due respect to Marc Carmichael, whom I don’t know but have heard is a great guy, notwithstanding how truly despicable Jim Banks is, I think there is only ONE Democratic candidate with a chance to win the upcoming U.S. Senate race here – Pete Buttigieg – and (sadly) I don’t see him coming back to run that race. (By the way, Mayor Pete, if you do come back to run, I will “max out” to your campaign!)

Unfortunately, in the absence of a high-profile, once-in-a-generation candidate like Pete, I see Democrats’ chances in Indiana through the lens of the Diego Morales/Destiny Wells race for Secretary of State in 2020.  The Republican Morales, like Jim Banks, was a despicable, pathetic character: in the months leading up to the 2020 election, Morales – a Trumper and election-denier – was credibly accused of sexual assault, and it was reported that he had been “disciplined” and fired from the very office he was seeking, and had previously committed voter fraud by voting in a county where he lacked residency!  The Democratic candidate, Wells, was well-regarded and had generally positive press.  Notwithstanding, Morales won the race by more than 10 points.  Winning 54% of the vote, he only slightly underperformed Governor Holcomb’s 56% and Trump’s 57%. (While I think Trump being the nominee helps Dems in many places, there’s no evidence yet that it does anything but help Republicans in Indiana.  In other words, the Republican “baseline” advantage in Indiana requires more than a “can do” attitude to overcome. It requires a Mayor Pete-level candidacy.) And as for Governor Shapiro’s win in Pennsylvania, the political baseline there (according to Pew Research) is 46% Democrat/39% Republican, while the same source reports the political baselines here are 37% Dem/42% Republican (with 20% no-lean).

Now, I know you see the politics of abortion altering the political landscape (because moderate Republicans join us on this issue).  And it is true – to a point.  Where abortion is “on the ballot,” the side favoring abortion rights does win (see Ohio, Kansas, and even the State Supreme Court election in Wisconsin). But the data on how General Elections go, when abortion is just one of many issues, doesn’t (yet) tell the same story. And while Dems everywhere need to make it as central an issue as possible, I still see donations to statewide candidates in Indiana akin to buying a lottery ticket – if you don’t play, you can’t win, but the odds are pretty much the same for now (unfortunately).

Finally, I DO truly hope you are right and I am wrong!  I would love nothing more than to see Indiana Democrats win the Governorship and the U.S. Senate race here – and while I will vote, I am still going to direct my limited resources to political candidacies which I view as more “winnable,” because we risk losing the entire country, not just Indiana, if Trump and his ilk win otherwise close races elsewhere.

Okay, readers–what say you about this argument? 

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Hamilton County And An Age-Old Story…

Back in 1995, when I was still at Indiana’s ACLU, I wrote a column about a “recurring fantasy” of mine, which I described as follows: a caveman discovers that he can produce drawings of the animals he hunts on the walls of his cave. Excited by the possibilities of his art, energized by the creative act, he produces a drawing–only to have it rubbed angrily off the cave wall by someone in his tribe who declares that the depiction of animal genitalia is indecent.

The first artist encounters the first censor, and a dynamic is born that is with us still!

Here in Indiana, there has been a takeover of the Hamilton County library board by some current descendants of my imagined angry tribesman. (Hamilton County is one of the “doughnut counties” surrounding Indianapolis, which occupies all of Marion County.)The new board immediately moved to “protect” children by requiring the library staff to review all of the books available to teenagers in the Young Adult section (at an estimated cost to the taxpayers of $300,000 ). Reports are that, out of the 1,859 physical books examined thus far, 1,385 have been moved from the Young Adult section to the Adult or General section.

One of the book moved was John Green’s best-selling “The Fault in Our Stars,” and Green sent–and publicized– an appropriately outraged message to the Board, triggering a national outcry, and a local petition to “Stop Censorship at Hamilton East Public Library.” (When I last looked, that petition had garnered some 3500 signatures.) As I write this, the turmoil has resulted in the (welcome) replacement of the library board’s president, a strong supporter of “protecting” children from reading  about things they can easily access on the internet and elsewhere.

The insistence that this exercise has been in furtherance of “parental rights” is equally ridiculous; a genuine concern for parental rights would respect the rights of all parents to determine what materials their children can access–not the right of some parents to determine what everyone else’s children can read.

No one said these people are smart. Just rabid.

I confess that I have never been able to understand the frantic need of so many of our fellow-citizens to control the habits and behaviors of the rest of us–habits and behaviors that do not affect them.

Nat Hentoff once wrote that the human animal’s urge to censor is stronger than its sex drive. In my days with the ACLU, I dealt regularly with folks who were absolutely convinced that they knew better than you and me what books we should read, what art we should see, and what musical lyrics the government should allow us to hear.

For those of us who believe that ideas matter, that literature and art are intensely important activities through which humans explore ideas, censorship poses a threat to our most important values. The government that can determine which ideas are worthy of consideration– and/or the age at which we should be allowed to consider them– is a government with power over the most important of all human functions–the power of the intellect.

In my long-ago fantasy, the caveman and his critic take their respective arguments to the leader of the cave clan. The censor insists that he and his friends find the drawing indecent, and argues that allowing smut in the cave will debauch the children and undermine the clan’s community standards. Another member argues the case for the artist: a society unwilling to consider all ideas will never leave the caves, will never reach the stars. A society willing to be ruled by the fears of the many will be deprived of the genius of the few.

In my dream, the leader considers the arguments and rules in favor of freedom of artistic expression. Civil liberties are born.

That, of course, was my fantasy. It remains to be seen whether civil liberties–not to mention common sense– will prevail in Hamilton County….Or, for that matter,  elsewhere in Indiana.

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A Cost/Benefit Analysis

Freedom of the press isn’t just implied in the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause, although that clause clearly extends to the media. According to historians, the country’s founders wanted to explicitly protect press information-gathering, because democratic processes depend on an informed electorate.

That understanding–that constitutional principle–is what makes a police raid on a Kansas newspaper so appalling. (When a reader first alerted me to this, I was certain there had to be more to the story–that the initial reports must have been wrong. I was the one who was wrong.)

As NPR has reported:

The small-town Kansas newspaper raided by police officers on Friday had been looking into allegations of misconduct against the local chief just months ago, according to the paper’s publisher, raising further concerns about the law enforcement officers’ motives.

The Marion, Kansas police department confiscated computers, cell phones and a range of other reporting materials from the office of the Marion County Record — the sole local paper in a small city of about 2,000 residents. Officers spent hours in the newsroom. It also seized material from one of its journalist’s homes. Eric Meyer, the publisher and co-owner of the newspaper, said his 98-year-old mother passed away the day after police raided her house, where Meyer was staying at the time. He said he believes the stress from the raid contributed to her death.

The background to the raid is particularly telling: the Record had conducted “routine background checks” just before police chief Gideon Cody took office. That “routine check” was evidently informed by anonymous tips the paper received after it ran a story about his candidacy for the police chief position.

Cody was sworn in as Chief in June, after retiring from the Kansas City Police Department in late April. Meyer was quoted as saying that “It was alarming, to say the least, the number of people who came forward, and some of the allegations they made were fairly serious. We were simply looking into the question.”

When a reporter asked Cody to comment on the allegations, Cody threatened to sue the paper, and the department stopped providing routine information to the newspaper. And then,

County magistrate judge Laura Viar signed a search warrant on Friday morning, authorizing the Marion police department to raid the Record. The warrant cites suspected “identity theft” of a local restaurant owner as the reason for the raid.

On Friday, just after the raid, the Record requested access to the probable cause affidavit — the document that would outline why the judge saw reason to authorize the raid — from the Marion County District Court.

But the court’s written response, reviewed by NPR, indicates that document may not exist.

There’s more, and it will undoubtedly all come out as other media outlets investigate the threat posed to press freedom by this episode. But what is especially troubling is that this bit of official thuggery comes at a time when local newspapers are disappearing. 

As an article in the Atlantic noted, local newspapers don’t just serve democracy–they also save tax dollars. The article cited a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, revealing that San Juan County, Utah, had paid a single law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees. The story also reported that the firm had overcharged the county, the poorest in the state, by $109,500. Embarrassed, the firm paid the money back.

That one story retrieved for taxpayers a sum that was triple the reporter’s annual salary. As the author of the article noted, funding local news would more than pay for itself.

In addition to providing citizens with the information needed to make democracy work, in addition to the tax dollars saved when government is under the eye of media watchdogs, local newspaper reports feed community , especially in rural areas. A recent article from the Washington Post focused on that function.

At a time when hooligans have hijacked the national discourse with disinformation and paranoia, the Rappahannock News operates in a calmer place where the slow rhythms of rural life are newsworthy — and where, regardless of political views, its readers are unified by a powerful sense of community… 

Similar newspapers once bound together communities everywhere. A century ago, The Post, too, carried items on the humdrum comings and goings of local residents. Though the news became impersonal in big cities, community papers continued to be at the core of rural and small-town America.“

As a Local News Initiative official puts it, local news organizations are the glue that hold the community together. When there’s a void of local news, people revert to the blue and red echo chambers and national news sources that confirm their own belief sets, and it aggravates partisanship.”

That Kansas sheriff obviously doesn’t care.

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If Demography Is Destiny…

White America is aging.

I know that won’t come as a huge surprise to many of the readers who comment here–a number of you reside in my own age cohort, and–shocked as I am by how quickly it seemed to happen–I have to admit that I’m pretty old.

I posted a while back about America’s changing electorate, and the fact that some 4 million Americans turn 18 –voting age–every year. Also every year, two and a half million older Americans die.

I recently came across yet another article considering America’s ongoing age shift; this one was titled “White America is Getting Older.” Here’s the lede:

A news release from the Census Bureau published on Thursday morning summarized three-quarters of a century of American history succinctly. It was titled, “America Is Getting Older.”

This is the Census Bureau, so the assertion was backed up with data. The median age in the U.S. rose to 38.9 years in 2022, up 0.2 years from 2021. Over the past year, 46 states saw increases in their median ages. Four states (and D.C.) saw no change.

This isn’t surprising but is, instead, a continuation of a long-standing trend. But there is an important detail that’s easy to overlook here: The increase in age is largely a function of White Americans getting older — a distinction that itself helps explain an awful lot about American culture and politics in the moment.

As the article explains, the Americans who are beginning to die off were part of the post WWII “baby boom.” That boom began at a time when immigration was constrained,  and as of 1970, about 84 percent of the country was non-Hispanic White, and the median age was just over 28.

A few years ago, the Census Bureau released data showing the age of Americans by race. At that point, the most common age for a White American was 58. The most common age for a non-White American — Black, Hispanic, Asian, mixed-race, etc. — was 27. For Hispanics, the most common age was 11.

The charts accompanying the article show that most White residents of the U.S. are older than the country’s median age, while most Asian, Black and Hispanic residents are younger. “Whites make up 52 percent of the population under the median age — and two-thirds of the population over it.”

The article notes–almost gratuitously, since most of us know it–that the people who are aging are those most likely to be voting Republican. As the report concludes,

It’s easy to see how this percolates into the political and cultural conversations. We have a heavily White older population that is competing for power and resources — like funding for schools or senior centers — with a more-diverse younger population. We have a partisan divide that overlaps with the age divide. We have explicit and implicit political appeals that center on the country’s changed demography.

In other words, we are at a point in America’s trajectory where demographic change is too obvious to ignore. That awareness helps explain the eruption of more explicit racism, as an older White age cohort tries frantically to hold onto its diminishing social dominance.

If we step back a bit to view the ebb and flow in historical context, it seems very likely that–once these older White Americans have passed away–our politics will calm down and settle into a new, (hopefully more equitable) normal. The danger, however, lies in what we might think of as the “death rattle” of an aging and angry elderly White Christian cohort.

The 2024 elections will tell that tale. If the nearly departed can install Trump and his ilk–in Indiana, Braun and Banks (both of whom have enthusiastically endorsed Trump)–they will continue on their merry way: arming the unhappy, forcing women to give birth, and  awarding judgeships to partisans who will cheerfully dismantle the protections of the Bill of Rights. Embedding those policies for yet another term will make it difficult if not impossible for demographics to save us. If there is no Blue wave in 2024, demographic “destiny” will take a lot longer–assuming it can be achieved at all.

I sure hope the Democrats are working  hard on getting out the vote……

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Blue Cities…

That cities are “blue” has become a truism. For the past several election cycles, the nation’s urban areas have repeatedly voted Democratic, while more rural parts of the nation have remained–or become increasingly–Red.

But “blue” also means “sad,” and according to a New York Times story a few weeks back, that meaning is also applicable to cities, if –like Indianapolis–they are located in a Red state.

The article focused upon St. Louis; the author noted that while conservatives love to point to San Francisco as an example of failed “liberal” policies, places like St. Louis demonstrate the harms done by conservative state legislatures.

St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative. Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis is a blue island in a red state, and conservative state policies have at least partly driven the city’s decline. More apt parallels to St. Louis are places like Kansas City, Mo.; Memphis; Nashville; and Little Rock, Ark. — liberal enclaves that in a macrocosm of the worst kind of family dysfunction are at the mercy of conservative state governments. The consequences of this dysfunction can be far-reaching.

The article noted that  St. Louis has been losing population for years, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus. The pandemic especially emptied out the office workers, “who scattered away to Zoom from their suburban homes and have not fully returned.”

A July 2022 Brookings Institution analysis described urban population loss during the pandemic as “historic.” The report highlighted cities like San Francisco, New York, Washington and Boston — and St. Louis. Some downtowns have since bounced back. St. Louis, like San Francisco, isn’t among them.

The reasons are debatable, but St. Louis’s politically fraught relationship with the Republican-controlled state government certainly hasn’t helped. Even as St. Louis leaders and schools struggled to navigate the once-in-a-century plague by following federal pandemic guidelines and expert advice, they had to contend with a barrage of lawsuits from the Republican state attorney general (now the state’s junior senator), Eric Schmitt, demanding that they drop their mask mandates.

Missouri Republicans also echo the accusations of Hoosier politicians who claim that crime is out of control. In Missouri, that led to the legislature attempting a state takeover of the city’s police force.

The narrative from the right was that the city’s soft-on-crime policies were to blame for the unmoored violence that is driving the city’s economic decline, so the police need to be under outside control.

That narrative sounds very familiar to anyone in Indianapolis who has seen the television ads of this year’s GOP candidate for mayor, who (inexplicably) wants to govern a place he evidently considers an urban hell-hole.

 Left out of that narrative is the fact that gun crime here is abetted by Missouri gun laws that are among the loosest in the nation. Virtually anyone can walk around the city with a gun, with no state-mandated background check and few state-level restrictions, and there’s next to nothing the police can do about it until the shooting starts. The state has rebuffed all entreaties from the city to be allowed to enforce some kind of permit requirement.

We have precisely the same situation in Indiana, where the Republican super-majority in our legislature has ignored both public sentiment and law enforcement testimony in favor of “permit-less carry.”

Republican critics maintain it is the city’s de-emphasizing of policing that’s the real problem, and as such, the legislature in 2021 passed a state law that effectively penalizes cities that cut their police budgets. But even the largest St. Louis police force would still be policing a city flooded with unregulated guns and few tools to confront them, courtesy of the same Republican state leaders. A current effort to pass a statewide ballot referendum that would go around lawmakers to give St. Louis the authority to impose firearms permits and other reforms is the kind of Hail Mary the city is left with.

At least Missouri allows referenda–in Indiana, there is absolutely no check on the culture warriors in the Statehouse, who were elected by  to rule over us by mostly rural voters.

The state has been unhelpful in other ways. The largest-ever Missouri state income tax cut, which lawmakers passed last year, will inevitably affect St. Louis and every other city in Missouri, where basics like infrastructure and education remain chronically underfunded.

It’s the same situation in Indiana, made even more frustrating by the fact that Indianapolis is the economic engine of the state. Evidently, none of the “good old boys” running things in the Statehouse have ever heard of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs…

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