- Words of wisdom from Michelle Goldberg:
Left-wing populists often believe that there’s a silent majority who agree with them, if only they can be organized to go to the polls. If that were true, though, an election with record high turnout should have been much better for progressives. Instead, 2020 was a reminder of something most older liberals long ago had to come to terms with: The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative than we are.
I’m an older liberal. I live in Los Angeles County, where Joe Biden romped with more than 71% of the vote to Donald Trump’s not quite 27%; Congressman Adam Schiff was reelected with more than 72% of the vote; an advocate for criminal justice reform defeated the incumbent (an African American woman and a Democrat) for District Attorney; and my city councilman (a progressive Democrat in a nonpartisan office, with a slew of mainstream endorsements, including Mayor Eric Garcetti and Speaker Nancy Pelosi) became the first City Council incumbent defeated in 17 years, by a candidate running to his left.
I’m fine with those results (though I voted for my councilman, whom I had no reason to be mad at, but won’t miss). But I know that Los Angeles is hardly representative of the rest of the country — and I want Democrats to win there too.
2. I was convinced that 2020 was the year that Susan Collins would go down. (A more reasonable prospect than daydreams about the defeat of South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham or Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell.) Mainers disappointed me again.
Today’s New York Times provides perspective on that senate race, which suggests that so much money poured into the state that much of the spending misfired:
Maine’s mill towns were reliably Democratic until they flipped red for Mr. Trump in 2016. Once wealthy communities, they have steadily lost population, and remain dotted with relics of their old prosperity, like Rumford’s elegant, neoclassical Hotel Harris. The paper industry began a long decline in the 1980s, and Rumford’s mill work force contracted from a high point of 3,000, in the 1960s, to around 650 today.
“They’re fed up with politics, politicians in general, Democrats and Republicans,” said Kerri Arsenault, whose memoir, “Mill Town,” traced the industry’s decline.
“There’s a lot of angry Trump people who work in that mill,” said Deano Gilbert, 57, a union official at the mill. “I deal with guys that have had union jobs for decades that are superstrong Trump supporters. In the 1970s, everyone would be trying to vote their jobs, but now that’s all over.”
Asked how Democrats could better reach voters in towns like Rumford, he said, “Know your audience.”
3. Did I mention Lindsey Graham? Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger — under fierce attack by many Republicans who don’t like the state’s election results — alleges that Senator Graham called with questions about Raffensperger’s handling of signature-matching laws and the oblique suggestion that Raffensperger throw out legally cast ballots. Graham made the call on the same day a Trump supporter filed a lawsuit in Georgia to do just that and Trump tweeted, “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud.”
Graham denies Raffensperger’s account, but when asked earlier by Sean Hannity — at a time when the South Carolinian was raising bogus charges of electoral fraud — whether the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania should consider rejecting the majority vote for Biden and selecting Trump electors by fiat, responded: “I think everything should be on the table.”
He said “everything” on Fox News Channel and endorsed the possibility of throwing out the ballots from Pennsylvania, but we’re supposed to believe he balked at making a discrete call to a Republican Secretary of State in Georgia to suggest more limited sabotage? This is hardly a credible denial from a hardly credible Senator, someone who has been all-in with Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election results and the incoming presidency of Joe Biden.
4. When he arrives at the White House on January 20, Biden’s first order of business will be defeating the coronavirus, which Trump has refused to take on. It will be a tall order — especially in light of how the Republican Party has created yet another wedge issue to divide us by opposing wearing a mask and social distancing to stop the spread of infection.
Democrat Joe Biden may have won the presidency pledging a national mask mandate and a science-based approach to controlling the pandemic. But in the states where the virus is spiking highest — particularly in the Upper Midwest — Republicans made substantial gains down-ballot. Often they did so by railing against the very tool that scientists say could best help arrest the virus’s spread.
Democrats on the left, convinced that messaging that’s effective in California or New York or other solidly blue states and metro regions, will be well-received in areas with a redder tinge, should pause to reconsider. Reflect on the opposition to taking simple steps — recommended by scientists, doctors, and public health authorities — to save American lives. This is the same audience that accepts election fraud nonsense.
Most of these folks — among the 73 million voters who embraced Donald Trump’s reelection — may be out of reach. But Democrats have to figure out a way to pry apart this bloc, to bring a portion of these Americans over to our side — enough to form a working majority.
Right now, they’re not talking our language, not accepting our facts, not seeing what we’re seeing. Expecting that an effective message in blue America will resonate in red America is wishful thinking. It’s going to be a harder lift than that.
(Image: Susan Collins via wikipedia.)
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