I hope that Kyle Smith is wrong and Democrats do not wake up the day after November’s presidential election feeling like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, but I increasingly feel that he’s likely to be right. As I look around, I notice that the people who are voicing the same concerns are largely from swing states or swing districts, including particularly the affluent suburbs.
Lawmakers are not necessarily the most astute judges’s of the electorate, but their self-interest alone guarantees that they make educated guesses. Over the last few days, I’ve seen suburban freshman Democrats, like Haley Stevens and Mikie Sherrill from Michigan and New Jersey’s 11th Districts, respectively, endorse Michael Bloomberg for president.
This isn’t good news for Joe Biden, as it’s clearly a result of their assessment that Biden will not prevail over Bernie Sanders and that another “moderate” champion is needed to help the Democrats hold their House majority. But, the unvarnished truth is that a Democratic presidential nominee who worries our suburban lawmakers is probably going to underperform in the affluent suburbs, and that’s precisely the opposite of what needs to happen for the Democrats to beat Trump in the Electoral College.
In fact, Hillary Clinton did better in these suburbs than Barack Obama or Bill Clinton ever did, and she still lost reliably blue states because of her terrible performance in rural areas and small towns. It seems unlikely that Trump will fail to clean up again in these areas of states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, he can lose in California and New York by huge numbers and get clobbered in the popular vote, and it won’t hurt him a bit.
I’ve been harping on this problem since the day after the 2016 election, but the Democrats were unable to resist the easy winnings Trump provided them in the suburbs. They rode that advantage to a huge midterm victory, as they decimated suburban Republicans all across the country, all the way down to the local row offices.
It was hard to argue with that kind of success, but I continued to warn that it could be a trap for the 2020 election. First, from a progressive point of view, dependence on affluent suburban voters was going to transform the party away from being good representatives of working class families, and that meant that ideas like progressive taxation and Medicare-for-All would become more remote than ever. But, second, if the party didn’t honor this change in the shape of their base and pretended that these suburbanites would support an economically populist and culturally urban platform, they would get the worst of all worlds. They’d lock in and even increase Trump’s rural advantage and depress their suburban one, leading to almost sure defeat in the presidential election.
The idea that Michael Bloomberg might swoop in and save the day seems extremely far-fetched to me, and I see his appeal to suburban lawmakers as a more a sign of panic and desperation than a solid plan.
If Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren is capable of proving skeptics like me wrong, they’re going to have to pull off something that seems extremely unlikely. They’re going to have to reshape the electorate away from the way it’s been headed, with urban/suburban vs. rural/small town polarization, and win by boosting urban and youth turnout to unimaginable levels. This would not be of much help in holding control of the House of Representatives, but it would potentially be enough to win back critical blue states that Hillary Clinton lost.
One sign that they’re on the right track would be indications that young small town/rural folks are splitting from the parents and rallying around the Democrat. Another sign would be that black support for Biden has transferred to a more progressive candidate and looks more energized than ever. What won’t work is the suburban strategy that was so successful in 2018.
And, because it won’t be successful, the party will not unite around this strategy even if it appears to have good prospects for defeating Trump. The reason the party won’t unite is because a non-suburban strategy threatens too many newly-elected officeholders.
Perhaps the most obvious way of pointing out the risk here is to state plainly that the strategy would ignore the preferences of black and urban voters while alienating suburban voters, and then hope that this doesn’t have the most predictable result that they don’t turn out or cast their ballots in a way that matches 2016 or worse. Ironically, going for the more progressive suburban-alienating options makes it critical that the small town/rural vote is heavily divided by age, with young voters defying their parents to support an economic populist over a cultural one.
This looks like such a long shot to me, that I completely understand those who are feeling panicked and desperate. But there’s still no way I am looking for Michael Bloomberg to be the left’s savior.
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