The Democratic Problem, the American Problem

Republicans are really fretting about the possibility of a Trump nomination in 2016. They get that no Republican is going to win while getting crushed amongst every group besides white guys. In truth, they should be afraid of more than Trump. Even non-white guys like Carson, Rubio, and Cruz have little appeal outside of the GOP base. It's likely that the Democratic nominee will come into the election with between 200 and 245 electoral votes in their column, and will need just a few states, many of which have large pockets of non-white voters. With the GOP field talking the way it is, it's hard to see them winning the White House. Even if they did, if they govern the way they have in the House the last five years, they won't hold it two terms. The GOP is struggling to be a national party. 

It stands to reason that the GOP is cooked if they lose the White House again in 2016. If they can't nominate a winner for President and can't elect a Speaker of the House who can lead the chamber, where can they go? It appears that the GOP can't win nationally because the House of Representatives is too conservative, and it pulls their statewide and Presidential candidates too far right. It's a self-defeating cycle.

It's also the lifeblood of why they will survive as a party either way. It's why they can pass legislation, and Democrats can't. And frankly, it's fairly clear, if you objectively look at it, that it's not going away:

But Congress, and the House in particular, is both the source of the GOP's problem and the force that prevents them from solving it. Even as Republicans in Congress enjoy approval ratings somewhere between those of O.J. Simpson and that kid at UConn who demanded his jalapeno bacon mac and cheese, the party's hold on the House is almost completely secure. That's partly because of gerrymandering — the last round of redistricting came after Republicans won big in 2010, so Republicans were in control in most state legislatures after the census — but mostly because Republican voters are distributed more efficiently than Democratic voters. If you have lots of seats where 80 or 90 percent of the constituents are from your party, as Democrats do in urban areas, then you've essentially wasted a bunch of surplus votes you could have used elsewhere.

Here lies the Democratic problem- while the Republicans can't win a mandate to govern as a bunch of nativist, white conservatives, Democrats aren't going to win for a while either. If Democrats are going to win national elections based almost entirely on the votes of young people, minorities, unmarried women, and highly educated liberals, that will continue to work for President. It will not work in a district-driven Congress. These groups of people live in common areas, mainly urban, and aren't spread out across Congressional Districts nationally. In other words, all of our votes are in about 185 Congressional Districts, and there are enough to win 270 electoral votes from there, but not enough to win 218 House seats.

We tend to understand the GOP's problems. We can read this, and comprehend it easily:

At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. Plus, it wants to do away with big government (or so it claims). 

The party establishment, including business and financial leaders, seems to realize that Republicans need to moderate their outdated posture on social issues. But they can’t persuade their own base — especially Republicans in the white South — to change. The longer the GOP holds out, the more likely it is to be damaged by the nation’s changing demographics — the swelling impact of Latinos and other immigrants, and the flowering influence of millennials, the 18-to-30-year-olds who are more liberal and tolerant than their elders. 

Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was cynical, of course, but it was an effective electoral ploy. Now, however, it is beginning to look like a deal with the devil. For 2016, the GOP has to cope with very different challenges. The party has to find a broadly appealing nominee who won’t scare off party moderates and independent voters, but who at the same time can pacify rebellious right-wingers and prevent a party crackup.

What we understand is that the "white bigot class" isn't big enough to win anymore. We understand that Republicans have to appeal to people outside of their base to win a national election, and their base won't allow them to nominate someone who hasn't sufficiently bowed to their demands that have no chance of winning over America.

What I'm not sure we understand is what we read here:

The presidency is extremely important, of course. But there are also thousands of critically important offices all the way down the ballot. And the vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress. Indeed, even the House infighting reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won't lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have. 

Not only have Republicans won most elections, but they have a perfectly reasonable plan for trying to recapture the White House. But Democrats have nothing at all in the works to redress their crippling weakness down the ballot. Democrats aren't even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don't even admit that they exist. 

Instead, the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama's left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.

What did that just say- it said we can't get a "liberal" Congress. Well, we "can," but we're going to have to tolerate some moderates to win Congressional seats, state houses, and Governor's mansions. Like the GOP has:

Liberals accustomed to chuckling over the ideological rigor of the House GOP caucus won't want to hear this, but one of the foundations of the GOP's broad national success is a reasonable degree of ideological flexibility. 

Essentially every state on the map contains overlapping circles of rich people who don't want to pay taxes and business owners who don't want to comply with labor, public health, and environmental regulations. In states like Texas or South Carolina, where this agenda nicely complements a robust social conservatism, the GOP offers that up and wins with it. But in a Maryland or a New Jersey, the party of business manages to throw up candidates who either lack hard-edged socially conservative views or else successfully downplay them as irrelevant in the context of blue-state governance. 

Democrats, of course, are conceptually aware of the possibility of nominating unusually conservative candidates to run in unusually conservative states. But there is a fundamental mismatch. No US state is so left-wing as to have created an environment in which business interests are economically or politically irrelevant. Vermont is not North Korea, in other words.

Yes, ideological moderation is what liberal Matt Yglesias is proposing here. The Democrats have to admit they have a problem to address it though. Yglesias has a proposal for how to:

In some ways, the Democrats' biggest disadvantage is simply their current smugness. A party that controls such a small share of elected offices around the country is a party that should be engaged in vigorous debate about how to improve its fortunes. Much of the current Republican infighting — embarrassing and counterproductive though it may be at times — reflects the healthy impulse to recognize that the party lacks the full measure of power that it desires, and needs to argue about optimal strategies for obtaining it. 

On the Democratic side, the personal political success of Barack Obama has created an atmosphere of complacency and overconfidence. If a black guy with the middle name Hussein can win the White House, the thinking seems to be, then anything is possible. Consequently, the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions — embracing same-sex marriage, rediscovering enthusiasm for gun control, rejecting the January 2013 income tax rate settlement as inadequate, raising its minimum wage aspirations to the $12-to-$15 range, abandoning the quest for a grand bargain on balancing the budget while proposing new entitlements for child care and parental leave — even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics. 

Whatever you make of this agenda substantively, there's no way to actually enact it without first achieving a considerably higher level of down-ballot electoral success than Democrats currently enjoy. 

But instead of a dialogue about how to obtain that success, Democrats are currently engaged in a slightly bizarre bidding war between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to see whether Congress in 2017 will reject a legislative agenda that is somewhat to the left of Obama's or drastically to its left. The differences between them are real, of course, and at least somewhat important.

This is where I get onto my soap box a bit. I get that most of the left thought of Jim Webb as an absolute joke of a Presidential candidate, and he was. Jim Webb also won a statewide contest in Virginia in 2006, something that isn't that easy. I get that many Democrats sigh at the possibility of white, Irish-Catholic Vice-President Joe Biden entering the Presidential race, because he offers about as much diversity as a piece of white-bread. I get this. I also get that we can win a national election for President with 38-40% of the white vote. We can't govern with that though.

And so the question begs of itself, do we essentially re-welcome the 1990s DLC back into the party and infuriate our base? I'm not sure there's much point to that. It's not as though we did much better in the 1990s in Congress, since we lost a landslide in 1994, and that Republican Majority held until 2006 (and really only broke because of a terrible war). On the other hand, i'm not totally dismissive to running "Blue Dog" type candidates in places where frankly Nancy Pelosi could never be elected.

On the other hand, what else can we do? Perhaps an agenda that reaches suburban America more and improves our standing in those types of districts could help. In suburban Philadelphia and New York alone, there are nearly enough seats to take the Democrats from a hopeless minority to being able to pass some pieces of legislation, provided they took them back. Yes, gerrymandering is an issue that makes this hard, but it goes beyond gerrymandering. General observations of the two parties make people self-identify with Republicans in these areas, and there's very little effort to push back on those presumptions. Issues like the minimum wage do have appeal to our base we have, but have Democrats explained to suburbanite, $65,000 a year workers how a rise in the wage would help them and their communities? Have Democrats pushed back against the narrative of lowering taxes and cutting the size of government with $100,000 a year suburbanites who are also wondering why their schools aren't being funded as well? Democrats are not presenting a clear agenda, and explaining how it would help for people whom aren't in the GOP's policy base of wealthy whites, but don't fit into any demographic groups that Democrats are currently winning. We're really good at talking to our base about issues that effect them. That's good enough to win 51% of a national vote. It won't win us Congress or let us govern.

This isn't just a Democratic problem, though it certainly is killing the party. The fact that neither party is currently truly a national party leaves us with a dysfunctional Congress that cannot govern. The Senate can't get major legislation through with 60 votes very often, and if it finds a way to, there's no way the hyper-conservative House will pass that said legislation. The "Republican Party" holds a majority with 247 seats, but can't get 218 votes to elect a House Speaker, and really can't do anything to threaten the 50 or so conservative members who are blocking them from doing so. There is no "moderate wing" of the Democratic Party who can swoop in to help them get to 218 votes, in part because there is no shared policy agenda right now that they could agree on to make such a deal. We're essentially living in two separate political countries.

President Obama famously said as a U.S. Senator that "there is no red America, or blue America, there is the United States of America." That language sounded great. I think he meant it. I think it's what he wanted to see. The reality is that right now there are red and blue states. There is polarization. Republicans' slice of America isn't as big, population wise, so they won't win a national election unless they change. Democrats' slice of America isn't as big as they think it is, nor is it distributed right to actually govern, unless they change something. Continuing to deny the issues facing the party won't make them go away.