The Democrats’ Midterm Challenge

Most of the Party operatives I spoke with emphasized that, as a first task, the Democrats have to upgrade their direct, in-person campaigning rather than focus on fine-tuning their message and beaming it out through expensive television ads. Steve Rosenthal, a long-discontented member of the pro-labor wing of the Party, complained about the Party's drift during the high era of television advertising: "The Party was too invested in television ads and messaging, and it ignored infrastructure—block captains, precinct leaders, people who knock on doors. Media consultants controlled the Party, and the operatives wanted to be media consultants. The Party failed miserably at grassroots organizing. They talked about it, but they didn't do it. The Party went completely in the direction of science. We created a generation of automatons who don't know how to talk to voters." He told me a story: an academic study by two psychologists, published in 2015, found that asking voters the question "Do you have a voting plan?" is associated with slightly increased turnout. So, according to Rosenthal, the Party's cosseted turnout specialists began instructing their field workers to ask that question. He has a photograph somebody sent him of a handmade sign in front of a house in Pennsylvania in 2016, the year Trump carried the state: "We have made a plan to vote! Please don't ring the doorbell!"

Even the grumpy Rosenthal admits that things have become better lately, at least in the purple states. An up-and-coming star among state Democratic Party chairs, Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, who has an organizing background and who helped to turn Hillary Clinton's narrow loss there in 2016 into a narrow win for Biden in 2020, told me, "It's all happening in people's houses. In 2018, we had a hundred and seventy-five different teams. We knocked on twice as many doors as in 2016, at half the cost. That became the Biden model, but virtual. Thirty thousand volunteers. The biggest thing is the ability to show up. Connect with people at the level of values, speak to hard work, establish trust. It comes from exposure and proximity. There's the question of the issues, and then there's the question of who's on your side—who do you trust more?"

Campaigning in this way implies being highly concrete and specific in making a case for the Democrats, but that still leaves the question of what the Democrats stand for over all. Biden hasn't been very good at answering that question, and it's a difficult one, because the various parts of the Democrats' coalition have such different preferences, culturally and economically. One Democrat who has to think about this a great deal is Representative Ro Khanna, of California, a child of immigrants from India who was born and raised in Pennsylvania, represents part of Silicon Valley, and is one of the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Khanna's district is one of the only majority-Asian congressional districts in the country, it is home to some of the richest corporations in the world (Apple and Google), and it voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 California Presidential primary. "I had a town hall in one of the poorer towns in my district, and many of the people there said our country's best days are behind us," he told me. "I had a town hall in Sunnyvale, and eighty per cent thought our best days are ahead of us. The world is their oyster."

How can you bring such different experiences and emotions into common political cause? "There is a necessary recognition that there have been blind spots and failures of globalization," Khanna said. "And a necessary recognition that the working class and the middle class have been left behind. The reality is, we made a strategic mistake. The consequence has been, in part, the rise of right-wing populism. The tech executives in my district recognize that we can't survive, going on as we are—that the middle class of the country has been hollowed out, that there's a growing anger, that it has led to xenophobia and increased tension with other countries. So I make the argument that this is enlightened self-interest for them. They understand that the bubble of prosperity for the few is not sustainable, and that it is not the democracy we want. We are making the most wealth in human history. We can afford to change."

Biden's favorite rubric, when he was campaigning and afterward, has been "build back better," but that's now associated with a wildly ambitious proposal that didn't pass. What else would work for the Democrats? That will take a long time to determine; they are at the dawn of a new political age. But Khanna was willing to make a suggestion, which may strike his fellow-progressives as jarringly jingoistic: "A new economic patriotism. There has to be a clear narrative. In the U.S., the story matters as much as the policy. And the story is the rejection of neoliberalism. For forty years, we made a mistake. Frankly, it was both parties. Now we need to be a nation that reclaims economic self-sufficiency and economic leadership. We'll make sure the U.S. is preëminent. Having an aspirational vision for America is really powerful. In a sense, the new economic patriotism is a blend of culture and economics. We need to show we believe America is the greatest country in the world. It's O.K. to root for the home team."