Dem
47
GOP
53
Democrats are disillusioned. They just lost a presidential election they thought they could win to an incompetent clown—again. Republicans control the Senate and House. All is lost.
The year, incidentally, is 2005.
The 2004 Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush won by 2% but thought he won by 20% and began talking about getting rid of Social Security. He overreached. In the midterms, the Democrats flipped 31 House seats and captured the chamber. They also flipped six Senate seats and captured that chamber as well (with help from the two independents). The sky cleared. In Jan. 2009, the Democrats had the trifecta. Stuff changes.
Is there a lesson for the Democrats in there somewhere? Could be. How did the Democrats come back from nowhere? Their leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, drew up a plan and followed it with great discipline. In Jan. 2009, Bush slunk out of office as one of the least popular presidents in modern history—34% approval at the end, down from 90% after 9/11, and 51% at his second inauguration (about where Donald Trump is now).
So what was the Pelosi-Reid plan? They defined a clear set of Democratic priorities where they aligned with the voters and the Republicans didn't. Protecting Social Security was one of the key priorities. Ending tax giveaways to the rich and big corporations was another. They also focused on health care, which ultimately allowed Barack Obama to get the Affordable Care Act passed.
Pelosi and Reid observed that Bush campaigned on one set of issues but governed on a different set, just as Trump is doing now. Bush campaigned on culture-wars issues and managing the war in Iraq. But the first thing he did as president was barnstorm the country trying to drum up support for abolishing Social Security. It was a huge failure. Donald Trump campaigned on lowering the price of eggs and not allowing prisoners to get sex-change operations. He is governing by filling his cabinet with billionaires and letting another billionaire decimate the federal government. That was not his mandate, insofar as he had one, especially since he beat Kamala Harris by only 1.6 points. Perhaps he got a mandate to lower the price of groceries, but he doesn't seem to be interested in that.
In W's first term, the Democrats protested everything he did and took up every progressive cause with zeal. It was a mistake. In his second term, the leadership allowed Democrats to vote with Republicans on some issues as long as they stayed united on the crucial issues. This showed the voters that Democrats were willing to be bipartisan on some things, but also had core principles from which they would not budge. The leadership chose its fights carefully.
They could do the same thing now. Core principles could be that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid should not be touched in order to provide billionaires with bigger tax cuts. Republicans are almost certainly going to try to gut Medicaid in order to pass their tax cuts while also placating their own deficit hawks. Democrats need to say: "Not one dollar from Medicaid for tax cuts." Defending USAID is not a priority with the voters and it shouldn't be for Democrats. Images of Democrats protesting outside of USAID's offices are even counterproductive.
Another thing Pelosi and Reid did is recruit House candidates who fit their districts. Heath Shuler was pro gun and anti-abortion. He won in North Carolina. Gabby Giffords was an immigration hawk. She won in Arizona. Bob Casey was anti-abortion. He won in Pennsylvania. But all of them vowed to protect Social Security.
Democrats now have litmus tests. If a potential candidate thinks the threat of global warming might be overblown, Democrats disown him. But if that's what people in his district think, he is a good candidate as long as he wants to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In other words, the winning Pelosi-Reid strategy was to find candidates who completely supported the party's core principles but were granted the freedom to campaign on what their district wanted on everything else. There are a fair number of reddish districts Democrats could flip in 2026 with the right candidate, but a clone of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is not the right candidate in any of them. (V)