Democrats Haven’t Really Won a Presidential Campaign Since 2012

Obama Wins | UCLA Bunche Center            As Democrats survey their recent losses in the election, they should avoid drawing conclusions or floating prescriptions for fixing their party’s problems. First, they should absorb the biggest data point that is currently being ignored by both the progressive and the corporatist wings of the party: they haven’t really won a presidential election since 2012. No, 2020 doesn’t count. Not really. Read on.

Democrats don’t yet recognize it, but they have effectively messed up three consecutive elections against Donald Trump. This points less to a divided country wobbling back-and-forth between two parties than to a systemic realignment in favor of the Republicans. For Democrats, this suggests a serious set of systemic problems unlikely to be fixable by nipping and tucking messaging and candidate presentation.

            I am not an election denialist. Trump officially lost in 2020. But Biden, doddering even at the time as he campaigned from his basement, didn’t really win.

            Covid shaped that race in two significant ways. Donald Trump committed political suicide in both. Trump’s unforced errors in 2020 were so easily foreseen and so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine another candidate ever committing political malpractice to such an extreme.  Of course Democrats were able to beat him then.

            It was a weird election.

            First Trump shot himself in both feet with Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership launched between March and May 2020, at the start of the lockdown. Epidemiologists and ordinary citizens alike fantasized about developing a vaccine, but experts cautioned that it would take ages. “Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump Administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months,” the New York Times reported on April 30, 2020. “The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years—more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.”

            “Never succeed” succeeded. Relying on emergency use authorizations and conditional approvals, the first vaccines became available to the public starting December 11, 2020. By April, anyone who wanted one could get one—a mere year after Warp Speed began.

            This was a miracle. A study by the Commonwealth Fund estimated that the vaccines prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations and saved the lives of 3.2 million Americans. They saved the budget $1.15 trillion through November 2022.

            Fast action to develop vaccines, something a more conventional politician like his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton might have been hesitant to approve without additional testing prior to approval, was Trump’s greatest accomplishment during his first term. Best of all from a political standpoint, timing made it the mother of all October surprises—had Trump chosen to run with it. The president could have informed a traumatized electorate a few weeks before election day that they would be inoculated against the deadly coronavirus, not four or more years in the future, but mere weeks or months away.

            Insanely, Trump ran away from his big win. To be sure, Trump did announce that vaccines were on the way. But he did so in an uncharacteristically muted manner. His highest-profile and highest-volume pandemic messaging, influenced by his wacky supporters and political allies, many of whom subscribed to unorthodox medical views including anti-vaxxers and those who thought Covid was a hoax, deteriorated into an incoherent morass that understated the impact, including the number of deaths. “That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on television—’Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina on October 24, 2020. “Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.” On October 26, he continued to downplay the scale of the pandemic as a “Fake News Media Conspiracy,” saying the U.S. had the most cases on earth only because “we TEST, TEST, TEST.”

            Thanks in large part to Trump, however, Covid vaccines were the fastest ever created. Due to internal GOP politics, however, Trump felt compelled to run away from Operation War Speed and, in doing so, threw away his best issue. An October 2020 Reuters-Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on his handling of the coronavirus crisis, with 37% approving and 59% disapproving. It was though FDR had denied having anything to do with the New Deal when he ran for reelection in 1936 and gotten dinged for making the Depression worse.

            Similarly inexplicable and tied to the vagaries of paranoid right-of-center internecine discussions, Trump repeatedly advised his supporters not to cast an early vote before election day or vote by mail, alternatives that exploded in popularity due to the pandemic lockdown, on the ground that they were rife with fraud. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020. “And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple—whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem,” he said in September 2020.      

            46% of ballots were cast via early or mail-in voting in 2020, double the result for four years earlier. But only 62% of Trump voters voted early or by mail, compared to 82% for Biden.

            It was an incredibly stupid mistake. It wasn’t one that the Trump campaign repeated this year.  

            Democrats convinced themselves that their 2016 loss was a fluke attributable to sexism, Russian interference and the novelty of Donald Trump, celebrity and TV star, as their opponent. They took comfort in the fact that Trump had been defeated in 2020 and therefore possibly would be again.

What they failed to grasp what is that the real anomaly here was 2020. Had Trump exploited the triumph of Operation Warp Speed and encouraged his supporters to cast early and mail-in ballots—any vote, any time, is a good vote—he would almost certainly have beat Biden. They foolishly assumed that Trump learned nothing from his previous campaign, that he would not correct his mistakes.

            For the first time since 1892, we now have a presidential candidate who ran in three consecutive elections, largely on the same issues, the border and the economy. Trump won twice and lost once, but that once was due to his suicidal moves. Whatever Democrats decide to do to try to become stronger and more viable going forward, they need to understand that they haven’t had a strong enough candidate to beat a real Republican running a normal campaign in a conventional presidential campaign since Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

The Data Is Clear: Progressives Should Boycott Biden

Good thing that he was surrounded by Secret Service': Joe Biden ...

            Once again the Democratic Party is asking progressives to vote for a presidential nominee who says he disagrees with them about every major issue. This is presented as an offer they cannot refuse. If they cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate like the unionist and environmentalist Howie Hawkins of the Greens or stay home on that key Tuesday in November, Donald Trump will win a second term—which would be worse than Biden’s first.

            Which is better for the progressive movement? Fall into the “two party trap” and vote for Biden, or refuse to be coopted and possibly increase Trump’s reelection chances?

            My new book Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party documents the last half-century of struggle between the party’s left-leaning voters and its right-leaning leadership class. History is clear. When progressive voters compromised their values by supporting corporatist candidates, they were ignored after the election. Only when they boycotted a general election did the DNC start to take them seriously.

            Throughout the 1980s party bigwigs manipulated the primaries in favor of establishment corporatist candidates over insurgent progressives: Jimmy Carter over Ted Kennedy in 1980, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis over Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. Democrats were united but unenthused; all three lost.

            Jimmy Carter won once, and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each won two terms, all three with progressive support. Democratic victories didn’t help progressives.

Most people have forgotten that Carter was the first of a string of conservative Democratic presidents. He brought back draft registration. The “Reagan” defense buildup actually began under Carter, as Reagan himself acknowledged. Carter provoked the Tehran hostage crisis by admitting the despotic Shah to the U.S., boycotted the Moscow Olympics and armed the Afghan mujahdeen who morphed into Al Qaeda.

            Carter became the first president since FDR not to propose an anti-poverty program. Instead, he pushed a right-wing idea, “workfare.”

            Progressives got nothing in return for their votes for Jimmy Carter.

            Like Carter, Clinton and Obama governed as foreign policy hawks while ignoring pressing domestic issues like rising income and wealth inequality. Clinton pushed through the now-disgraced 1994 crime bill that accelerated mass incarceration of people of color, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that gutted the Rust Belt and sent hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, and ended “welfare as we know it,” massively increasing homelessness. Obama bailed out Wall Street while ignoring Main Street, smashed the Occupy Wall Street movement and supported Al Qaeda affiliates that destroyed Libya and Syria.

            There was only one arguably progressive policy achievement over those 16 years: the Affordable Care Act, which originated in the bowels of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

            Progressives kept holding their noses and voting for Democrats. Democrats took them for granted. Democrats didn’t push to increase the minimum wage. They watched silently as generation after generation succumbed to student loan debt. As the earth kept burning, they hardly lifted a finger to help the environment except for symbolic actions like Obama’s fuel efficiency regulations, which required less than automakers were doing by themselves.

            Personnel, they say in D.C., is policy. Clinton had one progressive in his cabinet for his first term, Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Obama had none. Citigroup chose his cabinet.

            After the defeat of Bernie Sanders in 2016, progressives tried something new. Millions of disgruntled Sanders primary voters either stayed home, voted for Trump or cast votes for third-party candidates like Jill Stein. Hillary Clinton, who was so sure she could take progressives for granted that she put Sanders at 39th on her list of vice presidential picks, was denied her presumptive shoo-in victory. (Don’t blame Stein. Adding all of her votes to the Hillary Clinton column would not have changed the result.)

            Three years later, something remarkable happened. Most presidential hopefuls in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign emerged from the centrist corporatist wing of the Democratic Party yet felt pressured to endorse important progressive policy ideas. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and even Michael Bloomberg came out in favor of a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Most of the mainstream candidates proposed some sort of student loan forgiveness and Medicare For All. Nearly all support a Green New Deal.

            What forced the Democratic Party to shift left after decades of moving to the right? Fear that progressives will withhold their votes this coming November. After years of empty threats from progressives, the November 2016 voter boycott proved they wouldn’t sell their votes without getting something in return.

            The answer to the question, what should progressives do, is easy in the long term. Progressives should boycott Democratic candidates who don’t credibly pledge to support progressive policies. Biden says he would veto Medicare For All. He opposes a Green New Deal as well as student loan forgiveness. He is hawkish on Russia and Venezuela. He doesn’t want your vote. Why give it to him for free?

            The trouble is, every election is also about the short term. Progressive voters have to game out the next four years.

            If Trump wins, he may have the opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice. He will certainly appoint more federal judges. He will continue to coddle hate groups and spew lies. Many of the weak and vulnerable will suffer. On the other hand, activism will be sustained. Resistance and possibly even revolutionary change may emerge. Trump will be a lame duck likely wallowing in scandal; very few presidents get much if anything done during their second terms.

            If Biden wins, his Supreme Court picks may not be significantly more to the left then Trump’s. He is likelier than Trump, who shows restraint on interventionism and ended the occupation of Afghanistan, to start a new war. Big problems will get small solutions or none at all. Streets will be quiet. If there are any demonstrations, for instance by Black Lives Matter, his Department of Homeland Security will suppress it as Obama did to Occupy. As under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the left will go back to sleep. Progressives will watch Biden appoint one corporatist cabinet member after another as their dreams of making the country a better place fade away.

            And in 2024, we will again face a choice between a rabid right-wing Republican and a wimpy sell-out Democrat. This election, Democrats will say as they always do, is too important for ideological purity. Progressives should wait until some future election when less hangs in the balance. Perhaps in 2028? Maybe 2032? 2036?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Publication Date: June 23, 2020

Ted Rall’s latest is a no-holds-barred look at the civil war raging within the Democratic Party in the graphic style of his national bestseller, Bernie.

There’s a split in the Democratic Party. Progressives are surging with ideas and candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 72 percent of Democratic voters are progressives. But centrists like Tom Perez and the Clintons still run the DNC party apparatus–and they don’t want to compromise. Intraparty warfare exploded into the open in 2016. It’s even bigger now.

The struggle goes back decades, to the New Left and the election of Richard Nixon over George McGovern. It continued with the Democratic establishment’s quashing of insurgent progressives like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Howard Dean. The vast scale of the DNC’s secret conspiracy to stop Bernie Sanders in 2016 nomination came out courtesy of WikiLeaks.

Will Democrats again become the party of the working person? Or will the corporatists win and continue their domination of electoral politics? Ted Rall gets to the bottom of the story neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want you to know: how the civil war in the Democratic Party poses an existential threat to the two-party system.

Current Events/Biography, 2020
Seven Stories Press Paperback, 5″x7″, 192 pp., $16.95

Click here to Order Online.

Pre-Order Now: “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party”

As you know, I have been writing about and drawing about the division between progressives and corporate centrists within the Democratic Party for quite some time.

On June 23, my book comes out from Seven Stories Press. Obviously the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted book sales and the publishing industry due to the closure of brick and mortar bookstores. So more than ever, I’m asking you to support my work by buying this book. I’m also asking you to consider pre-ordering because pre-orders help book reviewers and bookstore buyers decide how many copies they want to buy – and I hope and pray that book stores are going to be opening in the real world soon.

The book is in the same format as my graphic novel biographies but rather than focus on one personality, it’s about the historical split in the party and how it impacts electoral politics and non-electoral politics going forward. I’m proud of it and I think you’ll like it.

keyboard_arrow_up
css.php