Is the blue party cut off from America's ground reality? Dems suffer losses in House while failing to flip Senate
The Democratic Party was aiming to win not just the presidency in this year’s election, but also flip the Senate besides maintaining its majority in the House. But even if Joe Biden inched closer to a victory over incumbent President Donald Trump, the Dems have looked less likely to flip the Senate and even lost a number of seats in the House. Among the candidates of the party who were defeated were several who were elected in the 2018 midterm elections that helped the party win a majority in the House.
While House leader Nancy Pelosi was still hopeful till the last vote was counted, it is undeniable a fact now that her strategies leading up to the election have started to be questioned. If one goes by a report in The Hill, two moderate Democrats have revealed that they were in talks with other centrist members of the party on something that was not thinkable even a day ago: backing a challenger to the 80-year-old Pelosi.
On Wednesday, November 4, the two Democratic leaders told The Hill that they were in talks with their colleagues to back Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic caucus and one of Pelosi’s top lieutenants, for the post of the Speaker in the next Congress, the Hill report added.
“He’s the only one prepared and positioned” to be Speaker, one of the Democratic lawmakers was quoted as saying. “He bridges moderates and progressives better than anyone. And most importantly, he’s not Nancy Pelosi,” the lawmaker added. Though Jeffries, 50, rejected the idea, the initiative showed that not all was well with the Democratic Party after the disappointing results in the 2020 election after the rise in 2018.
The Democrats are still wondering what had struck them. Is it the hidden Trump voters or the lack of coronavirus stimulus deal? Or did the failed impeachment move against the incumbent backfired in the ballot box?
The defeat of a number of centrist Democratic members of the House in this election and the win of all the Squad members -- known to be progressives -- could give rise to more headaches for the party in the long run. Can the Democratic Party, with increasingly progressive clout, be hopeful about winning America’s heartlands in elections in the near future? That is a far more important question to answer than making a cosmetic overhauling of the party’s top leadership.
Already, many centrist Democrats have started blaming their more progressive colleagues in the party for the disappointing result, claiming the moderate candidates couldn’t overcome the “socialist” challenge they faced in districts that were more in favor of Trump. It has also been said the Democratic Party could not erect a narrative solid enough to achieve real changes on the ground, apart from bashing Trump. The focus remained all the more on settling the internal battle between the progressive and moderate wings of the party while the president continued to connect with his rural White supporters in the language they understood, amid all the crisis.
Dems wished anti-incumbency will blow Trump away
The Democrats predicted that Trump would be blown away by the anti-incumbency mood and they would just have to add fuel to the fire. But the results in Texas showed that it was more of a wishful thinking. Biden kept it competitive for some time before Trump won the state. Even in Wisconsin, the win gap for Biden was wafer-thin. The win in Michigan was also much narrow, compared to how Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates had won before Trump flipped it in 2016.
Veteran Democratic House member Henry Cueller has come up with a reality check for the party amid the debacle. The leader from South Texas said that some leaders in the Democratic Party did not read Trump’s strength correctly, especially in the farm-heavy counties that are located outside the urban points, Politico reported. The party has clearly not been able to develop a solid message for these areas and the result was showing.
“This is what I’ve been saying over and over and over. Urban areas are important, but you still gotta look at the rural areas. If we don't change the strategy, it’s going to be the same in 2022,” Cueller, who has been serving in office since 2005, was quoted as saying.
The Democrats can learn from history that they had once strong links with the rural voters. In the 1980s, leaders like Jesse Jackson and Tom Harkin backed the rural voters when the farm crisis was at its peak and passed a comprehensive farm bill. But they have not kept up that tradition and have forgotten the rural voters, Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party was cited as saying by WBUR.
Trump and other Republican leaders have rallied around issues like gun rights, abortion and immigration to lure the rural votes and the Democrats need to counter this with a similar approach. But will the party’s progressive wing be strategic enough to ideologically accommodate the rural vote bloc which could be less flexible towards radical ideas?
That’s something for which the Democrats have to find a comprehensive answer.