God almighty, pull it together:
Right now, for example, if you can believe it, the Democratic National Committee seems to be slightly baffled about what to do as regards the race for the open U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. The Democratic candidate is Douglas Jones, the former U.S. Attorney who sent to prison the last of the terrorists who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963. The Republican candidate is a lawless theocratic nutball named Roy Moore, who lost his job as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice because of flagrant judicial misconduct.
It would seem to the casual observer that people generally should realize it to be their patriotic duty to keep Moore out of the Senate for the good of the country. However, as reported by The Daily Beast, the Democratic Party apparatus can’t even decide if it should go all in for Jones.
Come at us all “winnable districts” and saving your powder. Let me ask you geniuses how you think the presidential election might have gone differently in Wisconsin if you’d fought Scott Walker like you meant it up there. So far all you’ve got to show for all your powder-saving is a giant pile of dry powder. So sit on that and sneeze.
How on earth do any of you expect people to believe you’ve got their backs if you won’t at least try to save them from Roy Moore, of all possible creatures? How are they supposed to buy what you’re selling when you’re out there worrying about whether they’re even worth making your pitch? When you don’t even TRY?
Some fights you fight not because you deserve to win them but because you’d be better off, for the sake of your immortal soul, fighting them and losing hard. At a certain point you have to be able to get up in the morning.
Donate to Doug Jones. It’s a waste of money, you say? Forget it, Jake, it’s Alabama? WELL DON’T YOU SOUND SMART. While you’re doing that, me and mine will serve the Lord, motherfucker.
A.
Holy crap, I’d like to say you’re kidding. This is a 10 week campaign in a relatively cheap media market. Moore’s son just got busted for the ninth time, this time for trespassing and hunting over bait. Early polling shows Jones doing better against Moore than Luther Strange did against Moore in the primary. There’s no reason not to spend some time, money, and effort to find out if Alabama is ready for a change.
Bring down a national big shot or two. Hold rallies in Republican stronghold areas. Show folks there that the Democrats haven’t written them off or forgotten them. Talk to the local papers without the Fox filter; they have to fill space like every other media outlet. Give them some Democratic ideas to write about, like affordable health care and better schools. Let activists fighting the good fight feel bucked up by some national attention. Then get out the vote.
Is Jones going to win over every reluctant voter who marked a ballot for Moore in the primary? No, but he doesn’t have to. Swing a few percentage points in rural areas, capitalize in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville, and let’s see just how solid Alabama still is.
Please consider this calculation :
Most Alabama voters despise the national Democratic Party (Pelosi, San Francisco values, Obama was near, etc.) more than they despise Jones. Nationalizing elections in the South may be counterproductive, and “bringing in some Dem big shots” might have the perverse tribal effect of energizing the Rs to turn out for Moore, despite misgivings.
I’m not sure we did Ossof any favors by directing the gaze of the national press and the national party organizations at that contest early on.
Similarly, I think Obama calculated that if he got personally involved in the Walker recall, it would only heighten the tribalism and make it less likely that any of Walker’s original voters could be swayed to recall him.
These calculations may be mistaken, but it saddens me to see them portrayed as craven or as a lack of fucks to give.
So what should the Democrats do instead?
In such situations, the national Dems should support quietly support state Dem parties, as they did during Dean’s short-lived 50-state strategy. Stop waiting for the last minute. Fund permanent, full-time _local_ organizers. If we’d been doing that all along, there’d be less need for huge last-minute ad pushes (which make little difference anyway), and consequently for huge last-minute funding.
This was the strategy that got Obama elected.
Rahm hated it and killed it, because many of the Democrats it put in office were not very controllable. Left-“progressives” hated it because many of the Democrats is put in office were not very left, and were in fact Blue Dogs.
And it required more money, more consistently, that can probably be produced from individual contributions, and so creates a need for corporate contributions that many Dems apparently believe are ipso facto corruption.
But it did produce a Democratic majority in both houses, long enough to get ACA and Sotomayor.