There have been three big elections since 2016. The Democrats have won all of them, but it is the way that they won and the people they won with that give them some reasons for hope.
In purple Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam’s seven-point win was not unexpected, but it was larger than expected. In Alabama and in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District — a state and a district that Trump had won easily — Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., and Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., had to overcome deficits in the 20 point region to win.
Granted, Jones ran against a racist and child-dater who had been banned from a mall in the city of Gadsden. But he was in one of the deepest red states in the Union, and Trump had run hard against both. Northam and Jones are not clones of each other, and Lamb is like neither, but all of the three have some big things in common. They are wholly unlike Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and the rest of the noisy and aging and prominent Democrats. They have no use at all for identity politics. And they are throwbacks to the Democrats as they were many years earlier, a continental and vibrant majority party of the kind we don’t see any more.
Rare as they are now, people like Jones, Lamb and Northam were almost the rule in the midcentury Democrats. They were the giant that ruled for the best of three decades, winning seven of nine presidential elections, losing just twice to the hero of D-Day, a transcendent and almost nonpartisan figure whom their party had tried to recruit.
Northam and Jones belong to the President Harry S. Truman genre of Democrats — unpretentious, small-town, and out of the Heartland. Lamb is something different, but not wholly unknown. Well-born, well-off, and expensively educated, a veteran (a Marine in this instance), a son of the upper class who is wholly at ease among working class voters, a programmatic Democrat who is at the same time a temperamental small-c conservative, we have seen people of his kind before. Welcome to JFK, the 2018 iteration, and much more convincing than the gaggle of relatives (most often nephews) who have tried to cash on the family name and failed.
Whether JFK, HST, FDR, or whomever, the effective and competent midcentury Democrats had three things in common: a commitment to national and international leadership in the defense of freedom; a sense of civil rights as belonging to individuals and not to large and loosely defined collections of people behind self-appointed leaders; and a sense of responsibility to the middle class, working class, and the truly unfortunate in ways that did not wholly deprive them of agency or allow dependency habits to grow.
But since the late 1960s the Democrats have believed in none of these things, and it shows. President Jimmy Carter failed, and President Barack Obama and President Bill Clinton, after being sent off with huge expectations — the next JFK! The next Franklin D. Roosevelt! — overreached, lost both houses of Congress, and spent the six years after that in a bind. They might do well to return to the principles that once worked for them, and to the people who hold them, because what they’ve been doing since then hasn’t been working so well. As a new kind of tactic for the Democrats, back to the future might be the right way to go.
