Do you remember Netroots? Did you know it was still a thing?
Netroots Nation—a relic of the Deaniac left—took place in New Orleans this past weekend, and the good little Democratic socialists there have done their autopsy on 2016 and concluded that the answer for 2020 is for the Democratic party to counter Donald Trump’s wins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan by . . . going further to the left. As progressive activist Anoa Changa told the Atlantic, the Netroots reject “the notion that our way to victory is having a centrist, moderate right-leaning strategy that feels like we could peel off Romney Republicans, versus investing in communities of color, marginalized groups and progressive white people.”
Which is crazy. Unless it isn’t.
It has become an article of faith among Republicans that Trump will be very lucky if the Democrats nominate a radical progressive—or maybe even a socialist—to challenge him in 2020. That would assure his re-election, the thinking goes, because Trump won by converting disillusioned working-class white Obama voters in the Rust Belt precisely because the Democrats were already too far out of the mainstream. If Democrats double-down on their progressivism, then Trump might be able to win with two pair, instead of having to draw to an inside straight.
On the one hand, that makes a certain kind of sense. On the other hand, it’s hard to square this belief with the argument that conservatives have been making for 40 years: that the key to victory is bold colors, not pale pastels. Because if the bold colors strategy could work for Republicans, why couldn’t it work for Democrats, too?
Think about it this way: In the wake of the 2012 election, Republicans spent a lot of time on their own autopsy and came away with the conclusion that if they were going to be competitive again at the national level, they had to moderate their stance on immigration. Instead, the party nominated the biggest immigration extremist since Levi Boone. And he won.
But it isn’t just Trump. In 2008, Democrats had the choice between a centrist candidate and the second coming of Howard Dean. They chose the most liberal candidate available, and then Barack Obama won 53 percent of the vote and the biggest landslide since 1984.
In 2000, Republicans had been out of power for eight years and were choosing between a moderate Republican (John McCain) and the severely conservative George W. Bush. Who won. Same deal in 1980 with Reagan: Faced with a choice between the disciple of Goldwater and the moderate George H.W. Bush, Republicans went with the candidate further out of the mainstream, and then voters in the general election went with them.
In fact, you could argue that since 1980, the only time the “more mainstream” choices have won were H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory and Bill Clinton’s 1992 win. Every other time a party picked the mainstream candidate—Mondale (over Hart), Dole (over Buchanan), Gore (over Bradley), Kerry (over Dean), McCain (over Romney), Romney (over Santorum), Clinton (over Sanders)—the theoretically more mainstream, more electable candidate lost. I’ll go further: You could argue that the only edgelord candidate to lose a general election since 1980 was Mike Dukakis.
So maybe voters really do go for bold colors after all.
There are plenty of caveats, of course. Maybe the real lesson here is that celebrity or charisma or external economic factors matter more than the ideological face of a candidate. But the point is that Republicans dismiss the Netroots view of 2020 at their own peril. Because there are plenty of ways to win an election.
Look at Bush’s 2004 victory: Karl Rove’s reelection campaign was not based on persuading swing voters. The Bush campaign believed that the true swing vote was maybe 7 percent of the electorate. They were much more concerned with turning out the base vote, in particular the 4 million missing evangelical voters who Rove was convinced had simply sat out the 2000 election.
Look at Obama’s 2012 re-election, where he gave up ground with independent voters, but mobilized so many African Americans that they had the highest turnout of any ethnic group.
And look at 2016: Most Republicans assumed that the easiest path to the White House was by winning Nevada, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Trump lost all three of those states, but picked up Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez insists that for Democrats, “Our swing voter is not red to blue. It’s non-voter to voter.”
There’s no reason to automatically assume that she’s wrong, or that Howard Dean’s children will automatically suffer the same fate he did.
