Bruised and beaten, Democrats will start the morning reflecting on their disheartening defeat in Tuesday night’s special election down south in Georgia. Over at The Atlantic, Rahm Emanuel gives them a reason to keep their chin up.
Emanuel doesn’t reflect on the insanity of Democrats backing Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Hill staffer with no electoral experience to speak of and without an address inside Georgia’s 6th congressional district. That aspiring golden boy couldn’t even vote for himself and he couldn’t connect with voters.
Rather than nursing those wounds, Emanuel offers a playbook for winning the next midterm elections. And like a good coach, he tells the Left to quit the “navel-gazing.”
“Democrats don’t need to spend the next year navel-gazing over how to motivate their base,” Emanuel explains. The Republican White House, he argues, have already done all the heavy lifting. “In 2018, Trump will provide the greatest fundraising and get-out-the-vote machine the party has ever had.”
“Wave elections are a chance to build on that base by winning back voters disappointed in the other side,” Emanuel continues. “Democrats will have plenty of disappointments to bring to their attention, including Republican health-care and tax-cut plans that betray the working-class voters who put Trump in the White House. To pull that off, though, Democrats must channel their anger, not be defined by it.”
The sort of character-building that Emanuel described is easier prescribed than applied, especially after progressives dumped $25 million on the fresh-faced Ossoff. But the reasoning is valid.
While Ossoff gained traction in Republican territory, Trump disillusionment hasn’t bloomed. To be sure, the president has had a bumbling six-months. Hope of reforms to come and an obligation to give Trump’s young presidency a chance must have been enough to keep voters loyal. Emanuel and company are betting that their patience will soon wear thin.
But the Chicago mayor isn’t ready to copy and paste the Republican game plans that swept the Right into Congress simply by swiping at Obama. “The stakes are too high to rely entirely on one side’s enthusiasm or the other side’s disenchantment,” Emanuel writes.
“Waves don’t happen on their own,” he concludes, “Democrats need a strategy, an argument, and a plan for what they’ll do if they win.”
And it’s hard to see how he’s wrong. Instagram-ready candidates like Ossoff generate youthful enthusiasm and make good fundraising fodder. And resistance rallies painting Trump as a tyrant provide an opportunity for the Left to blow off steam.
But to retake the House, Democrats will need substance. For that they’ll need to listen to the original Democrat “golden boy.”
Still young in 2006, Emanuel engineered the Democrat wave that retook the House. Two years later, he put Barack Obama in the White House. Though a little grayer now, he might be able to create another wave if Democrats will listen in 2018.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
