A former House Democrat said this week that his party gave away control of Washington by spending the last few years ignoring blue collar workers, and pursuing leftwing bills like Obamacare and cap and trade that eventually prompted heartland voters to support President-elect Trump.
Jason Altmire, a former Democratic congressman who represented a Pittsburgh area district that bordered Ohio and West Virginia, blames House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders in Congress for kowtowing to the party’s liberal base.
“They gave it all away because they failed to see what was happening in Middle America, in the Rust Belt, and now it’s come home to roost,” Altmire said this week in an interview from Florida, where he has since moved.
Altmire, now 48, won his seat in 2006 by beating an incumbent Republican in a wave election that returned Democrats to power in Congress for the first time in 12 years. He was center-left and a part of a majority that was built on Blue Dogs who represented states and districts across the South and Midwest.
He said Democratic leaders’ insistence on pushing through far-left bills cost the Democrats with voters in the suburbs and the exurbs. That led to Democrats losing control of the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the presidency this year.
Altmire said he didn’t think Trump would win the White House, but was convinced that his old western Pennsylvania district would go heavily Republican. “I knew for sure that Trump would win in a landslide in the district I used to represent, and I knew he would do extremely well with the blue collar union folks that Democrats have taken for granted for a long time.”
Republicans dismantled Altmire’s district in the 2010 redistricting and he left Congress in 2013 after being ousted in a 2012 primary. Altmire doesn’t blame Obama for the decisions made by Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., then the majority leader, that he says cost center-left Democrats like him their seats.
“I think the president made an effort to accommodate centrists and to reach out to Republicans early in his term,” Altmire said. “At some point, he made a calculation that if he wanted to pass major legislation, the leadership in Congress” had to be placated.
Altmire’s comments reflect some of the conventional wisdom that has developed in the few weeks since Trump won the White House, and Democrats failed to meet the expectation of winning back the Senate and making real strides toward equalizing their seats in the House.
Several analysts agree Democrats got bogged down in identity politics and leftwing ideology, and focused on delivering for narrow groups in their coalition while ignoring white, middle class voters worried about the economy.
Just as Altmire doesn’t blame Obama, some analysts note that Obama didn’t fall into the same trap, and say it was Hillary Clinton’s relentless attention to factions of her party’s leftwing base that cost her the election.
Michelle Diggles, an elections analyst at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington, said that it wasn’t so much a strategic misstep on Clinton’s part as it was her campaign appearing to make the same faulty assumptions as other politicians and strategists across the party.
“Democrats went all-in on a base turnout strategy over the last few years … That strategy clearly failed,” she said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “If you can’t win on a demographic argument against Donald Trump, then that’s not a viable argument going forward.”
Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton; he trails her by more than 2 million votes with some still trickling in nearly fours weeks after Election Day. The president-elect continued the Republican trend of performing weak with non-white voters — Hispanics, Asians and African Americans — which could spell trouble down the line.
But Trump’s victory in the Electoral College was solid, and included Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states a GOP nominee had not won since the 1980s. This was fueled by a surge in white voters for Trump, plus whites that have historically supported Democrats and twice voted for Obama.
