ATLANTA — Democrats may be their own worst enemy when it comes to trying to rebuild their party into a more inclusive entity that can take back Congress and the White House, according to a new study.
The centrist Democratic think tank Third Way released a study called, “Why Demography is not Destiny,” which argued that the Democrats’ strategy of building durable majorities with the support of rising non-white demographics is simply not viable.
The Democratic Party’s sharp left turn on cultural issues has driven the white working class, for generations the bulwark of its support, out of the party. Yet there’s no indication that the liberal base, still smarting from President Trump’s victory, is in the mood to moderate and welcome these voters back into the fold.
“We need to stop running people out of the party,” said Lanae Erickson, who co-authored the study.
Democrats, however, continue to indicate that they are not ready to take the lesson. On Friday, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra seemed to dismiss the institutional and political challenges the party is facing, and instead argued that the party needs to communicate its message more effectively.
“Democrats need to talk about what we’re going to do to help Americans have the jobs they need and be covered the way they need to when it comes to all the issues, when it comes to buying that first home, sending their kids to college or having a dignified retirement,” Becerra told reporters.
The chairman’s race will be decided by the 442 eligible voting members of the DNC. The winner will have a big job ahead of them as they try to rebuild a decimated party.
Over the past eight years, Democrats lost the White House, majorities in the House and Senate, several governors mansions and nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country.
But Democrats are saddled with additional challenges — namely how to deal with Trump. Here, too, Democrats threaten to be their own worst enemy.
In new polling conducted by the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group, the data revealed that the most effective way to defeat the president is to focus on how his policies impact Americans, rather than on what Democrats say are Trump’s profound inadequacies and personal failings.
That could be difficult. Many Democrats so despise Trump they believe he has already met the grounds for impeachment and removal from office. The Democratic base is hungry for the party to fight, and is not necessarily going to be satisfied with “normalizing” Trump by taking the anodyne approach of criticizing him on policy grounds.
“That’s hard for us, as Democrats, to do, because we’re obsessed with him — we are,” said Matt Canter, a pollster with the Global strategy Group. “It has to be about [voters,] not about him.”
Canter pointed to his firm’s survey, which showed that 62 percent of “base Democratic voters” were worried that Trump’s conflicts of interest could lead to major corruption “unlike anything we have ever seen before.”
But 62 percent of swing voters, who Democrats need to win over to win seats in the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential contest, are more concerned that Trump’s conflicts will exacerbate an existing problem, by further corrupting a system that was corrupt long before the new president inaugurated.
“As is true with his conflicts of interest, the most compelling message antidote to Trump claims are the ones that focus on how his agenda could impact American families,” read the polling memo from Global Strategy Group.
