Governors’ races are where Democrats have the most opportunity to begin climbing their way back into power after President-elect Trump is inaugurated in January, according to liberal writer Greg Sargent, who authors “The Plum Line” blog at the Washington Post.
“Let’s face it, in 2018 Democrats are going to be on defense everywhere,” Sargent said in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s weekly podcast. “The real key thing to watch here is the 2018 governors races. The Senate is a virtual impossibility for Democrats — I don’t know about the House. That depends on if Trump’s very unpopular and makes a mess … But the redistricting stuff is enormously important and Democrats simply must gain some ground back on the level of the states.
“One route to doing that is to start winning some of these big governors races, because in many states governors have a hand in redistricting,” Sargent added. “That is crucial to both re-sharpening and fixing the message and creating a scenario where Democrats can win back the House in the 2020s sometime.”
Sargent said the Democratic Party is still in a period of soul-searching, and the immediate outlook is generally grim.
Democrats, he said, are trying to understand how Trump won the support of blue-collar voters in the Midwest who had historically voted for the Democratic nominee — and to what extent Hillary Clinton is responsible for the outcome.
Trump won the Electoral College on the strength of victories in the key swing states, plus his defeat of Clinton in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Rust Belt territory that a Republican nominee hadn’t won since the 1980s.
“Right now, everybody’s trying to figure out why the Democratic Party was unable to connect with working-class whites and to some degree, middle-class whites,” Sargent said. “A lot of the debate right now is sort of tangled up in recriminations.”
