When it comes to the voters, both parties will tell you you can’t be too careful what you let them do. Was it just a few weeks ago that Howard Schultz, the millionaire founder of Starbucks and longtime donor to Democrats, said that he no longer felt he understood his old party and was contemplating an independent run? Perish the thought.
His party’s reaction was to ask him to take a short walk off a long pier. “Go to space, Howard Schultz,” wrote a Washington Postie.
“Howard Schultz has brought a whole latte trouble,” Dana Milbank lamely tried.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party also was doing its utmost to narrow the scope of contention, floating the notion that in some states of the union it might save some time and some trouble and money not to have contests at all.
Of course, it might be better if the center Left had a vehicle to express its Schultz-like displeasure — and the Republican suburbs their irritation with some of Trump’s tweeting — but the parties prefer the illusion of unity. The parties believe they shape the vision, and it’s the duty and role of the troops to follow the leader. But they have it backwards: The obligation is not on the voters to follow the lead of the party, but on the parties to form coalitions the voters will want to be part of and programs they want to support.
Democrats in particular seem to take it badly when “their” voters, being the ones they think they own, defect, as occurred in the presidential election of 2000 in Florida. After too many recounts and lawsuits to keep track of, George W. Bush won the state and the White House by 537 votes. Democrats blamed Ralph Nader, the sky-is-falling environmentalist gadfly who had been preaching doom for the past several decades, not to mention the hanging chads of Broward County and the butterfly ballots that might have led some would-be Al Gore voters to cast ballots for far-right activist Patrick Buchanan instead.
Had the coin toss gone otherwise, the Republicans would have doubtless blamed the call of the election by the networks for Gore at 8 p.m. on the East Coast, before the polls closed in most of the country, and particularly in Florida, where the polls closed in the GOP-leaning Panhandle an hour later than the rest of the state.
Democrats still believe that since the environment was “their” issue, a vote for anyone other than Gore was an act of betrayal. This, even though surveys later showed that, had Nader not been on the ticket, many of his backers would have voted for no one at all.
Something similar was claimed by Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she lost the election by 77,000 votes spread over three states in the Rust Belt. Her followers blamed it all on Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, who came in fourth in the election with 1.07 percent of the popular vote. But Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who also was running, came in third with three times Stein’s number. Did much of that sum come from President Trump?
Democrats need to stop thinking that every person and thing to their left is theirs by right. They should listen instead to what Schultz and those like him have to say.
