By Jonathan Krasno
The conventional wisdom about congressional elections is that redistricting has made about 90 percent of House seats so heavily Republican or Democratic that they are out of reach for the other side. This comes up repeatedly in discussion of recent polls showing trouble for the GOP this fall. Experts caution that public opinion will only matter in the relative handful of districts where real competition is possible.
This extreme view of redistricting’s impact is simply wrong. How district lines are drawn does affect who wins and loses elections. But the argument that the mapmakers have managed to wring almost all of the potential competition out of the system vastly overstates the case and manages to make a bad situation worse.
Politicians have always wanted safe seats, and in the last decade mapping software has made it easier to draw those sorts of districts. Mapmakers’ handiwork is supposedly reflected in the 2004 House results: just 22 House races were decided by 10 points or less (of the two-party vote), the lowest number of close elections in more than 50 years.
The problem with that evidence is that districts are not the only reason why elections may be lopsided. For example, two thirds of House candidates in 2004 outspent their opponents by more than 5 to 1. It is no surprise when those candidates run up huge margins over their outgunned rivals.
That is one reason why academics often use presidential elections to measure the underlying partisan balance in a region. Sure enough, the presidential results from 2004 reveal a much different picture: President Bush or Senator Kerry prevailed by 10 points or less in 102 districts. That is actually a small number for such a close election, but it still suggests that there are far more potentially competitive districts than the House results reveal.
I could incorporate more elections or use fancier statistics, but I would still find a fair number of closely-drawn districts. It is worth remembering that this standard of “closeness” is entirely arbitrary; plenty of Democrats and Republicans have shown that they can win in areas where their party is a distinct minority.
If district lines do not explain the lack of competitive House elections, what does? Incumbents do their share in other ways. Sitting politicians work constantly to publicize their good deeds, using all of the advantages that come from holding an important office. It seems to work: polls show that citizens have a much higher opinion of their own member of Congress than of Congress itself.
But this, too, is an old story. Incumbents have been using their offices to build name recognition and good will for years. Unless one believes that they have become better at this over the last decade, incumbency cannot explain the striking decline in the number of close elections.
The best explanation is deceivingly simple: lack of effort. That is not to say that the main actors in congressional elections – candidates, parties, interest groups, and the media – do not work hard. Rather, these players have increasingly come to focus their attention on the group of races they find most competitive, essentially ignoring a growing number of campaigns.
For example, consider the actions of the political parties. Parties are an important source of funds for many congressional campaigns, and their decisions influence other donors. In 1992, parties invested half of the money they spent in congressional elections in 84 districts; in 2004 they spent half in just 11.
It is tempting to conclude that parties are merely responding to political reality. That is certainly true, but it is also true that parties and other big players help create that reality. Where good candidates run – with financial support from their party and the resulting media coverage – elections are cliffhangers. Where they do not, or they receive little funding or coverage, the results are foregone conclusions, no matter how evenly balanced a district may be.
Francine Busby as an under-funded nobody barely registered against Duke Cunningham in 2004. Francine Busby as a Democratic priority almost won the special election to succeed Cunningham in 2006. It is true that Busby’s funding was not the only difference between 2004 and 2006 – Cunningham went to jail in the interim – but no Democrat would have stood a chance without a substantial campaign. And with serious resources, she surely would have given Cunningham more of a race in 2004.
New York State is another good illustration of how these factors play out. The Democrats are reportedly planning to target as many as six of the nine seats held by the GOP. They targeted none of them in 2004, spending just under $12,000 in all nine combined. And, none of the Democrats came within 10 points of the Republican winner.
Obviously, party leaders feel that 2006 offers better opportunities – even though district lines are unchanged – and they are probably right. If they back that up with money, the candidates they help will have a better chance of competing and winning.
Therein lies the danger for Republicans in recent polls. If the polls convince the Democrats that they can win in more places, they might just try. And, if they try, more of their candidates will do better. The lottery motto applies: you’ve got to be in it to win it. That advice applies equally well to both parties. The difference is that the Democrats, as the minority party, have more to gain by maximizing their pick-up opportunities. And if either party is going to pick up many seats in 2006, it will be the Democrats.
That is why all the rhetoric about redistricting is so counterproductive, especially for the Democrats. The perception that competition is impossible in so many places gives parties, candidates, groups and the media an excuse for ignoring these races, and leaves most voters without any real choice for Congress. Coincidently, that perception also happens to be wrong. Politicians and their allies just need to believe that they can make a race of it in many areas, and they probably can. The question for 2006 is whether the Democrats will believe.
Jonathan Krasno is an associate professor of political science at Binghamton University.

By John W. Wilhelm
If demography is destiny, then the Democratic Party may be destined to permanent minority status if it is unwilling to squarely appeal to the surging immigrant population, especially Latinos. Consider a few critical trends. (Hispanic statistics are used here because they are available, but similar trends pertain to those coming to the U.S. from all over the world.)
— In just the last four years, the Hispanic population in the United States has grown by 14 percent to 40 million people versus only 2 percent growth for the non-Hispanic population. By the year 2020, the projected Hispanic population will top 60 million.
— As the Latino population grows, its composition is undergoing an underlying change. Births to Hispanic immigrants, rather than immigration itself, will be the key source of population growth in the near future. By 2020, second-generation Hispanics (i.e., citizens) are projected to reach 21.7 million in number, representing 36 percent of the overall Hispanic population, up from 9.9 million in 2000, when they represented 28 percent. As the white and African-American baby boom generation reaches retirement age, young Hispanics are filling in. In the year 2000, the U.S. Census reported that the median age of Hispanics, at 26 years, was nearly ten years younger than non-Hispanics. More than one-third of Hispanics are under the age of eighteen. These trends will continue regardless of our border policies, and native-born, English-speaking, U.S.-educated Hispanics will have a much greater voting impact on the country than their parents did.
— The Hispanic population is growing faster in much of the Republican Party-dominated South than anywhere else in the United States. North Carolina (394%), Arkansas (337%), Georgia (300%), Tennessee (278%), South Carolina (211%) and Alabama (208%) registered the highest rate of increase in their Hispanic populations of any states in the U.S. between 1990 and 2000, except for Nevada (217%). To be sure, these numbers started from a small base – between 293,000 and 1.2 million in the six southern states – but the trend is expected to continue. Notably, Hispanic voters in the South gave George Bush 53 percent of their votes in 2004.
— The Hispanic electorate is growing much faster than the non-Hispanic electorate. Between the 2000 vote and the election this November, the number of eligible Latino voters will have increased by about 20 percent — six times faster than the non-Hispanic population. Based on the most recent population data available, 40 percent of Hispanics, 15.7 million people, were eligible voters in 2003. Going forward, applying the same eligibility percentage to the expected 2020 Hispanic population suggests that it will grow to 24 million eligible voters, an increase of 52 percent.
Democrats may gloat that the Republican Party’s intramural brawl over immigration will do for national Democrats what California Governor Pete Wilson’s Prop. 187 did in the 1990s for Democrats in California, namely turn the Republican Party into a minority party.
Not so fast. While the leadership of a number of Democrats in the current immigration debate is helpful, too many Democrats (and their political consultants) are frightened of this issue. Indeed, a March 28 survey by the Center for American Progress shows legal immigrants giving both political parties low marks for the job they have done so far on immigration policy. While just 22 percent of Republicans received a positive rating, Democrats and the President scored little better at 38 percent and 32 percent respectively. This suggests that immigrant voter attitudes are still in play. Many of these new arrivals are newcomers to the U.S. political system, with no strong loyalties to any political institution and uncertain in their partisanship.
And who knows – the enlightened wing of the Republican Party shows signs of standing up to the Tancredo wing and rescuing their party from losing this growing bloc of voters. If Democrats treat it as a spectator sport, we can expect to see a continued erosion of votes for Democratic politicians.
The Bush experience is instructive. First as Texas governor and then in the White House, Mr. Bush has wisely tried to burnish his pro-immigrant image. And it is working. Among Hispanics in particular, he has made enormous progress. Bob Dole won 21 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1996; Mr. Bush improved that to 35 percent in 2000 and again to 44 percent in 2004.
The recent unprecedented outpouring of immigrants (not just Latinos) in marches all across the country ought to make clear that politicians and their parties risk losing this increasing bloc of voters by endorsing punishing measures aimed at immigrants.
In the context of a deeply polarized electorate, the shallow attachments many Latinos have to political parties in the U.S. make them attractive potential recruits to both parties. How attractive?

• Arizona, Florida, New Mexico and Nevada together have 47 electoral votes.
  
• In Arizona, where over 1.5 million votes were cast in the last presidential election, the Latino voting-age population is 16 percent of the electorate. Eighty percent of Latinos are native-born. There are about 337,600 unregistered Latino voters.
  
• In Nevada, Latinos make up 13 percent of the voting-age population. Since the last presidential election, the number of eligible Latinos in Nevada has increased by about 50 percent, and Latinos account for about half of all the increase in the Nevada electorate. About two-thirds of the Latino eligible voters in Nevada are native-born. There are an estimated 126,600 unregistered Latino voters.
  
• In Florida, 14 percent of the voting-age population is Latino. The fastest growth has been among native-born Latinos, who account for 83 percent of the new eligible Latinos. There are an estimated 568,700 unregistered Latino voters. Florida Hispanics increasingly are from countries other than Cuba.
  
• In New Mexico, Latinos comprise 40 percent of the voting-age population. An estimated 203,900 Latinos are unregistered.
  

by Will Marshall
After stewing in impotent rage for six long years, Democrats at last see their chance to stage a comeback. President Bush’s public approval is in free fall, the GOP-controlled Congress is begrimed by corruption scandals and special interest pig-outs, and conservatives are falling out over basic questions of war, government spending, immigration and environmental health.
Let’s enjoy the moment. But let’s also resist the temptation to see the GOP’s swoon as evidence of an irreversible slide, or of a chastened public finally willing to admit Democrats were right all along. The same voters who are disillusioned with the Bush Republicans consistently tell pollsters they have yet to hear a persuasive case for change from the other side.
Still, the oh-so-slender GOP majority is in trouble because independents and moderates seem ready to defect in droves. If Democrats can make inroads among these voters this year, then pick a 2008 nominee whose themes resonate in red states as well as blue, we could fashion a new progressive majority.
How to seize the opportunity? There are basically two choices. One, favored by many liberals and lefty bloggers, sees partisan belligerence as the key to mobilizing a Democratic majority. The idea is that by intensifying attacks on our opponents, we can galvanize the party faithful while also projecting the strength of conviction that swing voters have supposedly found lacking among Democrats.
But this approach is based more on wishful thinking than rigorous electoral analysis. The party’s core problem is not a pandemic of cowardice among its leaders, it is that there are not enough Democratic voters. Since the late 1990s, Democrats have been stuck at about 48 percent of the vote in national elections. Moreover, polarizing the electorate along ideological lines plays into Karl Rove’s hands because conservatives outnumber liberals three to two. Democrats need to win moderates by large margins, but moderates by definition resist strident partisanship and ideological litmus tests. The politics of polarization repels them.
To successfully raid the political red zone—the South, Mountain West, Great Plains and lower Midwest—Democrats instead need a politics of persuasion. It starts by acknowledging that moderates and independents have substantive reasons for swinging Republican in recent elections, including persistent doubts about Democrats on security, taxes and the role of government, as well as moral questions. Progressives need to meet these doubts head on, marshaling facts, arguments and new ideas to change the way persuadable voters think about Democrats.
For this, the party needs themes and ideas that limit its liabilities with persuadable voters and exploit growing fissures in the GOP coalition, as well as building on traditional Democratic strengths. Party strategists should pay close attention to Democrats who have won and governed effectively in red states. Tim Kaine’s victory in Virginia last year was especially encouraging as he did well in the fast-growing suburbs Bush overwhelming won in 2004. No less than three red-state Democrats, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack and Mark Warner, are hoping to parlay their local success into a race for the White House.
Their knowledge of tricky cultural terrain is essential, because building a durable majority requires that Democrats be competitive in every part of the country. We cannot continue to spot the GOP thirty states in national elections and have any chance of recapturing Congress or the White House. But cartography need not be destiny—not if Democrats finally get serious about rolling back the GOP’s red tide in America’s heartland.
To do that, Democrats must craft a creative governing agenda that is credible on national security, consonant with middle-class moral sentiments and economic aspirations, and committed to the radical reform of politics-as-usual in Washington.
Put Security First
Americans should not be complacent about the fact that we have not been hit by another terrorist attack since 9/11. The front in the struggle against Islamist extremism has simply shifted elsewhere: to Europe, Iraq, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. In fact, the jihadist contagion is spreading, not contracting, as the Bush administration has somehow managed to lose ground in the ideological war against a fanatical creed that exults in barbaric violence against civilians.
This means security will continue to dominate national politics for the foreseeable future. It is axiomatic that the American people are not likely to give power to a party they do not trust to defend their values and keep them safe.
Democrats therefore must close the national security confidence gap that has dogged them since the era of Vietnam protests. This requires reclaiming, not abandoning, the party’s venerable tradition of muscular liberalism—the Truman-Kennedy legacy that helped America win the Cold War. Updated for new threats, it offers the best answer to the challenge of Islamist extremism today.
Specifically, Democrats need to do three things. First, we must put security first—and mean it. No more trying to change the subject to domestic policy, where we feel more comfortable. After World War II, the party’s platforms routinely led with national security, and its leaders consciously linked America’s defense of democratic values abroad to the pursuit of liberal goals at home. It is time for Democrats to be a full-spectrum party again, once more integrating our international and domestic policies in a seamless vision for advancing progressive ideals.
Second, Democrats must convince the public that we are ready to take over the fight against Islamist extremism. We must offer a comprehensive, long-range strategy that employs all our nation’s might, not just the blunt instrument of military power, to delegitimate the jihadist ideology and patiently nurture the spread of liberal ideas and democratic institutions throughout the greater Middle East.
Third, Democrats must recognize that since 9/11, patriotism has become the most potent values issue in US politics. More than anything else, we need to show the country a party unified behind a progressive patriotism that is determined to defend liberal values against Salafist totalitarians, succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq, close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter today’s politics of polarization.
Close the Cultural Gap
It is not enough to convince working families that Democrats will make them safer and take America’s side in international conflicts. A winning heartland strategy must also assure them that Democrats share their values.
The perceived erosion of “moral values” has played a key role in GOP successes in this decade, especially with rural voters and women. Although married women voted for Clinton in the 1990s, they preferred George Bush over Al Gore by 15 points in 2000. By 2004, the “marriage gap” had widened to 19 points.
What is it about getting married and having children that inclines parents toward the GOP? Barbara Whitehead calls it “lifestage conservativism,” noting that the transition to parenthood produces a new outlook on culture:

Parents have a beef with the popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages. To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents’ beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on parents’ side.

Whitehead advises Democrats to begin simply by honoring the vital work parents do in teaching their kids right from wrong. We should also equip parents with better tools to shield their kids from the onslaught of the consumer culture and aggressive corporate marketing campaigns. And there is no good reason for progressives to exempt the entertainment industry from the same kind of accountability we demand from corporations in general.
Along with a progressive, pro-family policy, Democrats need to reach out to religious voters. As Bill Galston has written, religious observance is now the most important cultural fault line in U.S. politics. On religion as on other culturally fraught issues, Democrats need to define themselves, lest voters default to GOP caricatures of a militantly secular party that has launched a “war on Christians.”
Democrats should start by affirming the formative role that faith has always played in shaping America’s civic culture. They should engage skeptical religious voters, not to pander to them but to challenge them to look at issues other than abortion and gay rights through the prism of their faith. All major faiths enjoin their adherents to care for the sick and the poor, to work for justice, not just material gain, and to preserve the natural world. Indeed, U.S. evangelical leaders increasingly speak of “creation care”—a religious duty to be responsible stewards of nature—and some have split openly with the Bush administration, which has done nothing to curtail global warming. This opens fascinating possibilities for progressives to forge alliances with evangelicals around a “green gospel” agenda to stop doing irreversible damage to the earth’s climate.
Of course it also helps to pick candidates who can relate genuinely to religious voters. A turning point in the Virginia governor’s race, for instance, came when Kaine’s Republican opponent attacked him for opposing the death penalty. Kaine assured voters he would enforce the state’s capital punishment laws, even though his Catholic faith led him to oppose the death penalty. By affirming the role that religion plays in shaping his moral outlook, Kaine won respect from socially conservative voters without changing his stance on the death penalty.
Champion Middle-Class Aspiration
It is an article of faith among liberals that cultural politics is preventing voters from recognizing that their economic interests lie with Democrats. There are two problems with this thesis: first, in post-industrial America, economic or material concerns don’t play as large a role in shaping voters’ choices as they previously did. Today’s voters do not neatly compartmentalize their pocketbook worries and their moral concerns. Second, as labor economist Stephen Rose shows in a forthcoming Progressive Policy Institute study, middle-class voters do not really see Democrats as champions of their economic interests. Instead, they identify Democrats most with means-tested social programs aimed at poor and working poor families.
In fact, the white working middle class (voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 a year) – once the heart of the New Deal coalition — is now the mainstay of the Republican majority. According to a study by Third Way, Bush beat John Kerry by a whopping 22 points among white middle-class voters.
The fast-growing suburbs and exurbs are these voters’ natural habitat. Bush won them overwhelmingly. A year later, however, Kaine ran strongly in key Virginia suburbs by avoiding highly partisan attacks, affirming his religious beliefs, and addressing voters’ concerns about growth, congestion and traffic.
Likewise, Democrats need a positive economic message that speaks to these voters’ aspirations, not their fears. Above all, they want to hear ideas that can help them get ahead and realize their ambitions, not alarmist rhetoric about how globalization is crushing their hopes. .
Push More Radical Reforms
For Democrats, there is one and only one benefit of being out of power: the chance to hang the corrupt status quo in Washington around GOP necks for a change and recast themselves as the insurgent party of radical reform. Yet we have flubbed the job so far, because we have been unwilling to embrace political and policy reforms big enough to match the problems before us. Faced with corruption, cronyism and misgovernment on a scale not seen since the “Great Barbecue” of the Grant years, Democrats have shown an unerring instinct for the capillaries rather than the political jugular.
Where are the big ideas that can protect our political system against the machinations of future Delays, Cunninghams and Abramoffs? Gift and travel bans and new disclosure requirements for lobbyists fall risibly short of the systemic changes we need to break up the incumbency self-protection racket, allow non-rich citizens to run for Congress and reduce the power of private money in our democracy.
At a minimum, Democrats ought to insist on replacing Congress’ toothless ethics committees with an independent body that can bring criminal charges against errant lawmakers. They should also back state efforts to create nonpartisan redistricting bodies charged with increasing the number of districts that are truly competitive. That would both undermine the structural underpinnings of today’s polarized politics and boost voter interest in elections. Most important, we should call for some form of public financing for Congressional elections. Nothing short of public funding will truly break the nexus between private cash, legislation and campaigns, or restore public confidence in the basic integrity of our national political system. Although pundits view it as quixotic, public financing may also be the only hope for passing progressive reforms across the spectrum of national needs, since the current system makes it very easy for special interests to block change even if they cannot always order up specific legislative outcomes.
Finally, Democrats need a broader agenda for policy reform, not just political reform. Historians likely will look back on the two Bush terms as the years the locusts ate. Our most pressing national problems—fiscal profligacy, over-consumption and regressive taxation, economic insecurity and inequality, runaway health costs and the vulnerability of uninsured millions, climate change and a debilitating petroleum addiction—have either been aggravated or ignored. Americans are tumbling to the reality that conservatives’ animus toward government makes them lousy at governing.
This should be a boon to Democrats, the natural party of public remedy. But crafting new ways to modernize underperforming public sector systems will bring the party’s unresolved tensions to the surface. Many Democrats, for example, cling to the illusion that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid can be preserved in their 1935 and 1965 incarnations. They reject later retirement as well as progressive indexing or means testing of benefits—both necessary to create a modern retirement system for a rapidly aging society. Some imagine latent public support for a government-dominated health program like Britain’s or Canada’s. Others continue to defend an archaic public education monopoly that is chronically failing poor and minority kids.
It is time for Democrats to abandon their “just say no” stance toward Social Security reform and instead offer a progressive plan for modernizing the system. We should dramatically expand public school choice, by making it possible for every public school to become an independent, self-managed charter school freed from the stifling grip of centralized bureaucracies. We should insist on a national “cap and trade” system for carbon and other greenhouse gases, a step that would also hasten the development of plug-in hybrid cars and other clean energy technologies and fuels. We should offer a tough plan to reimpose fiscal discipline, reduce the Bush budget deficits and make America’s tax code fair and progressive again. Following the example of Massachusetts, we should propose a decentralized path to universal health care, using a mix of public subsidies, access to purchasing pools similar to the one Members of Congress use and individual mandates to make sure that young and healthy people do not get a “free ride” on the system. And more.
Democrats face a big strategic choice. We can continue to be the default party, defining ourselves chiefly by partisan combativeness. Or we can become the reform party, offering compelling ideas for solving national problems. In theory we could do both but in practice it is a lot easier to unite the party around antipathy to conservatives than a new vision for governing. That is the well-worn path of least resistance, but Democrats today should play for higher stakes.

by Elaine Kamarck
In the 1988 presidential election, Michael Dukakis was pilloried – rightly – for running a soulless campaign whose message consisted of the phrase, “It’s not about ideology, it’s about competence.” But times change. That was before the Federal Government’s response to Hurricane Katrina so overwhelmed us with its incompetence that America was humiliated before the world. The response to Katrina, however, was only the most dramatic in a long series of government failures, from the planning of the war in Iraq, to the failure of the occupation, to the design of the Medicare prescription drug policy. At the Kennedy School of Government, where I teach, we have traditionally begun the required course in government management with a case study on the Chicago heat wave of 1995 where hundreds of people died before the government even knew what was happening. The message we try to convey to our students of government every year was brought home to the entire country in September of 2005: when the private sector fails to manage organizations well, people lose money; when the public sector fails to manage well, people die.
For decades, Democrats have suffered under the political albatross of being the party of big government. But in the past decade we have had several dramatic “teaching moments” in America; moments that just might allow us to change the political conversation going forward and get out from under this millstone. First came the government shutdown in early 1996. Lots of Americans learned that the federal government was everywhere – it was funding pieces of their state and local governments and it was funding charities like Catholic Charities. President Clinton won a fairly dramatic victory over that shutdown – to the surprise of the Republicans who had believed perhaps too much in their own small government rhetoric.
Next came the tragedy of 9/11 where the heroes were government workers – from the New York firefighters who ran into the collapsing buildings, to the cops, to the airmen, seamen and soldiers who took off into Afghanistan. In the aftermath of 9/11 “trust in government” leapt higher than it had been at any time since the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nothing like a tragedy to make people appreciate when and why government matters. While the trust-in-government numbers came down to more normal levels in the months after 9/11, the temporary spike served as a useful reminder that, in the end, the private sector does not keep us safe.
And then came Hurricane Katrina where government at all levels, but especially federal government, failed spectacularly. Once again, everyone understood that we needed a government that works. No one seriously thought that the private sector could have rescued New Orleans.
In just four years tragedy showed us that sometimes we really need government and that when we really need it we need it to work. Just as Democrats had no trouble agreeing on a message of opposition to Social Security privatization, they have had no trouble agreeing on a message about the incompetence of the current government. Focusing on competence allows those Democrats who voted for the war and those who voted against the war to have a unified message. No wonder that the opening of the Democratic response to the 2006 State of the Union focused on competence. The new Governor of Virginia, Tim Keane, summed up the argument as follows: “You know, no matter what political philosophy you hold or what state you call home, you have a right to expect that your government can deliver results.”
Competence is not a very rousing theme. It is not easily turned into a convention cheer. But for the upcoming mid-term elections it’s not a bad start for the Democrats. For six years now the Bush Administration has beaten up Democrats over values: patriotism, family, life – you name it. But they are in a tailspin now. Why? They can’t deliver results. They can’t get armor to troops in the field in Iraq, they can’t design a Medicare prescription drug program, they can’t save lives in a hurricane, they can’t protect American ports. This list of what they can’t do is fairly impressive. Think about it for a moment – maybe a political party that hates government is doomed to govern badly.
It is not just that competence is back – over the past six years the entire basis for disliking Democrats has been turned upside down. In 2001 a Republican president inherited a budget surplus; by 2008 a Republican president and a Republican Congress will have bequeathed record budget deficits. Numerous conservative think tanks and scholars have pointed this out as well as Democrats. So just who is the party of big government these days? And, perhaps more importantly, aren’t we entitled to some competence for all that money?
Republicans will try to argue that the Bush deficits are all about military and homeland defense, but the Cato Institute, not exactly a bastion of liberal apologists, has shown the fallacy of that argument. Looking at spending policy back to President Johnson, Stephen Slivinski says, “Contrast that with Bush’s presidency so far. He has presided over massive increases in almost every category. This is a dramatic change from previous presidents, when increases in defense spending were offset by cuts in non-defense spending…”
Democrats have a chance to morph their image as the party of government into the party of government that works. They should put together a robust reform agenda that focuses on the adaptations the federal government needs to make to protect America in this new era. To do that they should start with one simple but powerful proposal (championed by Senator Hillary Clinton): take FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) out of DHS (the Department of Homeland Security).
A government that can “deliver results” will stand in stark contrast to the current situation. Democrats voted for and against the Iraq War, but none of them thinks it has been led wisely. Democrats are the long-time champions of a prescription drug program, but no one thinks the bureaucratic mess that seniors are now muddling through is what the doctor ordered. Democrats do not have to solve every internal disagreement they have in order to go to the country with a pretty convincing case that the Administration is the “gang that can’t shoot straight” and that allowing a pliant and beaten Republican majority to control Congress has allowed a bad situation to get even worse.
Looking beyond the mid-terms, a government reform agenda can do for the Democratic candidate of 2008 what “reinventing government” did for Bill Clinton in 1992: show that he or she is attuned to the fact that government needs to work better and more efficiently than it does now. This was an important message for Clinton to deliver in 1992 since it helped him show people that he was a “different kind of Democrat.” In 2008 a new version of that message, re-worked around the theme of government competence, will be a welcome change from the record of the previous Administration.
In the long run focusing on the competence issue will be the political equivalent of making lemonade out of lemons. Democrats need to take the fact that they created the modern federal government and show that they are uniquely qualified to make it work. This means a non-stop reform effort, one that will sometimes displease the government workers unions that now constitute the largest portion of the American labor movement. This means taking on entrenched interest groups that benefit from government ineptness. This means a constant drive towards productivity in government as a way of moving the Democrats away from the party of big government to the party that provides the government that you need.

By Donna Brazile
President George W. Bush’s main foreign policy goal is to spread the fire of democracy in every corner of the globe. In almost every foreign policy address, senior members of the Administration speak of the power of freedom and democracy in giving oppressed people everywhere a seat at the table.
“Americans, of all people, should not be surprised by freedom’s power,” the President has said. He’s right, of course. And on the basis of his words, I would expect the President to lead the cause of democracy here at home, especially the cause of electoral reform and cleaning up our dysfunctional election system. Unfortunately, he has not shown much interest.
In order to strengthen democracy here at home while continuing to export it abroad, Democratic campaign officials must make election reform a priority. Voter confusion, delays, equipment malfunction and misinformation continue to prevent many citizens from participating in the electoral process.
Democrats should support election reform on principle, and it can’t be presumed that it will always and everywhere help us politically. But given that historically Democratic constituencies are disproportionately affected by voting irregularities, the right thing to do will also improve Democratic prospects in a nation so closely divided along partisan lines.
No, it is not enough to have a good candidate, a brilliant campaign plan, money in the bank and a talented and energetic group of seasoned campaign workers and volunteers. It is also necessary to understand the fundamentals of what constitutes a vote, who is behind the local election regulations and what rules apply to counting ballots in the event of a close election.
As a Democratic strategist, I witnessed first-hand the electoral irregularities surrounding the 2000 Presidential election when my former boss, Al Gore, won the popular vote but lost the election following a Supreme Court decision which halted a Florida recount. Experts agree that the 2004 national election was again rife with election anomalies including, but not limited to: excessively long lines at the polls (particularly in predominantly poor and minority precincts); insufficient and defective voting equipment; voter suppression and intimidation tactics targeting young voters, minorities and first time voters; unlawful purging of eligible voters from voting lists; and massive confusion over the issuance and tabulation of provisional ballots, absentee ballots and ballots cast by U.S. citizens living overseas.
An investigation by Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee disclosed massive and unprecedented voter irregularities in Ohio surrounding the 2004 Presidential election as the result of misconduct by Ohio’s Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, and negligence and incompetence among some local election officials.
After two close presidential elections, as well as state and local races that were too close to call, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) launched its own in-depth investigation of Ohio’s 2004 election. “Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio,” revealed that many Ohio voters were dissatisfied with their electoral experience. From antiquated voting machines in urban minority precincts, to untrained poll workers who turned away thousands of citizens who showed up at the wrong polling sites, to the unusually high number of provisional ballots, our study indicated that electoral inefficiencies left Ohio voters feeling cheated or disenfranchised in a very close presidential race.
As Chair of the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, I was astounded to learn just how dysfunctional our electoral system has become and why this is a serious impediment to successful elections for Democratic candidates at all levels. It’s time for Democrats to get smart about election administration and take an active role in cleaning up laws and adopting new ones to protect every citizen’s right to vote.
The strength of our democracy depends on the faith of every voter in the integrity of our elections. But it is obvious from the voices of those who stood in long lines in Ohio and elsewhere that confidence in the integrity of our electoral system is waning, even as democracy blooms abroad.
The right of all citizens to vote, and to have that vote accurately counted, is the bedrock on which our democracy is founded. Nothing is more fundamental to our freedom than public confidence in the integrity of basic democratic institutions. We used to be the envy of the world because our elections were hard fought, but the results were rarely questioned. This is no longer the case.
It is America’s calling to defend and expand liberty, and to take an honest look at who, and how many, were denied the right to vote in 2004. Given past endeavors by some Republicans to marginalize voting rights concerns, it is up to Democrats to push for the adoption of tough new standards to ensure that no American is ever denied the right to vote.
For starters, the Democratic Party has worked tirelessly in urging the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration to fully fund the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and to assist states in improving election administration. While most states are attempting to comply with HAVA’s mandates, there is confusion and a lack of consistency regarding the implementation of some of HAVA’s requirements and many states are out of compliance.
Last year, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker released a report recommending, among other things, that “Congress should pass a law requiring that all voting machines be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper audit trail….(a) to increase citizens’ confidence that their vote will be counted accurately, (b) to allow for a recount, (c) to provide a backup in cases of loss of votes due to computer malfunction, and (d) to test — through a random selection of machines — whether the paper result is the same as the electronic result”.
Twenty-six states have now implemented requirements for voter-verified paper records and 13 more and the District of Columbia have such a requirement pending. In order to assure equal protection under the law, the independent auditability of the vote count must be consistently and legitimately protected in all states. We must reject the privatization of the vote count through the use of privately controlled electronic devices running on trade-secret-protected and undisclosed software. This practice is fundamentally at odds with government of the people, by the people and for the people. We must demand regulations that mandate transparent election administration, requiring voting equipment vendors to disclose their source code so that the equipment can be examined by third parties.
In addition to requiring a voter-verified paper record for every vote cast, we must urge lawmakers to require a significant percentage of random, unannounced, hand-counted audits of voter-verified paper records as a check on the results reported by electronic equipment.
We must work with local election officials to prohibit voting machines from having wireless or Internet connections and require that all voting equipment be used exclusively for voting purposes. Election officials must make certain that all eligible voters are able to cast their votes without impediment, regardless of physical or language limitation and that ballots are easy to comprehend and voting equipment is uncomplicated to use. Regulations must be adopted mandating that all voting machines used in local, state and federal elections – including, but not limited to direct recording electronic touch-screen machines – be certified as accurate and tamper-proof.
Local party officials must effectively train election monitors and poll watchers to enforce local election laws and procedures. We must continue to advocate for the adoption of election policies which require every ballot to be in a form that voters can read, verify and manually place in the ballot box.
In the post-2000 campaign environment, we must work with local officials to ensure that manual countywide recount procedures are in place before the vote is certified when manual vote tabulation detects a strong possibility of election equipment tampering.
Party leaders must work with state and local lawmakers to adopt regulations which preclude election officials from substituting efficiency for accuracy, so that voters can trust that every vote will be counted as cast.
It is vitally important that campaign personnel review the implementation of all HAVA guidelines, which protect voters from unlawful purges; reinforce the entitlement of voters to cast provisional ballots in federal elections; clarify the proper places and procedures for casting provisional ballots and establish a presumption in favor of validity; and clearly mandate that provisional ballots shall be counted in the most generous possible manner in every state, thereby maximizing and equalizing the value of the right to cast one.
Every Democratic campaign must work with state and local government officials prior to Election Day to ensure the equitable distribution of voting equipment and supplies to all polling places. This is crucial in order to avoid a repeat of those circumstances in 2004 when voters left polling stations out of sheer frustration due to excessively long lines and malfunctioning voting machinery.
It is also imperative that Democrats actively call upon the Republican Party to help stop voter fraud, voter suppression and intimidation, including the use of deceptive practices such as changing polling sites and placing off duty security guards at polling stations explicitly to harass certain voters on Election Day. Although it is an uphill battle, we must be relentless in pressuring federal and state lawmakers to outlaw these bogus practices.
While President Bush champions freedom and democracy elsewhere, I hope that Democrats will continue their call for clean, transparent and honest elections here at home. Before freedom marched in Baghdad, it took a stand here in America. Let’s continue to fight for the right of all Americans to vote, to participate in elections to select those who will govern a free people and yes, to hold those elected accountable to our democratic principles and ideals.

Robert L. Borosage
“Had enough?” Abramoff and DeLay, Katrina and Iraq, Schiavo and Halliburton, Big Pharma and Big Oil. Leave it to Newt Gingrich to provide Democrats with their best election year sound bite. [Surely an improvement on “Together, we can do better.”] No doubt Democrats are tempted by Newt’s advice to make 2006 “a referendum, not a choice.” In an off-year election, with Republicans in control of everything, nationalizing the 2006 election inevitably requires making it a referendum on Republican failings and flailing – the equivalent of the 1994 election that brought Republicans to power. But if Democrats are to move toward building a governing majority, then they must use 2006 to begin posing a clear choice to voters – even while beginning the far more serious debate about the party’s posture on the emerging challenges facing this country. Here is a summary of the themes for 2006 – and of the harder questions that Democrats have yet to face.
1994 in 2006
The Gingrich strategy from 1994 should inform the Democratic playbook in 2006. Gingrich began not with the reform ideas of the Contract with America, but with relentless attack on the corruption, arrogance and failures of the Democrats in control. The campaign was nationalized by linking Democratic candidates directly to what was at the time a very unpopular president, with ads morphing the Democratic candidate into Clinton’s face and then back.
The Contract, unveiled late and not well known, provided Republicans with a prop that showed that they stood for change. An entire section was devoted to congressional reform, from term limits to promises of open governance. Others restated popular conservative shibboleths – a balanced budget amendment, missile defense, tax cuts. Divisive social issues, like prayer in the schools or abortion, were excluded. The document was accompanied by a promise of action – a vote on every measure in 100 days – that spoke directly to voters’ frustration that Democrats had failed to deliver.
In 2006, given the breathtaking scope of conservative misrule and the growing dismay of voters, Democrats can follow the same model: relentless attack on the failures of Bush and the Republican Congress, ignoring pundits who complain Democrats have no agenda; morphing Republican candidates scrambling to establish their independence into pictures of Bush and back.
The catastrophic failures and corrosive corruptions of Bush and the Republican Congress also make it relatively easy for Democrats to frame a clear, compelling agenda that make them the party of change. The themes are simple. Had enough? Do you want more of the same – the Bush direction – or a new course? They have failed. They govern for the few – they auctioned off Congress to corporate lobbies and CEOs – and you pay the costs of this corruption. We’ll put government on your side, a policy that works for all. Core elements of the agenda are logical and, not surprisingly, poll well in early snapshots by Democracy Corps, Lake Research and others.
1.  Clean out the stables. Voters are not particularly interested in process reforms, but they are looking for change. Democrats should be the party of reform, championing bold, clear reforms to curb the corruptions of the corporate lobbies: block the revolving door, expose all contacts, end the junkets, ban the ear-marks, curb the privileges. Enact a freeze on congressional pay raises until wages are going up for Americans, a position Stanley Greenberg’s polling has revealed to have wide support. Pledge to root out the outrages – particularly the scandalous rip-offs in Iraq by Halliburton and other corporate cronies that not only wasted billions of dollars but contributed directly to the failure of reconstruction. With Democratic incumbents incomprehensibly unable to forge unity on a bold agenda of reform, Democratic challengers should take up the charge and make themselves the outsiders who will clean out the stables.
2.  Stand up for people, not special interests. Democrats best demonstrate their values, their character and their courage by fighting against entrenched special interests on basic kitchen table concerns. This isn’t rocket science. It starts by reversing the costs of Republican corruption that Americans pay in higher drug prices, higher college costs, soaring gas prices, and jobs getting shipped abroad. Make health care affordable, starting by taking the Medicare prescription drug plan out of the hands of private insurers and requiring the government to negotiate lower prices. Make college affordable, starting by cutting interest rates on student loans in half, raising grant levels, and providing tax credits towards college tuition. Revoke the tax breaks and loopholes that reward corporations for sending jobs abroad. Raise the minimum wage, require corporations to treat the shop floor like the top floor in benefits, and empower workers to organize to gain a fair share of the profits they help generate. Roll back the subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, and use that money to champion…
3.  A bold concerted drive for energy independence. Champion a plan like that laid out by the Apollo Alliance, generating jobs, capturing new markets, and unleashing American science and technology, all while reducing our reliance on Persian Gulf oil. Democrats should overcome their temerity about big investments – and embrace new energy for America.
The Republican response to this assault – as laid out by Karl Rove – will be to localize elections as much as possible, while framing two national choices. We’re for tax cuts and growth; they’ll raise your taxes. We understand there’s a war on; they don’t get it and want to cut and run. Democrats should relish challenging Republicans on both of these core questions:
4.  An Economics that Works for America. To most Americans, Bush sounds out of touch as he touts the great economy. And Democrats should dramatize how these guys don’t get it. Profits are up, CEO salaries are up, but wages are not keeping up with prices. We have record budget deficits, unsustainable trade deficits. Good jobs are moving abroad. The tax cuts have created more jobs in China than here. In fact, the great bulk of jobs created here have come from the growth in state and local government jobs and the military buildup. We would be better off using some of the money Bush handed over to the wealthy to invest in areas like energy independence that are vital to our future, in good schools, in rebuilding New Orleans and in protecting our homeland. That would generate more jobs here and less debt in the future. Democrats should be calling for an economic strategy that empowers workers, and holds CEOs accountable. One that benefits companies that create jobs here, and revokes subsides for those who take jobs abroad. The party should put forth a trade strategy that will support good jobs here – not one that sits idly by while countries like China play by different set of rules.
5.  A Real Security Plan for America. Democratic strategists all intone the mantra that the party has to be “strong on security”. But the overwhelming base of Democratic voters opposes the war in Iraq, and has no desire to police the world. This often leaves Democrats tongue-tied or divided. And that is why, despite growing public disenchantment with the Iraq debacle, the White House will make it a centerpiece of the fall elections: “They want to cut and run; that will hand al Qaeda a victory and provide them with a base for terror.”
Many Democrats would prefer to duck: It’s the president’s problem; he should present us with a plan to win. No one really expects a legislator to provide the solution. But ducking is only likely to make Democrats look weak and irresponsible, playing politics with a basic security issue. Nor are the mock-tough postures once in vogue on the right of the party – urging more troops for Iraq or smarter tactics – likely to ring true given the growing civil stifle in Iraq.
Democratic candidates would be well-advised to level with Americans about the reality. There are no good choices. Withdrawing could leave a divided Iraq enmeshed in bloody civil strife. But staying only involves our soldiers in that strife. And it weakens America. It isolates us from our allies, provides al Qaeda with a training ground and a recruiting boon, rouses suspicion and hatred across the Moslem world, and distracts us from the real war on terror. We freed Iraqis of a brutal dictator, now we need to put Iraqis on notice that it is time for them to take responsibility and for our troops to come home over the course of the next year. By committing to keep them there until 2009, the president gives the Iraqis no incentive to step up. Accompany this with a real security agenda reviving collective alliances to hunt down the fanatics dedicated to global terrorism; common-sense measures to protect America, including inspecting all containers coming into our ports and demanding security plans for dangerous chemical and biological factories; and a pledge to appoint competent leaders to critical posts, not callow cronies who are not up to the task. A position stated with conviction will do much better than one that looks like it is poll driven.
Towards A Governing Majority
Democratic gains this fall in the wake of the conservative collapse should not mask how far the party is from consolidating a governing reform majority. As Karl Rove has discovered, this requires not simply skilled messaging and expert politics. Consolidating a governing majority requires a strategy that successfully addresses the fundamental challenges we face. Democrats have sensibly been unified in the face of the extreme project posed by Bush and the Republican Congress. But unity in opposition has come at the expense of defining clarity around proposition. We now witness the collapse of the conservative consensus that has dominated American politics over the last twenty-five years. Large challenges must be addressed, for example:
American strategy in the global economy. The conservative strategy of the last twenty-five years has left America the world’s largest debtor, borrowing from foreign creditors while shipping jobs, not goods, abroad. The Chinese are lending us the money to buy the goods they make with the jobs and technology our companies ship over to them. This year we will run a $1 trillion current account deficit. Everyone agrees this is not sustainable. Free trade nostrums provide no answer. Are Democrats the party of Main Street and providing American jobs, or the party of Wall Street and wage insurance for those who lose their jobs?
Globocop or neo-realist? Both parties have exulted America as the “indispensable nation”, vital to policing the globe. But this role is both unpopular and increasingly unaffordable. Are Democrats for sustaining the costs of America as the global policeman or, mugged by reality, are they prepared to argue for collective security and reduced military commitments while championing human rights and democracy with soft power, not bombs?
Growing inequality and the insecurity of the American middle class. Conservative economic policies have produced unprecedented inequality. Globalization, deregulation, privatization, corporate assaults on unions, and a decline in the social wage have put workers in a box, working longer and still falling behind. Are Democrats the party of the board room or the shop floor? The party of worker empowerment and corporate accountability or the party of deregulation?
Stark public investment and budget deficits. The turn under Bush from budget surpluses to record deficits has received extensive coverage. Less visible but more telling is the growing public investment deficit in areas vital to our future – modern communications, mass transit, basic infrastructure, affordable college, adequately paid teachers, affordable housing, and basic nutrition and health care to lift children from poverty. Core investments were slashed under Reagan, deferred under Bush and Clinton and now are coming under the knife again. Do Democrats prioritize investment or fiscal probity?
Higher walls or rising tides? Immigration will be a core issue by 2008. Democrats are the party of opportunity and inclusion. Will they be for building walls on the border to keep people out or opportunity across the border, so they will not want to come – or both? The former is more popular but less effective, and more likely to feed xenophobia and racism. The latter requires courage and creativity, but could be very costly politically. Do Democrats dare pose good sense against the furies?
These are only indicative of large choices that Democrats have to face if they are to build a ruling majority. Of course, Democrats have to win an election before we start worrying about governing. We have to stop the right from digging us deeper into the hole, while arguing about how we get out. But these and other fundamental questions will be answered – one way or another – before Democrats can hope to build a governing majority.

By Kenneth S. Baer and Andrei Cherny
At this spring’s exclusive Gridiron Dinner, Senator Barack Obama — according to reports, as the dinner is closed press – offered up a complaint common in Democratic circles. “You hear this constant refrain from our critics that Democrats don’t stand for anything. That’s really unfair,” he said, “We do stand for anything.” As they say in the Catskills, the line killed. But the problem it refers to has been killing Democrats for years.
Since the end of the Clinton years, the Democratic Party has been adrift – without a coherent agenda or public philosophy. According to a poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research earlier this year, only 29 percent of Americans believe that Democrats have a better sense than Republicans of what they stand for as a party (while 51 percent say that Republicans have a better sense than Democrats). As Stan Greenberg has put it, the American public believes Democrats have “no core set of convictions or point of view.”
Part of that is expected: when you lose the White House, a party loses a de facto leader who can impose message and ideological discipline. But there is more to it. The world has profoundly changed since President Clinton sat in the Oval Office: globalization has accelerated at a torrid pace as have the technological innovations fueling it, the country has become more diverse and more dispersed, changing family arrangements and workplace structures have deeply affected how people see the world, and the attacks of September 11th have brought to the surface a simmering war with radical Islamist terror.
Yet Democrats have not put forward a vision of where the country should go, where it should lead the world, and why. And absent that vision, no get-out-the-vote effort, re-messaging exercise, or charismatic candidate will help Democrats win the White House and, just as importantly, become a vibrant progressive force for years to come. That is why if Democrats want to win in 2008 and beyond, they must invest in the intellectual infrastructure that underpins a modern political movement. They need to develop coherent responses — rooted in the party’s deepest beliefs about democracy, liberty, equality, and justice — that respond to the new realities that America faces.
What Democrats cannot rely on are the explanations that have cropped up in the wake of the loss of the Senate in 2002 and the failure to win back the Presidency in 2004. These include the technological — witness the huge amount of money poured into the Democratic National Committee’s “Demzilla” database project, and now into the independent Democratic DataMart – but more often than not focus on the Democratic message. Here is a sampling:
1) All we need to do is retool our message – a quadrennial complaint that probably extends back to Thomas Jefferson’s loss to John Adams. This time this strategy has resurfaced under the rubric of “framing”, otherwise known as putting old wine in new bottles.
2) All we need to do is boil down our message to four phrases that have the same catchiness as the GOP’s “Smaller Government. Less taxes. Stronger Military. Family Values.”
3) All we need to do is figure out what goes on the bumper sticker. This produced a Democratic response to the 2006 State of the Union in which Virginia Governor Tim Kaine repeated the phrase “A Better Way” nine times in his short address – using the very same slogan which the Robert Redford movie “The Candidate” mocked as the essence of vapid, meaningless political rhetoric.
4) All we need to do is figure out “how to talk to” evangelical, gun-owning, Hispanic, exurban married couples in red states as if voters simply had merely not understood what we were saying.
Tactics and targeting, media and messaging – these are the ways we try to put lipstick on a party that does not know what it stands for. Democrats today are rich in strategies and poor in beliefs. Ask most Democrats what they believe in, and they will respond with a list of policies and programs, criticisms of Republican wrongs, or a series of painful stammers.
Right now, Democrats are like the fourth-generation that takes over the family firm: we have forgotten why we went into business in the first place. As a result, we spend most of the time fighting to protect the proud heritage of our past achievements from being destroyed, a necessary assignment in the current climate, but not sufficient to provide the roadmap to the future that America needs and that a great political party should provide.
Of course, Democrats have policies – by the truckload. But policies are not ideas – and anyone who tries to conflate the two is putting the cart before the horse. A policy is the “How?” An idea is the “What?” and the “Why?”. Social Security is a policy, one that has served the nation well. The notion that the federal government should mandate that Americans put money aside into a pool to ensure that seniors, widows, and orphans are not left to rot in poverty is a powerful idea, rooted in distinct beliefs about equality, justice, and the role of government in our economy.
Understanding what you believe and developing a view on how the world works and how it should are critical to the nuts-and-bolts of politics. That is to say that you cannot work on the bumper stickers or on talking to swing voters if you do not know what it is exactly you believe. Think of policy platforms, political slogans, and bumper stickers as the tips of icebergs. The ones that work are deceivingly simple but strong because underneath the surface is all the substance and weight that holds them up and that most people never see.
And therein lies the strength of the conservatives’ slogans. Their bumper sticker phrases were not cooked up in a focus group or decided by a central committee of Republican Party elders meeting in the wood-paneled boardroom of Dick Cheney’s secure undisclosed location. They were arrived at through years of vigorous debate and discussion by people who passionately held some core beliefs – and debated them with each other and the politicians seeking their support. They were unafraid to think big and unafraid to anger those who disagreed with them – including many voters.
And, most of all, conservatives had the institutions in which to float the fanciful idea and debate it — not just think tanks and academic institutes, but also idea journals such as The Public Interest and Policy Review. In fact, almost every signature idea that we associate with the modern Republican Party – from supply-side economics to pre-emption and Social Security privatization – was incubated in one of these journals years ago. It doesn’t change the fact that these policies are wrong-headed, but we cannot deny that underneath them is a well developed public philosophy.
Election Day is when the Republicans reap the rewards of this intellectual spadework. When George W. Bush, Bob Dole, or any other mainstream Republican is chosen as their party’s nominee, they get placed on top of a pyramid of thinking that has been developed far in advance of their first visits to New Hampshire. It was not George W. Bush’s campaign, for instance, that developed the theory of compassionate conservatism; that was done by Marvin Olasky and others before. Bush, characteristically, inherited the work that others had sowed in the intellectual vineyards. Democrats, on the other hand, tell their candidates to go into the fields and plant their own ideas six months before the first primary. As we have seen in campaign after campaign, what ends up happening is that candidates lapse into the default position: what does everyone else say or what does the most powerful interest group want.
To help Democratic candidates win and to revive the progressive movement, Democrats need to invest in ideas – and in the think tanks and journals that incubate them. They need to recognize the importance of investing in the development of a coherent public philosophy not just for its electoral implications (of which there are many), but because when a party lacks a viewpoint on the type of nation and world it seeks, then it loses its raison d’etre.
While winning elections is the ultimate goal for any political party and the way to affect real change, Democrats need to shed their compulsion for the transactional. Currently, candidates are selected by Party committees on the basis of their bankroll rather than their experience. Primary voters sometimes seem more concerned with that elusive quality of “electability” than with the old-fashioned notion of ability. Policies and ideas seem to be discussed by Party insiders almost exclusively in the context of which voters they would appeal to instead of what impact they would have on the nation and the world. What does it profit a political party to win an election and lose its soul?
Instead of another round of discussion over who are our swing voters, Democrats need a real debate over what are our “swing ideas”: the big notions that will remake the political landscape as surely as Republican ideas have over the past generation. To do that, we need to get back to first principles, thinking deeply about the world we want to build and how we will do it. Once we do this, we will be able to build a Democratic Party that strides boldly into this new century confident about who we are and where we are headed. That is a Democratic Party that will win again – and one that will be ready to change America for the better.
Kenneth S. Baer and Andrei Cherny are the founding editors of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, www.DemocracyJournal.org.

By Jerome Armstrong
Ten years from now, the Democratic Party will have fully broadened its election strategy beyond the battleground mentality that dominates strategic thinking today. Democrats will be a national party, leaving no uncontested race anywhere in the nation, and will have rebuilt a party infrastructure down to the precinct everywhere in the nation. The Democrats will have regained their majority status as the governing party, and the mapchanger approach to elections will have been the reason.
The notion of “running Democrats everywhere” seems fanciful (to put it nicely) to DC beltway insiders and veteran political strategists. At the Presidential level, those strategists that subscribe to the beltway mentality believe that Democrats should forget about half the states, and focus all of our resources on trying to win a bare majority of electoral votes.
As the Democratic Party shrinks from a national party into a regional stronghold, the battleground also shrinks further and further. In the 1992 and the 1996 Presidential elections, with three candidates in the race, as many as 30 states were viewed as competitive battleground contests up through Election Day. In 2000, that number dropped to just 17 by Election Day. In 2004, the number of contested states early in the presidential contest stood at 18, and was whittled down to about eight by Election Day.
The battleground strategy – or more accurately obsession – that the Democratic establishment in DC pursues of narrowing electoral campaigns to ever shrinking “swing states” is self-defeating. It does not build any new converts to the party, it makes it easier for the Republicans to walk away with huge chunks of the country unchallenged and it starves the Democratic Parties in those “red” states.
At the congressional level the focus is on trying to win just enough seats to win back the majority. This incremental notion is exactly why the Democratic Party has not been able to reclaim a majority on the House side of Congress since losing control over a decade earlier. Every two years, since 1994, the congressional strategists mark out the 10 or 20 seats representing the best opportunity to win back bare control of the House, make a minimal show in 10 or 20 more, and cede the remaining GOP seats to Republican control-without even a party-supported oppositional candidate.
Those strategists have argued that they simply do not have the money and resources to fight on a broader front, and it is true – the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was outspent by its Republican counterpart $186 million to $93 million in the 2004 cycle.ⁱ Yet, the party must have a better approach than narrowing its efforts only to the districts it sees as “winnable”. That may serve the short-term interest of trying for a slim majority in the House, but it completely ignores the long-term interest of acting, behaving and campaigning as a truly national political party.
As blogger Chris Bowers of MyDD noted November 5, 2004:

Abandoning a district also has repercussions for future elections. Failing to challenge your opponent’s message in an area is damaging to your message in that area in the future. Failing to provide a choice to those willing to support you – and there are always tens of thousands willing to support you in any congressional district – sends a message that you do not represent or care about those people. Even worse, failing to challenge an incumbent sends a message that you are afraid of your own beliefs and that you are not working to make this country a better Democracy.
Running a candidate in each of these districts would also have helped to identify Democratic activists in each of these districts. Identifying, encouraging, and assisting potential Dem[ocratic] activists throughout the entire country would help to strengthen the Party, both now and in future elections cycles. These are the people who can help to bring the Democratic message to every corner of the country.ⁱⁱ

The battleground mentality is cautious and narrow, and it plays to the Republican strong hand. The Republicans realize exactly which races are the battlegrounds, and focus all of their resources in kind, on the same races. This allows the party with the stronger array of resources to have the upper hand, and that is the Republican Party, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new media, machine politics and database inventories that give them superior voter targeting capabilities.
In contrast, the mapchanger attitude urges an aggressive and broad challenge to Republicans. It provides the national party with the best opportunity to utilize the tens of thousands of grassroots activists in every state and congressional district. The power of people becomes the strongest resource and gives the national Party the ability to pour resources into those states or districts that become surprisingly contested.
Further, the battleground mentality leaves half the country without a contest of ideas. We abandon progressives in rural areas of the country and let Republicans rule there, without even a contest-and those Republican incumbents then go out and raise money for Republican challengers in contested races.
Challenging Republicans in “deep red” districts would force Republican incumbents to spend a great deal of time and money defending their seats instead of campaigning for other Republicans and donating to their campaigns. Walter Ludwig’s Project 90, which encourages Democratic candidates to run in “red” Congressional districts, found that

between 2000-2004, Democrats failed to compete or barely challenge in over a quarter of U.S. House races, and the Republican incumbents in those districts contributed over $60 [million] to their colleagues in closer races.ⁱⁱⁱ

Activist bloggers do not advocate that the people wait for the Democratic Party strategists in DC to adopt the mapchanger strategy. The Republican Party has become an election machine. The Democratic establishment, while they believed they were the party of governance, wasted hundreds of millions of dollars while ignoring what the Republicans have been building.
Instead, Democratic Party officials and politicians have been under the powerful sway of a cabal of media and polling consultants in DC, whose principle contribution seems to be an extension of this battleground mentality into decisions over campaign expenditures, advocating that the majority of funds be spent on polling and media in a strategic manner that rewards their services with increased profits.
Even for this upcoming cycle, all of the Democratic candidates in big races are going with inside-the-beltway media consultants whose best practices remain entrenched within a conflict-of-interest approach. It is a fact that consumer businesses no longer receive commissions based on the amount of advertising that is done-that racket only remains in DC (particularly on the Democratic side). And if you look closely at what media consultants are doing, they are really only project-managing the task of creating television commercials. That is, they will usually outsource the creation and the placement of the ad, and thus are merely the middleman for the politicians. As project managers, they should be paid a set monthly fee, not commissions without end that sometimes reach into the millions. The Democratic Party and its candidates who are participating in this scam are ripping off people that are contributing through donations.
For beltway outsiders to take more of the duties of the Democratic Party apparatus is really the only option that seems to be available. Waiting for those tired and defeated Democratic consultants to “get it” means remaining in the political wilderness beyond the next decade.
The netroots and grassroots progressive community should begin to take matters into its own hands. It is time to go beyond merely collectively grouping hundreds of thousands of dollars and pushing it toward candidates and consultants that perform business as usual. Building a progressive movement is going to take more than that sort of hit-and-run attitude of activism. We should be creating institutions that effectively spend the dollars raised for campaigns, rather than relying on the establishment channels.
In order to begin the mapchanger process, and really reform the Democratic Party, progressives must organize online in a manner that takes control of the Democratic Party at the precinct level. This ‘trickle up’ strategy will yield results by creating a state-based power that dictates the party strategy from within the Democratic Party establishment.
Yes, the Democratic Party has a problem with branding. Yet if we can rebuild the party across the country, at this very local level, the message and branding problems will be much easier to address. They are certainly not going to be solved within DC. In fact, in many ways, the debate over strategy and tactics versus ideas and principles is a false one. The election strategies that a party puts into practice reflect its values. A national party cannot, through a slogan, say they are putting people first, and then in the next election blow off half the people of the nation.
No matter how you look at it, challenging Republicans in all races and all geographic areas is a good idea – it builds the Democratic Party’s brand, it exhausts the Republicans’ resources and it sows the seeds for future Democratic wins.

ⁱCenter for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets web site, www.opensecrets.org. Accessed 4/13/2006.
ⁱⁱChris Bowers, “Uncontested,” http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/11/5/115834/784, as quoted in Crashing The Gate (White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 2006) 157.
ⁱⁱⁱWalter Ludwig, as quoted in Crashing The Gate (White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 2006) 158. (Ludwig’s Project 90 document is available from him personally.)

By Harold Meyerson
We live in a time when there’s no such thing as purely good economic news. When the GDP surges – as it did by 4.8 percent in the first quarter of this year – something always lags behind, and that something is almost always the income of ordinary Americans. In that same first quarter, for instance, worker compensation rose by just 2.4 percent – half the rate (4.8 percent) by which inflation grew.
Save for the wealthiest of our countrymen, we are all of us laggards. The American economy booms; the American people are left behind. Once upon a time, in the period of great post-World War Two prosperity, median income rose at precisely the same rate as productivity (both increased by 104 percent between 1947 and 1973). Since then, however, productivity gains have outstripped the average American’s income by a rate of three-to-one, and in recent years, by eight-to-one. As Northwestern University economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon have demonstrated, over the past couple of decades, all the income from productivity gains has gone to the wealthiest ten percent of Americans.
One economy vanisheth, another – a meaner one – taketh its place. GM and Ford announce they will close roughly 30 factories, while the median wage for newer hires among such industrial powerhouses as Caterpillar Tractor is now half that of their veteran workers. Or, to depress ourselves further, consider a survey of the nation’s 361 metropolitan areas, which account for 86 percent of the nation’s GDP. It found that the average wage of jobs lost in the recession of 2001-2003 was $43,629, while the average wage of jobs created in 2004-2005 was $34,378 – a cozy 21 percent decline.
Worse yet, it’s no longer clear that one of the lines that Bill Clinton frequently used in his 1992 campaign – “What you earn will be the result of what you learn” – is even remotely true, now that so much highly-skilled work can be sent electronically. Last year, economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz concluded that within the service sector, it’s skilled workers in general and scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in particular who are susceptible to having their jobs off-shored. Indeed, over the past half-decade, the United States has generated just 70,000 new jobs in engineering and architecture. In such an economy, sending more people to college, while a social good in itself, may not prove an economic panacea. In 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has concluded, 26.9 percent of all jobs in the U.S. required college degrees; by 2012, that will rise to 27.9 percent – one measly point.
The middle is falling out of the American economy. Globalization, immigration, de-unionization, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of a financial sector and culture enamored solely of shareholder value have combined to imperil one of America’s defining achievements – the creation of the world’s first majority middle-class economy. At the same time, they have also combined to negate virtually all our theories about how to create mass prosperity. Oh, there are things the Democrats could do in power that would have very positive effects. Nationalized health insurance would take a major burden off employers with older work forces and enable them to compete on a more level playing field with foreign companies whose health care costs are picked up by their governments. The minimum wage could be raised and indexed. Labor laws could be amended so that workers could feel free again to join unions without fear of firing.
But none of these changes would basically alter the DNA of American financial and corporate institutions, which ceaselessly impels them to disaggregate firms, out-source work, and find the cheapest labor in a world brimming with cheap labor. In such a world, generating broadly shared prosperity amounts to squaring a circle.
This is a crisis for the nation, and it is a particular crisis, and challenge, for Democrats and liberals. At bottom, the Democrats – and parties of the left and center-left across the planet – are parties of broadly shared prosperity. Since the days of Jefferson and Jackson, that has been the one defining attribute the Democrats have largely clung to (though there have been periods – the presidency of Grover Cleveland, for instance – when they have happily dropped it).
Today, there’s not a political tendency on the planet that has much in the way of plausible notions as to how to preserve mass prosperity in the advanced economies in the face of the new global realities. The long-term political consequences of this dilemma, however, may not be equally distributed among all political tendencies. The alternative to a politics of economic advancement is often a politics of social and cultural resentment. The steadily declining income of white working-class males over the past several decades, for instance, correlates to their increasingly rightwing voting habits. We may not be able to prove that correlation is causal, but I doubt it’s entirely coincidental.
In any given election, the inability to lay out a plausible scenario for renewing mass prosperity is not likely to leap out as the Democrats’ most glaring deficiency – particularly since the Democrats’ economics both are and are seen to be more friendly to the ordinary American than the Republicans’. But the objective reality of downward mobility, of the vanishing of an entire stratum of secure, middle-income jobs, creates a volatile political terrain on which nationalist, immigrant-bashing, union-hating demagogues may thrive. If Democrats can not assure broadly shared prosperity, a floodgate of reaction will at some point likely burst.
What, then, should the Democrats be advocating? I have three suggestions, in ascending order of difficulty.
First, when they retake power, the one action that could most strengthen their base, politically and economically, would be to enact the Employees’ Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to join unions without fear of firing. The new Change To Win Federation estimates that there are 44 million non-union private-sector jobs in such non-off-shorable sectors as construction, hospitality, transportation and health care. Over time, the EFCA could lead to the betterment of low-wage service sector jobs, just as the Wagner Act transformed over time the economic life of America’s industrial workers.
Second, they need to revive the idea of industrial policy. In such proposals as the Apollo Project (backed by unions and environmentalists), which would create tax credits for businesses that retrofit and become otherwise more efficient; or the consortium of Midwestern states (proposed by political scientist Joel Rogers and economist Dan Luria) that would improve the infrastructure of and give benefits to firms that in-source their supplies from the Midwestern region; or Barack Obama’s bill in which the government assumes some of the auto companies’ health care costs so long as they invest their savings in hybrid technology, we see a movement to shore up the nation’s industrial sector. The nation and the Democrats would profit by more such movement.
Finally, and here we move from the difficult to what may be the near-impossible, the Democrats need to disenthrall themselves from many of the values and mindsets of the financial community. They need more Eliott Spitzers and Phil Angelideses to ride herd on corporate abuses and to invest public funds with an eye to social responsibility. More sweepingly, they need to make corporate and financial institutions answerable not just to shareholders and top management, but to their employees and communities as well. Doing that will take a reform and redefinition of corporate power at least as sweeping as that of the New Deal. Given the increasingly dominant role of finance in filling the party’s coffers (the Rockefeller Republicans are all Democrats now), and in defining the party’s “responsible” economics, this will be anything but easy. But the grim reality is that in the age of globalization, American capitalism as currently practiced is eroding mass prosperity in the nation as a whole. In that contest, Democrats’ allegiance must be to their nation.