Serenity Now
Democrats need acceptance, courage, and wisdom
For the first time since 1996, almost every American thinks the election results are legitimate.
Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden were all dogged by significant blocks of voters who viewed them as illegitimate. But recent polling shows 90% of Democrats view Trump’s second election as legit - far greater than acceptance of Republican victories in 2000, 2004, and 2016.
There are more hard truths that Democrats will need to accept.
It is tempting for Democrats to torture the data for good news. Progressives are highly incentivized to tell an overly rosy story, and they do have some evidence to tout.
It is true that Kamala was within 2% in the presidential tipping point state of Pennsylvania. It is true that Democrats lost the House by just 10,000 votes and will likely win it back in the midterms.1
But, as we wrote in CNN earlier this year, denial is the problem from which all of Democrats’ other problems flow. And as
noted this week, such “Hopium” comes at a high price.Here is the reality: Kamala won just 2 of the 31 states where median household income is below the national average. She won just 19 states overall, an outcome good enough for just 38 Senators.2 As Republican Senator Steve Danes told NBC this week, the GOP has likely won the Senate for the rest of the decade.3
Democrats need serious change.
Acceptance, then Courage
Accepting this reality is one thing. Having the courage to change it is another.
It is one thing for national pundits to point to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden’s repeated victories in Trump districts. It is another for politicians and staff to show the courage to face harassment from progressive advocacies groups from being the type of independent leader who wins those districts.
At the wonderful NewDEAL Leaders4 gathering in DC this week, Welcome’s
moderated a panel with and rising star Democratic elected officials, Mayor Paige Cognetti of Scranton and Georgia state Rep. Tanya Miller. You can watch the whole panel here.Yglesias had two key points on what we need to accept.
The first is just how much of Democratic politics is driven by “the risk is that people will scream at you … That means being brave enough to get yelled at. That structures every topic.”
As we wrote on Monday in Getting To No, we need the Welcome community to grow so that courage is a rewarded more.
The second key Yglesias point was understanding what cannot be changed. He invoked the serenity prayer, and it recalled the below post we wrote before the midterms. Read on for that excerpt, or read the whole piece here. We are still on the same road from before the midterms, and change is needed,
Join the team, help show some courage, and share your wisdom.
Democrats haven’t accepted these inconvenient truths —or acted like it.
Excerpt from Midterm Pre-Mortem CliffsNotes, originally published November 8, 2022
In his famous “Serenity Prayer,” President Obama’s favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, asked God for “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Democrats will need that serenity, courage, and wisdom if they are going to defeat the Trumpist onslaught before it's too late.
The party’s far-left, out-of-the-mainstream public perception is causing it to hemorrhage support from the rainbow coalition that has historically formed its base. As Ruy Teixeira put it in The Atlantic:
“America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support. And not just among white voters. Not only has the emerging Democratic majority I once predicted failed to materialize, but many of the nonwhite voters who were supposed to deliver it are instead voting for Republicans.”
As we wrote in NBC back in 2020, the far-left is “whiter, richer and more educated” than everyone else in the Democratic coalition — and is at serious risk of alienating them.
But a consistent refrain among the activist wing of the Democratic Party is the denial that the far-left brand cost Democrats in 2020 (it did) and an uncritical reliance on the mythical power of turnout as an alternative to having to actually persuade swing voters (they’re wrong).
As Matt Yglesias has noted, Democrats are not actually “acting like they believe the future of democracy is at stake.” This is often for fear of alienating the same far-left leaders and advocacy groups who shifted the party brand in the first place.
This is the sixth consecutive election in which control of Senate, House or White House has changed. The midterms will likely make it seven in a row.
Democrats are a few GOP missteps from being at just 43 Senate seats today. As
wrote this week, Democrats held four Senate seats in Trump-won states. This split-state outcome had only happened twice in the last two decades, and was partially due to significant undervoting.The echoes of six-year Senate terms last awhile, not to mention presidencies - there are still 11 federal judges in active service who were appointed by Ronald Reagan.
As we noted in our intro of NewDEAL founder Debbie Cox Bultan in Centrist School, this network of state and local leaders is exemplary of a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem on the center-left. “To experience a NewDEAL event is to feel a community come alive.” Check out their 2024 Election Takeaways Report here.
And integrity matters. When they go low we go high. Even at rhe cost of occasional losses. https://youtu.be/DDr8OKVK9QQ?si=wHg1Ga2MqP7scgzt
💯. I also think we really need to build new civic spaces within which to practice that courage IRL. I’m still trying to imagine what that might look like. Back in MA, I am hearing about robust attendance and participation in town halls and other civic meetings; maybe I’m just out of the loop here (an unincorporated county), but I’m not aware of any such structures. Also I really wish I’d known about the NewDeal group when I was running in 2018! They’re doing so brilliantly what I was trying to do from my gut. ;) thank you for all of it!