How the Left Can Break Free from a Failing Democratic Party
The Democratic Party has stopped targeting voters outside of coastal cities
Welcome back to Tracking Biden from the Left!
Exactly a year ago, voters across the country were going to the polls. They sent a clear message: the Democratic Party’s platform of “Trump bad” was not good enough to earn their vote.
Zohran Mamdani is doing the opposite of what Democrats have done since 2016. He has a platform. He is not afraid to say that things can change. He is well-spoken.
Yet, as of Election Day, the highest-ranking Democratic Senator, New York City’s own Chuck Schumer, refuses to endorse him.
Zohran Mamdani represents a clear threat to the Democratic Party. He is an economic populist who is not afraid to go after the billionaire donors, along with interest groups like AIPAC; The groups who increasingly control the strings for the Democratic Party.
Zohran Mamdani is part of the way to fix the Democratic Party. He has the right message to move the Democratic Party away from socially liberal coastal elites to working-class voters of all regions. The Democratic Party must become the party that doesn’t force unionized freight workers to accept a bad deal or do nothing at all to raise the minimum wage.
But the way to fix the Democratic Party is not to run democratic socialists for the House and hope they slowly gain power, or even to run a charismatic Democratic Socialist in the Democratic presidential primaries and hope he wins. We have tried these things. In the words of a former President of the United States, “nothing fundamentally changed.”
So it’s time to get much stronger on the local level.
In states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, Idaho, South Dakota, and North Dakota, the Democratic Party is non-existent. Combined, in state legislatures in these states, there are currently 777 elected Republicans to only 129 elected Democrats.1
These people, except for in Kentucky with Governor Beshear, have been forgotten by the Democratic Party. They will be more socially conservative than voters in New York and California, but they can be convinced to support economic populism.
In order for the Democratic Party to be destroyed, economic populist organizations need to create viable opposition parties in these states. These organizations need to be totally separate from the Democratic Party, which these voters have clearly rejected.
If you want to build a new political movement separate from the Democratic Party, it starts on the state level. If you can raise the quality of living in states like Kentucky and West Virginia, for example, by raising the minimum wage, you will be able to start to move to bigger elections, like Senate and House races.
That is how you build a movement to improve life for Americans without the help of the failing Democratic Party.
Kentucky Senate (32-5), Kentucky House (80-20), West Virginia Senate (32-2), West Virginia House (91-9), South Dakota Senate (32-3), South Dakota House (64-6), North Dakota Senate (43-4), North Dakota House (82-12), Idaho Senate (29-6), Idaho House (61-9), Oklahoma Senate (40-8), Oklahoma House (81-20), Arkansas Senate (29-6), Arkansas House (81-19).
Purely electorally, Mamdani's margin of victory was a little underwhelming against someone as awful as Cuomo. Meanwhile, here in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill outperformed polls in a big way (as did Spanberger in Virginia). Is there anything that can be gleaned from Sherrill and Spanberger's overperformaces?