Democrats' Next Debate: What Makes a Good Democrat Now? [View all]

[Celerity]

Arguments about the future of the party will eventually result in money being thrown at real human beings who Democrats will need to actually win elections.

https://www.notus.org/democrats/future-candidate-recruitment-elections



The Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association is unique among the various Democratic Party organs that slosh cash around ahead of elections. Recently reconstituted after years of dormancy, the DLGA is one of the few places where the national party builds someone an electoral ladder. Should you be the right candidate, the group will help you assemble a campaign team, raise money and run for the quixotic office of LG. And then, should you make a name for yourself, the DLGA will help you run for something more, shall we say, prestigious. Like governor. Or senator. So when the DLGA goes looking for the right candidate, its choice could have ramifications that echo into the future.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis is the DLGA’s current vice chair and one of the leaders helping the group prepare for its first candidate recruitment drive. On his short list: people with regular lives. “We need more candidates for office who have authentic, lived experience,” he told NOTUS. “Quite frankly, we need less lawyers running for office, less millionaires.” Online, on TV, on podcasts and in private conversations, Democrats are locked in an argument about what they need to be to win — and how much that deviates from what they want to be. Can the party be a bulwark for emerging civil rights movements, or does that leave them too vulnerable to conservative claims that they’re radical? Can they be a party that attracts educated middle-class voters and still reach the working class? Can they center their aging heroes while also promising a new and different future? Can they go on Joe Rogan but also be the voice of people disturbed by the audience he represents?

These questions all lead to the two big ones rippling across the party: Who is a Democrat now, anyway? And who is a Democrat who can win? Privately, some Democrats grumble that the party has only recruited candidates who neatly align with the views of the party’s socially liberal college-educated voter bloc. Those Democrats argue the party should be receptive to candidates who hold positions — on everything from transgender student athletes to abortion — not entirely in keeping with Democratic orthodoxy. “Voters have a good bullshit radar and want candidates who are unafraid to say what’s on their mind,” one strategist involved in candidate recruitment said. “Democrats are only shooting themselves in the foot if we continue to run candidates who just check the boxes on issue after issue.”

Senate Democrats who won in November think they know the key to successful candidates and campaigns going forward: Go everywhere, talk to everyone and focus on the economy. And don’t talk about racial, sexual or gender identities. “Personally, I think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic senator-elect from Michigan who won a narrow race in her state, told reporters recently. “People need to be looked at as independent Americans, whatever group they’re from, whatever party they may be from. And you have to approach them with an open, generous heart because anyone in this situation is, I think, approachable and gettable, but you have to go there.”

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