‘Democrats need to not blow it’: our panel reacts to the historic midterms |
‘Democrats can’t rely on Trump to deliver them elections’
Trump has been a disaster for our country. His economic plans are incoherent, the Iran war is making inflation worse, and his complicity with Israel’s crimes in Gaza and other acts of lawlessness, from the extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean to the kidnapping of Maduro, have been combined with a continuing coarsening of American culture.
We live in a country with more casual racism, with more speculation and moral depravity, more selfishness than at any point in the recent past, and the rot starts in the White House with a man who’s the personification of vice.
Voters are making him pay. But the fact that even a victory like this leaves Republicans with so much support tells us about the extreme polarization of the country and the limits on how much electoral punishment a disastrous administration can expect.
To break through, Democrats need to do better in rural and semi-rural areas, and they need to reverse the trend of class dealignment in a more systematic way by making their party the party of working-class concerns and interests. That means fighting for higher wages, stronger unions, affordable housing and healthcare, and giving working people a reason to believe that Democrats will make their lives better.
They can’t rely on having Trump gift them elections through his erratic rule. A normal Republican administration can be almost as dangerous to working-class interests but will present nowhere near these opportunities. Democrats need to give voters something to support beyond their opposition to the man in the White House.
Fundamentally, we need a durable popular supermajority for progressive change in this country. And we need a wider coalition to do that. Winning back the House and Senate gives Democrats an opportunity to build it. But I have no confidence they’ll even attempt to build one.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities
Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, the founding editor Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in An Era of Extreme Inequalities
‘The most consequential midterms in decades’
It hasn’t been at the front of most minds as the results have come in, but one of the biggest victors of the night has been the polling industry.
For a decade, since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, the field of opinion research has been placed under a tremendous amount of scrutiny – partly as a consequence of misses that suggest pollsters have systematically been undercounting Trump supporters.
Those critiques pointed to real challenges facing survey science but also an underlying anxiety – that Trump and Republicans under him have been able to defy gravity thanks to a standing reserve of disaffected, previously marginal voters willing to show up and back the right through thick and thin. Given that, the wild margins predicted for Democrats ahead of tonight couldn’t possibly have been real.
Well, they were. An ailing economy and high prices, an idiotic war abroad, a war being waged, here at home, against American cities and immigrant families that in no way resemble the criminals and vagrants the right has been ranting and raving about for years, naked corruption in Washington in the service of adding filigrees to the president’s fascism – these things did mater, it turns out, even to voters who’ve been willing to give the Trump circus multiple chances at the ballot.
A blue Texas would have set the mind reeling at the extent of the backlash alone – what’s happened on top of that is the most consequential midterm result in decades, big enough that this is already being discussed as a realignment election.
But a realignment to what? The majorities Democrats have won comprise candidates on both sides of the party’s internal divide – both the left and the center will have victories and near misses to crow about and parse.
The question of where the party should go........