If you want to steal a seat in a red district, it might help not to run a candidate who carries a major creepiness factor and seems to be doing a Barack Obama impersonation whenever he talks - but without any of Obama's charisma.
But panicky Democrats are right: It's not enough just to run against Donald Trump when the voters don't think too highly of you either, and when they know full well that if they put you back in charge, all they're going to get is more of the policies that gave us eight years of piss-poor growth, mounting debt and record low labor participation rates.
Democrats don't think like that, though. At least not most of them. They still seem to think the whole problem is mere branding:
Democrats Seethe After Georgia Loss: ‘Our Brand Is Worse Than Trump’
But Ms. Pelosi also said it was time for Democrats to “put forth our message,” and promised an economic one that “we can all embrace and utilize in our districts.”
She did not directly address the sometimes caustic criticism of her leadership from skeptics within the party. Several lawmakers who have opposed her in the past argued that Ms. Pelosi would undermine the party’s candidates for as long as she holds her post.
Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, an open critic of Ms. Pelosi, called the Georgia result “frustrating” and urged a shake-up at the top of the party.
Representative Kathleen Rice of New York told CNN the entire Democratic leadership team should go.
Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, who tried to unseat Ms. Pelosi as House minority leader late last fall, said she remained a political millstone for Democrats. But Mr. Ryan said the Democratic brand had also become “toxic” in much of the country because voters saw Democrats as “not being able to connect with the issues they care about.”
“Our brand is worse than Trump,” he said.
To a Democrat, ever-growing government is the answer to every question
Ryan comes closest to the truth here, although I suspect he's a little off on how he would define "issues they care about." To a Democrat, if anyone in America has a problem, the answer must be that a politician confiscates money from someone who has lots of it and uses it to solve your problem for you.
That is not what most Americans want. They want the ability to solve their own problems without all kinds of governmental, cultural and societal interference. Every so often, Americans are willing to give expansive government a chance, at least on a limited scale, as a prospective answer to the problems of everyday people. But inevitably they observe that it's not the answer, and when voters start to figure that out, Democrats find themselves out of power once again.
If Democrats really want to understand why their brand is in the toilet, they need to consider that there's a difference between "connecting" with voters and really understanding what their priorities are. To a Democrat, ever-growing government is the answer to every question. So every attempt to "connect" with voters is really just an attempt by Democrats to persuade those voters that government can solve all their problems. If the voter buys it, the Democrat connected. If he doesn't, they didn't.
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Throw in cultural insanity, moral degradation and campus fascism, and it's really no surprise why Democrats' brand is in such bad shape
Rarely has there been a better example than ObamaCare. It's a mess and everyone who's not blindly partisan knows it, but Democrats can't get behind any change in the law because they don't want to admit their big-government health care bonanza turned into such a fiasco. They were willing to tweak it when they had the White House, but then they turned around and blamed congressional Republicans for not willing to settle for tweaks of a problem that clearly requires much more than that.
Meanwhile, premiums are soaring, insurers are bailing and provider options are narrowing. Voters are not stupid. They know the Democrats caused this problem, and even if they're not excited about the Republican solution, they can clearly see the Democrats are contributing nothing to solving the problem. In fact, they're willing to bring all Senate business to a halt next week in order to keep the problem from being solved.
Throw in cultural insanity, moral degradation and campus fascism, and it's really no surprise why Democrats' brand is in such bad shape. It's because they're terrible at governing. Address that, and maybe they can change their fortunes.
If you want to steal a seat in a red district, it might help not to run a candidate who carries a major creepiness factor and seems to be doing a Barack Obama impersonation whenever he talks - but without any of Obama's charisma.
But panicky Democrats are right: It's not enough just to run against Donald Trump when the voters don't think too highly of you either, and when they know full well that if they put you back in charge, all they're going to get is more of the policies that gave us eight years of piss-poor growth, mounting debt and record low labor participation rates.
Democrats don't think like that, though. At least not most of them. They still seem to think the whole problem is mere branding:
