I am very disappointed in the results I saw tonight. As I watched the results from Georgia come in, it looked increasingly dismal. Watching Ossoff's margin get worse and worse is and should be a blow to the Democratic party's self-esteem, but as a postmortem, let's look at what we should have done to win in GA06 and the other special elections that we have lost since Trump took office.
1) We cannot win by following the same playbook we've been using for the last 40 years.
This should have been clear after losing the presidential election in 2016, but tonight's result should make it crystal clear. People want policy! People want to know how we are going to make their lives better and then they want us to do it. We can't keep attacking the other side's platform and candidates and think that is good enough to win. We are the GD Democratic party! What we are good at is coming up with policy to help people, so if we sink to the Republicans' level by making our entire campaign into a banner saying "Come on, that guy!?" then we have lost what makes us great.
2) Lukewarm candidates don't win.
After Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary, the events which followed were fairly predictable: Clinton shifted to the center, pissed off the left, and lost important voting groups when she needed them in the general election. We cannot have candidates who flip-flop on issues. In 2008, when John McCain lost against Obama, part of the reason was that he turned hard-right after being somewhat of a centrist for years before. The same thing happened to Mitt Romney in 2012 and it was a major black mark on his record. We need candidates who follow through on their promises rather than going back and forth based on what their donors and pollsters tell them. I believe this was a major problem in Ossoff's campaign. Ossoff made big claims about holding Trump accountable for his actions and the policy he planned on instituting when he got into office, but in the final few days of the race, he decided to stop. With that decision, it felt like the soul of his campaign was gone and the polls showed it as last minute polls showed him doing worse and worse. I'm not sure why Ossoff decided to change his mind, but it certainly had an effect on the campaign and may have cost him the whole election.
3) Run everywhere.
Much like Forrest Gump, we need to run from Alabama to the Pacific Ocean, back to the Atlantic and back again. My point is, we need to run everywhere. Despite not winning any of the special elections since Trump took office, every single election had Democratic candidates doing better than expected. In 2018 and 2020, we have really good chances of taking seats all over this country, but we can't be sure about which ones are most vulnerable. To deal with this issue, we have to run everywhere. No Republican should be running unopposed and every left-leaning candidate should get some kind of national help. Yes, I said left-leaning, not Democratic. While we get ready for the 2018 midterms, we need to bury our rivalries with socialists and greens because we are all on the same side. This means that if a Democratic candidate cannot win in a district, we need to support a Green party candidate or a socialist candidate. A coalition-based, 50-state strategy must be the official strategy of the left or whatever victory we achieve will be short-lived.
To make it easy for the DNC leadership to understand, I have summarized the main points here:
1) We cannot win by following the same playbook we've been using for the last 40 years.
This should have been clear after losing the presidential election in 2016, but tonight's result should make it crystal clear. People want policy! People want to know how we are going to make their lives better and then they want us to do it. We can't keep attacking the other side's platform and candidates and think that is good enough to win. We are the GD Democratic party! What we are good at is coming up with policy to help people, so if we sink to the Republicans' level by making our entire campaign into a banner saying "Come on, that guy!?" then we have lost what makes us great.
2) Lukewarm candidates don't win.
After Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary, the events which followed were fairly predictable: Clinton shifted to the center, pissed off the left, and lost important voting groups when she needed them in the general election. We cannot have candidates who flip-flop on issues. In 2008, when John McCain lost against Obama, part of the reason was that he turned hard-right after being somewhat of a centrist for years before. The same thing happened to Mitt Romney in 2012 and it was a major black mark on his record. We need candidates who follow through on their promises rather than going back and forth based on what their donors and pollsters tell them. I believe this was a major problem in Ossoff's campaign. Ossoff made big claims about holding Trump accountable for his actions and the policy he planned on instituting when he got into office, but in the final few days of the race, he decided to stop. With that decision, it felt like the soul of his campaign was gone and the polls showed it as last minute polls showed him doing worse and worse. I'm not sure why Ossoff decided to change his mind, but it certainly had an effect on the campaign and may have cost him the whole election.
3) Run everywhere.
Much like Forrest Gump, we need to run from Alabama to the Pacific Ocean, back to the Atlantic and back again. My point is, we need to run everywhere. Despite not winning any of the special elections since Trump took office, every single election had Democratic candidates doing better than expected. In 2018 and 2020, we have really good chances of taking seats all over this country, but we can't be sure about which ones are most vulnerable. To deal with this issue, we have to run everywhere. No Republican should be running unopposed and every left-leaning candidate should get some kind of national help. Yes, I said left-leaning, not Democratic. While we get ready for the 2018 midterms, we need to bury our rivalries with socialists and greens because we are all on the same side. This means that if a Democratic candidate cannot win in a district, we need to support a Green party candidate or a socialist candidate. A coalition-based, 50-state strategy must be the official strategy of the left or whatever victory we achieve will be short-lived.
To make it easy for the DNC leadership to understand, I have summarized the main points here:
- Run on policy
- Stick to your guns
- Bring back the 50-state strategy
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