David Michael Miller
Ever since that dark and gloomy night in November 2016, Democrats have been debating what went wrong and how it can be corrected in 2020.
The thinking falls pretty much into two camps.
Camp A believes that the party’s 2016 strategy should have worked then and has an even better chance of working now. That strategy is to double-down on their appeals to college-educated, relatively affluent white urbanites, minorities and young people. The thinking is that the country is growing more diverse every day and the demographic glacier is advancing. Camp A’s favorite candidates are Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Camp B wants to reach out and win back some of the blue collar Trump voters who had voted for Barack Obama in at least one of the two previous elections. Camp B’s favorite candidate is Joe Biden, but if he stays on the road to self-destruction they might consider Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg. John Hickenlooper, John Delaney and Michael Bennet are also moderates but they would seem to have no chance at getting the nomination.
I’ve always been a Camp B guy myself, actually even before the 2016 election. My last blog before the inevitable victory of Hillary Clinton was to voice my hope that she would reach out to alienated and frustrated blue collar voters who were so desperate that they would even vote for a candidate who was clearly as unqualified and downright repulsive as Donald Trump.
Now an analysis by New York Times reporter Nate Cohn lends more credence to the Camp B argument. Cohn, who writes for the Times’ super analytical Upshot column, suggests that Wisconsin is the “tipping point” state for 2020, just as it was in 2016.
What he means is that whoever wins over Badger state voters is likely to win the Electoral College as well. His analysis suggests that the Camp A double-down strategy may well produce more overall votes but only because it will run up the numbers in already securely blue states like California. Cohn estimates that Trump could lose the popular vote by as much as five million and still win the Electoral College.
The problem is that the Camp A strategy could wind up churning up higher vote counts in deep blue states at the expense of winning states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I don’t need to point out that in the Electoral College a candidate wins just as many electoral votes by winning a state by one vote as if he won it by a million. Camp A would turn already blue states deeper blue while turning purple states red.
Trump’s approval rating in Wisconsin is already a couple points higher than it is nationally (Cohn suspects the real number is maybe four points higher) and there’s reason to suspect that some of his voters just sat out the 2018 midterms as opposed to being won over by the Democrats. If they show up again next year because he’s on the ballot it could be déjà vu all over again.
In 2016, Trump famously lost the popular vote by a historic margin for a winning candidate (Clinton beat him by almost three million votes) but he won where it counted in the Electoral College because he won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a combined 77,000 votes. That was a half of one percent of the 13.8 million votes cast in those three states.
The point Camp B is trying to make is that you don’t need to win a ton of blue collar voters back to the cause. A wafer thin slice of them in just the right places would get you what you needed in the Electoral College vote. “Wisconsin is the pivotal state in this analysis, and a one-point difference there could potentially be decisive,” Cohn writes.
This is a good light in which to watch the next Democratic presidential debates, which take place July 30 and July 31 in Detroit. In my view, the first debate was downright alarming. the Camp B favorite Joe Biden had a horrible night, while two Camp A stars, Harris and Warren, did exceptionally well. Even more concerning, much of the field followed the party’s most ardent activists to the far left on issues like health care and immigration. Eliminating private health insurance and decriminalizing illegal border crossings might be popular among party activists, but these positions are probably deadly in a general election.
What I and a lot folks in Camp B would like to see is a trimming of those sails and for candidates like Biden, Klobuchar and Buttigieg to make a much more forceful case for moderation. Because in the end, I’m betting that a lot of Camp A activists just want to win. They might support a candidate who isn’t as ideologically pure as they would like if they are convinced that that candidate has a better shot at winning Wisconsin and, by doing so, beating Trump.
[Editor's note: This post was updated with the correct dates of the upcoming debates.]
