The doomed voting rights push and the biggest problem Democrats have; Redistricting hysteria versus reality

The push for comprehensive voting rights legislation in Congress is all but dead. That has been obvious for months now and is a big indictment of the Democratic leadership for not pulling the plug sooner. It has been, at best, a big waste of time and nothing but performative theater. Otherwise, it is actively causing harm by giving people the false hope that it could actually pass only to have them disappointed when the inevitable happens. Once again, this is reflective of what I consider to be the single biggest problem afflicting the Democratic Party.

That problem is the inability of many party elites to distinguish activists from voters. I define party elites to mean elected officials, congressional and campaign staffers, party officials, advocacy groups and donors. While not everyone in those groups fails to make that distinction, many do. The most recent example was the endorsement of defunding the police by many left-wing advocacy groups despite it being irrelevant to their missions and radioactive.

The good news is Democratic voters are sane. That has been shown over and over again in primaries and in recent elections in blue areas. Democratic voters are not clamoring for a revolution. They do not want to burn everything down. Their priorities are the same as most everyone else, i.e., schools, healthcare, jobs, etc. They are not obsessed with the latest cultural flash points and have no idea what the latest woke buzzword is. They want immigration reform, but do not want open borders. They want police accountability, but want safe streets, too, and do not think crime is okay. Like most everyone, they are not obsessed with what is going on in DC and do not follow the legislative sausage making process. They do not spend hours a day on Twitter nor do they watch MSNBC.

The bad news is that some party elites do some or all of those things. While party elites are small in number, they have a large microphone, lots of money and can get attention very easily. It is in those circles where cultural flash points are all the rage and where those who are the most vocal are treated as being the most representative. It is in those circles where calling oneself a socialist is cool, police are bad, pointing out increases in crime is racist and school closures did not cause any harm.

In the case of the push for voting rights, it is activists and donors who are the driving force behind it, not rank-and-file Democratic voters. To be clear, I support the voting rights legislation and strongly oppose Republican efforts at voter suppression. I support eliminating the filibuster and believe that we should do everything possible to increase voter turnout as a good thing in and of itself. That said, the idea that passing voting rights legislation is the only thing that will save our democracy is Trumpian level demagoguery. Comparing voter ID laws to Jim Crow is despicable and shame on Democrats, including Biden, for doing that. At best, apocalyptic claims do nothing to persuade people. At worst, they can harm your own causes by driving people away and can become self-fulfilling. If Democrats come to believe all is lost, they may be less inclined to vote. If you think that is just theoretical, look at what happened to Republicans in Georgia after two months of Trump saying the election was stolen.

The biggest threat we have to worry about with respect to our democracy is what happens AFTER votes are cast. The voting rights legislation being pushed does not address that. Reforms to the Electoral Count Act can address that and they should be pursued. The biggest obstacle right now to getting comprehensive voting rights legislation is the filibuster. As much as I wish it could be eliminated, the votes are not there. Joe Manchin has been crystal clear about that and he will not change his mind. I think he is wrong, but he is not going to budge and nobody can make him. Just as they have done with Build Back Better, the Democratic leadership has dug its head in the sand thinking they could convince him to.*

Why would the Democratic leadership waste so much time trying to do what was so obviously not going to happen? The (hopefully) most likely and optimistic explanation is that they do not want to tell their activists that they will have to take a loss (alternatively, they really believe their own BS and we are in serious trouble). In their defense, they have the narrowest majorities so they need to keep most everyone happy to some degree. Maybe they have known the whole time that voting rights legislation would not pass and just want to make it look like they did all they could and now it is time to move on to work on things that can actually pass. I hope that is the case, but it is still an indictment of them. What it means is that they were worrying about activists who have no real constituencies and wasted the better part of a year trying to appease them.

That is the biggest obstacle to Build Back Better passing. Plenty can be enacted with Joe Manchin’s support that will do so much good for so many people. To get it passed, however, many interest groups will have to be told that they cannot get what they want, i.e., no paid parental leave, no child care. They will be unhappy about it, but they are irrelevant. They will kick and scream and tweet, but that is it. The reality is there is no massive constituency for causes like child care even if it will help many people. Democrats are acting like elephants afraid of mice. Their unwillingness to say no to a small number of loudmouths is putting in danger their ability to get anything enacted. The alternative to not passing a more focused Build Back Better is not to pass every single liberal fantasy. It is to pass nothing.

Every single cause has its advocates and they tend to be very vocal. Vocal is the key word. While they are vocal, they are not numerous. Very few issues have large constituencies clamoring for action on them, especially on the federal level. That is because a huge majority of voters do not follow politics closely, if at all. In DC, the legislative process and latest five-second plot twists are all the rage. Activists and political reporters who are “extremely online” eat that stuff up. Voters, in contrast, have no idea what any of that stuff is.

How can this be fixed?

The simplest way for Democrats to solve the problem of activists being mistaken for voters is to stop doing that, but how? If nothing else, it would be nice to just remind Democratic officeholders and candidates of who their own voters are. Beyond that, those working on campaigns and for members of Congress need to have it drilled into their heads that they are not remotely representative of your average voter. They are young, well-educated and very liberal. Most voters are none of those things.

The single best thing that could be done to combat the tendency to mistake activists for voters would be for Democratic officeholders and candidates and especially their staffers to get off Twitter. That site really is the source of almost all of the problems with activists. I know because I am on it and I see many Democratic officials and staffers on it all the time. Even though Biden is not on it, his staff is and it shows in many of the statements that are put out by them. It is on that site where the most active people are overwhelmingly liberal even though they are a tiny number of people. Spending enough time there can easily give you a warped sense of what really matters. It is on that site where ideas like defund the police are popular. It is almost certainly because every single left-wing advocacy group's leadership is on that site obsessively that they almost all endorsed defunding the police at more or less the same time in 2020.

More than anything else, Democratic officeholders and candidates are going to need to have some serious discipline. They have to resist the urge to bow down to activists who are the most vocal. It was dismaying watching the 2020 primary unfold as scores of candidates took toxically unpopular positions on a whole host of issues just to appease a handful of activists. Examples included candidates endorsing decriminalizing border crossings, giving insurance to illegal immigrants, speaking in woke jargon that nobody understands, advocating for abolishing private insurance and banning fracking. One might have thought that the candidate who did that the most, Elizabeth Warren, turning out to be an epic flop would have sent a clear signal to everyone about what Democratic voters want, but that would be mistaken.

In the end, it will be the job of Democratic elected officials and candidates to push back against the urge to bow down to activists. Activists will not stop doing what they are doing. They are not going to stop taking toxically unpopular positions nor are they going to stop acting in ways that turn off a large majority of people. Democrats cannot silence them nor should they try to. They should make clear to them that while they can have a seat at the table, they are just a few of many people there. If they act in unhelpful ways, then Democrats should just ignore them and focus on what voters want because that is who decides elections. If the choice is between alienating some loudmouth activists and being subject to mean tweets or alienating broad swaths of voters, the correct course of action should be obvious.

Redistricting is going well for Democrats

Everyone seems to have a tendency to fight the last battle. There is no better example of that than Democrats constantly worrying about gerrymandering guaranteeing them electoral doom. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a Democrat whine about how there was no way they could win back the House in 2018 because of gerrymandering, I would be a billionaire. I think we all know what happened in the House elections in 2018. Articles like this one from late last year exemplify the panic porn that Democrats and some members of the press have bought into. It has been an article of faith among Democrats that Republicans will gerrymander the latest congressional maps so effectively that they will wipe out Democrats everywhere and win the House back easily just because of that.

Fortunately, reality is very different. As it turns out, Democrats are actually poised to come out better off after the latest round of redistricting than they are now with the current map. That is despite the fact that they unilaterally disarmed in some blue states. There are many reasons for this. One is that Republicans have opted to play defense in some states, like Texas, rather than try to pick up as many seats as possible. Another is that Democrats control more state governorships and legislatures than last time and have been much more aggressive in doing their own gerrymandering. In addition, redistricting commissions in states like Ohio and Michigan have limited Republicans’ ability to draw maps in their favor. Yesterday, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymander and ordered it to be redrawn, which could give Democrats an extra 2-3 seats.

When all is said and done, the median congressional seat will have voted for Biden by 4-5 points. That is basically the same as his national margin and is greater than the current median House district margin of 2.5 points for Biden. For years, the conventional wisdom was that Democrats would have to win the national congressional vote by at least 4 points to be able to win or keep the House. Now, it is likely closer to just 1 point. In other words, whichever party wins the popular vote will likely win the House, which is as it should be. Democrats are still likely to lose the House in November, but that is just because that is how midterms work. The good news is they could very well win it back in 2024.

To be clear, gerrymandering is bad. The biggest victim of this cycle of redistricting is competitive districts. However, that may not be true in a few more cycles. Districts are only redrawn every 10 years. A lot can happen between now and 2030 to make a non-competitive district competitive. For example, I used to live in Georgia’s 6^th, the most famous district ever. When I lived there in 2014, it was blood red. Tom Price never had to lift a finger to win by more than 20 points. By 2018, a Democrat was representing it and Biden won it easily in 2020. While it has been redrawn to become redder, that may not last for long given Georgia’s current trends. To make it redder, Republicans had to cede a neighboring district to Democrats in suburban Atlanta. When I was there just 7 years ago, the idea that Republicans would have to cede a whole swath of suburban Atlanta because of how blue it had gotten was inconceivable and yet here we are.

*Kyrsten Sinema is also opposed to getting rid of the filibuster. Unlike Joe Manchin, my sympathy for her is almost zero. She does not come from a red state and her opposition to tax increases of almost any sort is unacceptable from a Democrat. She has also opposed allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, one of the most popular things there is. While I think Joe Manchin has been wrong on some things with respect to Build Back Better, Sinema's opposition has been much more damaging and her demands much more regressive. Her approach to politics is a dead end. She combines cultural liberalism with Chamber of Commerce-style economics, which appeals to approximately nobody. Culturally moderate/conservative, economically progressive Democrats in red states are good and more should run for office. The Sinema approach is a one way ticket to irrelevance.