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I’m shocked, I must admit, at the outcome of the Massachusetts election. Before the primary it had been widely assumed that the Democratic nominee would be a shoo-in in this state, the most Democratic in the union when measuring by Presidential elections in the last generation. I had not been following the election after the primary and didn’t realize the danger.
It’s hard to make clear statements about "what ifs" in elections. As the Washington Post notes, you don’t want such statements to be "Rorschach tests" that just reflect whatever you think. The uncertainty is made worse by the lack of any exit polls. But we do know that the bottom dropped out on working class votes during this cycle. According to Hart Research pollster Guy Molyneux,
the real story here was much more about class than gender, with just a collapse of working-class support
According to the AFL-CIO:
"Voters, and particularly working-class voters, were responding to the fact that no one was really addressing their needs. They rejected the status quo, they want results, and they didn’t see anybody really fighting for them."
It’s pretty clear to me that the other major Democrat in this campaign, Mike Capuano, understood the significance of this more than the other candidates. My current guess on Coakley is that she drew much early support from the Massachusetts state political machine and then failed to use that machine to her advantage.
I was an early Mike Capuano supporter. Capuano was the sole candidate among the four Democrats competing in the primary that supported Medicare for All. He was the sole candidate to support that aspect of the Massachusetts Democratic Party Platform and one of the seven of ten Massachusetts representatives who had endorsed HR 676. I don’t want to paint Capuano as ideal – he had said before that he’d enact Medicare for All if he were "emperor," not exactly a sign of strident support – but I think he was manifestly superior to all other candidates on health care. Apparently Progressive Democrats of America agreed, because they later endorsed him.
Coakley, on the other hand, supported only the Democratic status quo in Washington, which you can see for example from her health care white paper. With our country having perhaps the most inefficient health care system in the industrialized world, this would be no small matter in any election, let alone one in the middle of a huge health care debate and the biggest economic slump since the Great Depression.
There were probably many winning strategies in this election. But one strategy that would have worked, and the only one that would help the core problems of the country, was tapping into economic populism.
The Coakley defeat seems symptomatic of a larger failure by the left to organize the public, a failure that Noam Chomsky also noted in a recent interview. This defeat is part of the larger question of why the teabaggers are being organized by the right against their own economic interests instead of by the left for their economic interests. It’s also part of the question of why we have organizations like HCAN and Moveon running our effort (as opposed to the likes of Healthcare-NOW and PDA), organizations which on health care embrace bogus, pre-compromised solutions that the public can’t get motivated by or even understand.
I think another question is why Firedoglake has supported these same bogus solutions throughout this process, hewing closely to the agenda of the above organizations. The reasons aren’t that unclear: at least one HCAN staff member writes regular blog posts here. More fundamentally, blogs are in many ways elite outfits, attended by people like you and me who are already concerned with politics, and there’s a huge difference between sound tactics for building a brand and sound strategy for building a mass popular movement. It’s also difficult to network with established Democratic voices if you criticize them too harshly.
In this sense, the people saying "don’t just blame Coakley" for the defeat are right. We shouldn’t just blame Coakley–we should blame ourselves too.
9 Comments
Thanks, khin, This is among the most frustrating things. During the 1970s the Yuppie wing of the Democratic Party began to give up on economic liberalism and emphasized interest and ethnic group liberalism instead. That tendency grew throuigh the years reaching its culmination under the neo-liberal Clinton Presidency. Now, Democrats seem bery uncomfortable about embracing Economic populism and the working class, the historic class basis of the Democratic Party. That’s why the Democrats and the Progressives are so impotent. They’ve given up their historic cause, which si their primare reason for being.
I think you summed it up perfectly letsgetitdone. The shift in the Democratic party under Clinton involved using identity politics and relatively trivial wedge social issues to placate their liberal, elite base while at the same time enacting legislation that was inimical to the interests of the working class, the business (as opposed to the “new class”) middle class and the more “rough around the edges” liberals that look more like libertarians with a social and environmental conscience than anything else.
As a result, it will be extremely difficult for Democrats’s to “rebrand” themselves as real populists. On the one hand, they’ve been in bed with corporate and intellectual elites, too long, and the academic, identity politics thing is a huge turn off to most working and middle class people without advanced degrees from elite educational institutions.
Thanks ihb58. I agree with your amplification, and also agree that it will be difficult for Democrats to go populist now, but if they not I think they will have to leave the stage. In the long run there is no basis for an identity politics political party that defends the interests of the wealthy.
letsgetitdone wrote:
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I totally agree. I always thought one of the best ways of conceptualizing the basic political program of “populism” was to be found in John Kenneth Galbraith’s idea of “countervailing power” even though the term “populism” originated long before Galbraith wrote “The Affluent Society.”
I think one of the larger problems is the way in which people categorize themselves economically, and therefore politically. Back in the day, I was proud to consider myself working class, as was most of my extended family. Now, everybody wants a college degree and wants to think of themselves as middle class, at least. In addition to removing the stigma attached to the word “liberal” by using the label proudly and often, a resurrection of the concept of the “dignity” of all productive work, and the inestimable value of the “working class” to our collective well being should be hammered home over and over and over.
I agree with everything you said, but I don’t agree that the teabaggers are working class. Their demographics don’t show them to be working class at all. The teabaggers are astroturf.
The core reason Coakley lost was that all the indies went for Brown.
Indies tend to be well-educated non-sheep.
That’s the big problem looming ahead for Dems. And I love it.
All good comments (all 4 above me); not much to add. There is a disconnect between the leftie bloggers and the working class, and the working class was the initial base of the Dem party. The neo-Dems have definitely hewed away from that base, while paying lip-service to it and happily looking to the Unions (generally representing more or less working class folks) to hand over money and votes.
While I guess I could be considered more of an elite, my roots are solidly working class. I voted for Clinton with trepidation the first time, and then voted for Nader in the next election. I only voted for Gore in 2000 because I simply couldn’t stand Bush. I’m more than ever ticked off with Gore for backing down so quickly over the FL vote count given the recent Supreme Court decision led by Bush family lap dog, John Roberts. Clinton, Gore, Obama – none represent the working class, nor have they done much that can be considered populist, except for ObamaRahma making pretty speeches.
I agree that Indies in MA either didn’t vote and/or voted for Brown, who seems like a total dolt to me.
How we get a viable party structure is a good question at this stage. Sorry that I don’t have better answers.
I do agree with one of the prior posts, though, that the majority of tea partiers are not working class. To be sure, some are, but the majority are members of the conservative middle class well-educated elite, who have bought into the trickle down rhetoric & no taxes, no taxes, no taxes after years of indoctrination by Pat Robertson & his ilk.
Along with Coakley’s lack of effort, Brown’s Sarah Palin kind of appeal, progressives sitting out, jobs, those who disagree with the health care legislation (which I think is over stated). I think Senator Kennedy has been able to keep the lid on the prejudices that still exist in Boston and other neighborhoods in Mass.
You were not alone. Neither was Martha Coakley.