How Democrats Should Be Approaching 2022
Democrats seem resigned to historic trends and a sense of political doom that nothing will avoid catastrophic "off cycle" losses in 2022. They need to snap out of it ... for everyone's sake.
Publisher’s Riff
As the 2022 midterm, state legislative and gubernatorial race cycle fast approaches, we should be wondering: What exactly should Democrats do to win it? At the moment, most Democrats seem casually resigned to historical trends. As FiveThirtyEight reminds us “[s]ince 1946, the president’s party has lost, on average, 27 House seats.”
Democrats will need to ignore the history.
Why is this actually a very important and non-partisan mix of question and statement? Because we're faced with multiple threats rapidly eating away at the fabric of democracy from white nationalist Confederates recharging old Civil War energy and posing as Republicans. Should "Republicans" (Confederates) retake the U.S. House and Senate in 2022, this becomes a very real chessboard check on the Biden White House. Based on the "Republican" (Confederate) party's rejection of official and certified 2020 Electoral College results and the failed Jan. 6th attack (because “insurrection” just seems too mild a term to use for how truly deliberate and coordinated it was) this will be much more grave and dangerous than just another unfortunate midterm election trend whereby the opposition party simply takes over the legislature from the party dominating the White House. No, the new opposition, soiled from its losses, shouldn’t expect Confederates to take them by the hand and happily skip down the yellow brick road of “bipartisanship.”
We are all very aware of what this means should Confederates take back Capitol Hill. There will be an immediate, and potentially, successful attempt to impeach President Biden for simply being in the White House and existing as the antithesis to rampant Confederate "Big Lie" mythology surrounding the 2020 election results. Some scandal will be manufactured, exaggerated and the media will largely validate it with ill-sourced “both-sides” conversation. Most (if not all) “Never Trumper” Confederates, caught up in winning and going along with the party line, will predictably go along with the vote to impeach Biden. Senate conviction is uncertain and will depend on the margin of Confederate control; but, then again, Senate Confederates throughout history - especially since the creation of the filibuster in the 1840s - have been persistently creative at bending rules.
Impeachment is a highly likely scenario so long as Trump continues wielding unabated control over the Confederate party. At the very least, if a Biden impeachment does not happen, we will certainly see this other very likely set of scenarios: 1) a complete stall on the rest of Biden's first term policy agenda complimented by 2) an appropriations gutting of any agency, primarily the Justice Department, that plays a key role in what is evolving into the likely federal criminal prosecution of Trump, his political allies and other Confederates for various crimes, hence eliminating legal jeopardy, augmented by 3) a very prolonged and disastrous federal government shutdown (or consecutive shutdowns) along with 4) the cemented end of all federal voting rights protections. This will leave Biden so handicapped and politically weak by 2024 that many voters will not understand how checks and balances work, that the ensuing chaos has been designed by Confederates, and it will fuel an intense electoral backlash combined with a depressed Democratic base vote - such as Black voting blocs in key states - in addition to finalized pro-Confederate structural changes to election administration and process in most, if not all, the 50 states.
Democrats are, literally, the only organized political institution with enough money, members and current clout to block these scenarios - unless there's another major political institution or party in all 50 states with as much funding, mobilization resources and collective voting power that we're not aware of. Tell us …. waiting … oh, ok, didn’t think so.
And, so, it's like the rather tattered and poorly trained Union Army in 1861 at the start of the Civil War: if you're among the enslaved Black population, or in the freed Black population or a committed abolitionist fearing the final penetrating blow from Confederate armies close to Washington, D.C., who else do you have to keep White fascists from completely dismantling the U.S. government and your last chance at the complete abolition of slavery? Exactly. So, you regroup and build up the Union Army that wins Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga in 1863 and encourages the kind of political leadership that finally hires General Ulysses Grant in 1864 to wrap it all up into a Union win and Reconstruction soon after.
Fast forward 160 years later and Democrats are in that role of a very battered, dysfunctional and weak Union Army back then - in political terms. But, this is political war right now and everyone should be doing whatever it takes to decisively win the political war so it doesn’t explode into an actual shooting war. The current Democratic Party is what we've got to work with at the moment. If it's not that, we should then be prepared for a complete political collapse unlike anything we've seen in nearly 200 years. Hence, it's absolutely crucial for Democrats to first recognize that this is a moment of full political war (sans the munitions). There is no relaxing simply because Biden-Harris won in 2020. The 2022 counter-assault must be back on offensive and relentless, despite all the current structural advantages Confederates (called "Republicans") enjoy at the moment through voter suppression and Census-instigated gerrymandering. Assaults must be a ceaseless, merciless barrage of legal actions and political maneuvering wherever opportunities arise in an effort to exhaust Confederates and weaken their ability to wage state legislative, gubernatorial, Congressional and U.S. Senate campaign warfare in 2022.
Messaging will be key to all of this. Democrats' wobbly coalition of Black, Indigenous, Brown, Asian/Pacific Islander and progressive-to-center left Whites coalition must be prioritized, replenished and energized for the current political war; "Republicans" must be immediately and openly reframed as "Confederates" who are actively staging a fascist political coup that will be 10 times the scale of the January 6th insurrection, and this is how they're doing it and this is how to stop it. That's part of the core national message: "we're the party who is trying to protect you from anti-democracy violence and build a better future for you, but they're the Confederacy that's just trying to take that future away from you."
In addition to that, a second layer of messaging must be localized. Democrats must micro-tailor messaging that makes them everything to everybody. There must be a protection and prosperity plan sold to every major voting bloc group that's already a part of the Democratic Party coalition … and the blocs that are not. That will mean aggressive selling to so-called "moderate Republicans" who can't accept their party's role in Jan. 6th and Independents who say they’re on the fence but quietly vote according to their racial superiority complex. Try to siphon some of those voters to play guerilla political warfare for House seats in red districts, to slip in and take Senate seats and to defend or retake Governors' mansions. There should be no alliances with "Never Trumpers" who pose as if their against the so-called "Big Lie," but still support or don't condemn Confederate voter suppression efforts. There should only be non-negotiable agreements that they help to combat voter suppression efforts.
In summation: Democrats will need to start knuckling up now and acting as if everything is on the line. Because, despite the euphoria of 2020, it really is.