(This op-ed first appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Elections are always followed by another tradition: finger-pointing season. I’ve spent my entire life in politics right here in western Pennsylvania, which became the looking glass for the entire nation as people tried to figure out what has happened to turn the two parties into battle camps.
Allow me to offer a few things I’ve learned.
Lessons for Republicans
It’s not all about TV. We need to compete with the Democrats in terms of field work. Knocking on doors and asking someone to vote for a candidate remains the most effective way of persuading voters.
Go beyond polling. An era of endless polling has left us with the misimpression that elections are only about reading peoples’ minds. In truth, elections are also about changing peoples’ minds. True, polls tell us what issues resonate with voters, but we need to identify the unarticulated and unfulfilled aspirations of voters. This is a lesson taught in 1991 by the late Harris Wofford who was appointed senator to succeed John Heinz. Wofford’s advisors – chief among them, James Carville – realized that health care for the middle class was increasingly a point of anxiety. Polls had shown that the number one issue identified by voters was jobs – but this will always be the case, just as a sufficient supply of oxygen would trump jobs if you put it on a choice of polling questions. Wofford and Carville recognized that it was the unrealized concerns that mattered. When that case was put to voters in a persuasive way, it allowed Wofford to overcome a political juggernaut known as Dick Thornburgh.
Achievement still matters. Stacy Garrity took the reins at Treasury and immediately laid out a series of goals: return more abandoned property than anyone else, reform how state pensions invest, expand the college savings program. Treasury might be the dullest important job among the statewide, but Stacy showed that a well-articulated record of accomplishment can be an unassailable fortress against political anger ginned up by an opponent. She ended Tuesday night with more votes than any other candidate on the ballot, including Donald Trump, and became the highest vote-getter in modern history, surpassing even Gov. Josh Shapiro. That’s how future stars are made.
Tamp down the anger. Watching television should not induce post-traumatic stress disorder. Bring some joy to the thing. A good lesson here is an ad produced by Pittsburgh’s own ColdSpark media, on behalf of state House candidate Michael Perich. Going up against a well-entrenched and much-liked incumbent, the Perich camp produced “Wrong Way Matzie,” which employed an animated picture of the incumbent flying the wrong way, interspersed with old movie clips and bright music that broke through the angry clutter of other ads and entertained people as well. Perich came within a hair’s breadth of winning and Perich, even in defeat, doesn’t look like just another angry politician. In short: Happy warriors win friends.
Lessons for Democrats
Un-fringe yourselves. Party activists on both sides have traditionally tended to the extremes. This was first noted in 1984 by political scientist Emmett Buell Jr. who saw that candidates for party delegate in New Hampshire weren’t exactly middle-roaders. That has accelerated in both parties, but it is nowhere as vivid as in the exotic assortment of wailers, cause-finders and all-around scolds that now steers the party of JFK and Truman. This has been made all the uglier by the emergence of a brand of antisemitism that hinges on the notion that Israel is an imposition on the Middle East rather than a refuge for persecuted Jews who practice democracy. Here in Allegheny County, the largest city is run by a cadre of leftists incapable of balancing the books, and the county council is a haven for loud extremists, some of them so supportive of the poor that they would make more of them by taxing the middle-class into poverty. Nationally, the Democrats have chosen to politicize things that should not be political and taken the tar brush to people who are religious or just out of step with the current fashion. Think about this: the Catholic vote used to be reliably Democratic. This year, the only Catholic on the national ballot was JD Vance.
Take off the robes and mortarboard. Class in this nation was once defined by income. Today, class is just as readily identified by educational attainment. A conservative university professor is a museum-quality find. This correlation between university degree and liberal politics is not a result of one causing the other. It is a result of one group taking over academia and turning it into a place where dissent is strongly encouraged, but only so long as it conforms with the liberal orthodoxies of the academy. I have news for them: a boilermaker, welder or truck-driver will soon be the only middle-class wage-earner able to send their child to college without amassing debt. Self-aggrandizing piety is pretty much the only luxury still available to the overburdened university student. Democrats need more than universities to promote their message and that means not just listening to non-college voters. It means taking them seriously.
The Gender Gap runs both ways. The press has long focused on the leftward political drift of women and suggested that this means there’s something wrong with the Republicans. A bit of introspection would help here. Men voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, much as they have for other Republicans. That’s a gender gap, too. And it’s not going to be solved by explaining away differences of opinion with terms like “toxic masculinity” or, my favorite, “mansplaining,” which has come to mean any unwelcome opinion from a male. Figure out why men aren’t voting for your party. I’d venture to say that it’s because, increasingly, they don’t feel welcome.
I close in noting that every election carries its own, sometimes unique, lessons. There is one that stands out this year: when it comes to the people, the system works. Now, it’s up to the people they elevated to make things work as well.
