E. J. Dionne of WaPo thinks the GOP and President Trump are in trouble due to their selection of tactics:
A fifth of the country can provide an ample audience for a cable network and a lot of radio hosts. It is not enough to win an election. In the nominally nonpartisan Wisconsin judge’s race, as Michael Tomasky noted in the Daily Beast, several counties that had moved from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 swung back to Rebecca Dallet, the choice strongly endorsed by Democrats. And this came in a low-turnout race. In the Obama years, small turnouts benefited Republicans. The energy gap means that this pattern is now reversed.
A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Friday brought home additional concrete results of this imbalance. It found an astonishing 1 in 5 Americans reporting that they had joined protests and rallies since the beginning of 2016 — and that 70 percent of them disapproved of Trump.
The dilemma for Republican politicians tempted to cut and run from Trump is that doing so might only further dispirit the party’s core and diminish Trump’s already parlous popularity. For his part, Trump knows only the politics of outrage. It is looking like a strategy with a very short shelf life.
But for me, there’s 7 months left before the mid-term elections. Will those who’ve been stirred up by Trump’s incompetence remain politically engaged for those seven months? For that matter, for the next 2 years and 7 months?
It’s one thing to have become interested because you had to, which means speaking out and voting. But how about running for office? If you’re frozen out by the local politicos because you’re the newbie on the block, will that alienate the public-spirited citizen, and will she then broadcast her negative experience with (presumably) the Democratic machine that disallowed her desire to serve? The Democrats are going to need to make the new guys welcome.
This may not be difficult in districts where the Democrats have not been noticeably active, i.e., those districts dominated by the Republicans. The Democrats may welcome anyone willing to invest their time and energies in a possibly fruitless run for a seat, be it at the state level or the Federal level, just so they can say they competed. But if the novice wins? Can the Democrats stomach that, work with the new legislator? I’ve been wondering about recent unexpected special election victors Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) and Representative Conor Lamb (D-PA), who are reportedly both relatively conservative Democrats. Can the progressive wing of the Democratic Party temper their leftward, and allegedly intolerant, lean enough to work creatively and positively with these two on projects of importance?
These are just two of the questions which face the Democrats over the coming months.
