A week ago, The Tampa Bay Times editorial board took the unusual step of begging the Florida Democratic Party to get its shit together. This cry for help in editorial form was entitled “Florida Democrats have an everything problem,” which was meant as a cheeky rejoinder to the state leaderships’ admission that the party has a “messaging problem.”
The editorial runs through the sad and lengthy litany of bad decisions and legislative mismanagement at the state level for the entirety of the current century and says:
This, of course, is bad news for Democrats but also for Florida’s democracy. A state government without the checks of a multiparty system is a recipe for authoritarian abuse. No wonder Florida Republicans have rolled over Democrats on everything from new voting restrictions to state preemption to COVID-19.
I wish I could say this is an example of the MSM being wired for Republicans, but in this case, the editors are correct. The state party is a basket case and has been losing ground for ages. And we’ve got a humongous authoritarian abuse and corruption problem here because the GOP perpetrators know they won’t be held accountable. That’s on voters, but it’s on the state party too.
To get a flavor of how rampant the corruption is, read this excellent summary at Billy Townsend’s Substack about the DeSantis-appointed grift-mavens who’ve taken over the Florida Department of Education and converted it into a funnel that pours taxpayer dollars into the GOP education grift empire. As Billy notes, this scandal could be weaponized against DeSantis because he owns that department — and he sold out the rural MAGA choads* Florida schoolkids to enrich Jeb Bush’s “Miami mafia.” Here’s how Billy puts it:
Your state-school system — and the state agency that operates it under the authority and workplace culture of Governor Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran — has become a deeply cynical state-run criminal enterprise that victimizes children, communities, taxpayers, and its own honest employees just trying to survive.
That’s as clear a statement of the problem as you’ll see, and Billy notes that media outlets and a couple of gubernatorial candidates (Fried and Taddeo) have paid some attention to the issue. But here’s the challenge: Will the state party be ready to help Florida Democrats weaponize this narrative (and other outrages) and wrest the governorship from DeSantis’s grubby mitts?
Will they get the “messaging” back on track with a compelling and true narrative about rampant Republican corruption? It’s hard to be optimistic based on past performance.
We have some great electeds, and also some crappy ones. There are many excellent county-level party organizations in the state, along with some crappy ones. But the state-level party has been consistently bad for decades. In my opinion, the main problems are that leaders rely on the same old incompetent consultants, plus a crab-bucket mentality among too many in party leadership.
To be fair, it is a large and complex state. The endless stream of wingnut retirees flocking to places like The Villages makes change a heavy lift. But individual Florida Democrats are thinking about the problem and coming up with solutions, even if the state party won’t. In a recent letter to FL Dems leadership, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber suggested opening our closed primary to unaffiliated voters, who currently make up a larger share of the FL electorate than Democrats or Republicans:
In his letter, he blames Republicans for widening political divisions, accusing them of “becoming even more hardened, as otherwise reasonable conservatives are adopting the rhetoric and false narrative of the hard-right wing of their party. Or they sit silently.”
“I am not convinced our opponents are presently capable of breaking free from this vortex. Few seem willing to stand up to their putative leader. So the horrible rhetoric will continue to be even more outrageous. Divisions more pronounced. Violence even more common, the inevitable endpoint being a democracy that is too frayed and brittle to survive,” Gelber wrote.
“That is why I believe it is time for our state party to do what it can to take steps to address this division and hyper-partisanship by reaching out to more than our own political base,” Gelber continued, getting to his main point. “Florida Democrats need to open up our statewide and partisan primaries to unaffiliated independent voters.”
He also made the argument that the Florida Democratic Party should do so both to be more inclusive and to force candidates to craft broader appealing messages.
Florida currently has closed primaries. There’s no same-day registration — voters have to sign up at least 29 days before an election. Gelber proposes opening the Democratic primary unilaterally. I highly doubt Republicans would agree to open their primary too since hard-right Republicans have a lock on the statehouse, so from their point of view, there’s no problem.
I’m conflicted about the proposal for a few reasons. Unilaterally opening the primary would give Republicans and hard-right unaffiliated voters an opportunity to fuck with the primary, though I question how much of an effect those types of operations have, other than giving blowhards something to talk about. But if shenanigans could work anywhere, it would probably work in Florida, where the media is even more fragmented than it is in the country at large.
I’m also not sure it’s a good idea to give people who aren’t invested enough in the direction of the party to register as Democrats a say in our primaries. That said, something has to happen to blow up the current citadel of fail. That’s why party leaders will almost certainly reject Gelber’s proposal, which is a cry for help of another type.
Open thread.
*Edited because the injured party in my original description was far too narrow — DeSantis sold out every Florida schoolkid, not just rural and/or MAGA area students.
Steve in the ATL
Related question: Vanity Fair magazine–worth a try for $15 for a year?
Chris
Dad lives out of the country but made it a point to come back to Florida in the last two election cycles to campaign for the Democrats. His reports on the state of the party weren’t optimistic, even if they were from ground level.
japa21
It’s almost as if the leadership of the Florida Dem party is composed of sleeper agents of the GOP.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
can’t speak to FL Dems, but I’m always leery of “messaging” arguments. To take it away from politics, I’m listening to an NPR story right now that says the number of people seeking Covid boosters is actually falling. I’ll concede that some of the messaging from federal authorities about testing and isolation advice has been a bit confusing, but “Get vaxxed, get boosted” has been pretty clear to me since about Thanksgiving.
I’ve been saying for years: I don’t get how so many people are so indifferent to trump’s corruption, incompetence and malevolence, but I don’t blame Democratic “messaging”. I don’t even blame the media. The problem isn’t the water or the leading, it’s the horses.
wonkie
Is the problem incompetent Dem leadership? I’m not at all familiar with FL, but I have had the impression for a while that the wrong people were in decision-making positions down there. Is there any way to evict the bad leaders and get better people in place? Republicans have been out=performing Dems in voter registration. Val Demings is within two points of Rubio, but I figure she’ll lose by a lot more than that, given the crappy GOTV efforts FL Dems have made in the past.
Ocotillo
I was going to say, about opening primary voting to non-affiliated, we have it here in Texas and it doesn’t seem to be an issue and then my mind caught up with that thought. Nevermind.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Makes one wonder how Dem leadership gets to those positions. That might be the problem. In my experience, State party conventions elect those leadership positions but who attends the convention? Those that have both the time and money to do so
Betty
It seems as if change has to start with mobilizing people at the local level. That takes time to make a difference in the party apparatus. You have said your local area probably is not fertile ground for Democrats. Tough one.
Old School
It seems there’s a little bit of the MSM being wired for Republicans in the editorial:
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree too many people don’t take their civic responsibilities seriously and/or are susceptible to disinformation and demagoguery, but if you want to change the bad outcomes that flow from that, better messaging has to be part of the equation.
@wonkie: I do think bad leadership is part of it. The TBT editorial I linked up top goes into a bit more detail about that. One huge problem has been that consultants have viewed Hispanic voters as a monolith, and they aren’t, so they get blindsided when various groups respond in unexpected ways.
After Trump won Florida by an even wider margin in 2020 than he had in 2016, there was a fleeting moment when it looked like the state level party might really change. But they just reshuffled the same old deck, and here we are.
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
I confess I haven’t read the article, but while the Democrats may be a mess, I’m hoping the article acknowledges they couldn’t stop the republican steamroller even if they were organized. Republicans have enormous majorities in both chambers and (obviously) a republican governor. The entirely of the republican caucus exists only to enable De Santis’ White House run by passing endless red meat.
The 2020 election was Florida Democrats’ last best chance to really make headway, but as we saw, the state got redder and Democrats lost legislative and Congressional seats. Now the gerrymandering is only going to get worse. And to think Andrew Gillum was only a few thousand votes away from having been able to stop this, at least for a few years. (Presumably, Gillum wouldn’t have fallen apart in despair and self-destruction had he won the close race instead of losing it.)
kindness
Florida has an immigration problem. No, not brown skinned folk from south of the border. I’m talking the whitest of white people who pull up stakes from northern/midwestern states and move to Florida for the Republican ‘paradise’ it’s become. Texas is going through the same thing. Of course not everyone who moves to Florida is a slack jawed nut job. Just most of them it seems. And the demographics that would normally save other states (a large Latino population who are themselves immigrants) is hurting them because the majority of that Latino population are Cubans and they are notoriously right wing because Castro. Go figure. I wish the best for you Betty. I’m sorry Florida has become such. It isn’t just the Democratic party’s fault though. It the voters fault.
Chris
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Lots of blame to go around, but it’s definitely true that at a certain point, you have to blame the voters.
It really doesn’t take a lot of information or sophistication to see that the last two Democratic presidents have left us with a vastly healthier economy than they inherited, that the last two Republican presidents have both cratered the economy, public health, foreign policy, and too many other topics to list, and that if you want to keep your society functional, there’s only one party that has a record of even trying to do that, and another with a proven track record of doing the opposite. Even all the media’s shenanigans can only obscure so much. The fact that Republicans are even still competitive at all is a stunning indictment of the American public, whether it’s the people who vote Republican or the people who can’t be arsed to vote against them.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
Dad noted that outreach to Hispanic voters seemed to be treated as an afterthought by the campaigns he tried to work with.
Which is at least explicable if you’re in whiter parts of the country, but in Florida, it’s unforgivable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty: I think one problem with us (the on-line, blog-reading and -commenting Left, twitter, etc) is that we’re way more invested in national and partisan politics than the average voter, and most voters don’t respond to politics, or “messaging” the way we do. To take one example from Florida (and all this from memory and far away and remembering what Betty C and Adam S and Armando from D-Kos said about the 2018 races there) : I remember a lot of people being surprised when Rick Scott did so well with Hispanic voters in FL, including Puerto Ricans, so soon after Hurricane Maria, and trump talking about “their country” and the stupid stunt with the paper towels. To us, Rick Scott = Donald Trump (and Susan Collins = Donald Trump, and Thom Tillis = Donald Trump, and ….). IIRC, Rick Scott made six or seven trips to Puerto Rico, and he spoke Spanish (google tells me more than one person compared his Spanish to Peggy Hill’s, but he made the effort). Could Bill Nelson even say “Did you know I’m an astronaut?” in Spanish?
When Jon Ossoff ran for that House seat in GA right after trump’s inauguration, some old school city columnist grey beard in Atlanta said Ossoff would have won if he talked less about trump and more about traffic congestion in that district. As I recall, Gretchen Whitmer’s de facto campaign slogan was “Fix the damn roads”
Geminid
Virginia has no party registration, so every primary is “open.” Some Republicans use this as an excuse to use the caucus/convention method of nominating candidates. This method tends to empower fanatics who will spend the time, and leaves out people who just want to drop by tgeur polling place, vote, then get on their lives. Some of the more moderate Republicans say that restricting primary voting is crazy when the party cannot win without Independents. But they are on the losing side of this argument.
There is always a theoretical possibility that partisans will invade the other party’s primary to help elect a weaker candidate. I hear people talk about doing this, but in practice few actually do. So I tend to think opening Florida’s Democratic primaries to Independents has an upside. I doubt if it will influence outcomes much, but if it gets engagement and buy in from Independents that would be a good thing.
MisterDancer
I think some of it is that the “I can write, too!” situation. Messaging feels like a thing we can all provide a solution to, and thus everyone has a “solution” to it.
It doesn’t help that many of us came up in the age of the “sound bite,” and it’s implications that policy, culture, and esp. voting patterns can change based upon putting out the right pithy saying.
What they don’t have, is a solution to decades of millions of dollars flowing to orgs that relentlessly shape and reshape public and especially private dialogue. We don’t have, for example, a Heritage Foundation shaping a generation of judges, then handing off their picks of that litter to be voted in, no matter their experience level. Nor do we have financial “escape hatches” for people to help guarantee their loyalty to our causes, no matter how the vote pans out…
…much less the threats of rhetorical and real violence, to the same cause.
In the face of all that? No wonder so many cling to the life raft of “respectable messaging,” of the desire to “fight it out in the court of public opinion.” Too many think, still, that if we just say the right thing we’ll overcome decades of Rush Limburger, of Fox UnNews, and now “neutral” Social Media in people’s ears, every hour of the day.
cope
The state of the Democratic Party here in Florida has been on pretty much a downward slide since we moved here over thirty-one years ago. I can’t assign percentages of blame between the leadership and the schlubs on the ground like me but it cuts both ways for sure.
I am incredibly proud of my activist daughter who works her tail off at the local level. She’s plugged into her local school board as well as her county commission and county level party efforts. She organizes, she trains others and she takes this all very personally. However, her frustration is growing and it’s no wonder she spends a fair amount of time contemplating moving her family out of state.
Wvng
I’m a WV Democrat and could probably get endangered species designation if I tried. It has just gotten so so red here, aggressively red, that it’s hard to see a path to combat it. The cultural issues and misinformation dominate here, as they do throughout rural America. It just feels lost.
MisterDancer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “fix the damn roads” is pretty much how Danica Roem won in Virginia. You’re right again — we are also obsessed with Federal-level politics, and a lot of why we’re fighting a rearguard action is because Progressives (and I’m including myself in this!) treat local politics as unimportant, and boring. Plus, we tend to only care about state-level when they dredge up Yet Another Hateful bill from whatever crap the Hate Bill Factory’s spewed forth, this time.
I’d not be shocked to find that (some of) the FL Democratic Party’s issues stem from decades of benign neglect from the national Party. Being ignored, save when you need to mine votes from someone…well.
Roger Moore
@japa21:
I don’t think you need to engage in conspiracy theories. Parties have a tendency to be taken over by parasites in any case, and it takes constant effort, either at the grassroots level or by winning candidates who have the muscle to step in, to keep it from happening. Parties that lose too often can easily slip into despondency and fail to root out the grifters. I’ve seen it with the Republican party here in California, and the Democrats haven’t needed to lift a finger to make it happen.
Betty Cracker
I’m not giving up on Val Demings’ chances because 1) she’s a talented politician, 2) Rubio sucks, and 3) her power base is the central part of the state. The latter might make a difference. Florida is a large, diverse state, but its state level party leaders tend to be from South Florida. It’s understandable since that’s the bluest part of the state, so that’s where you have the highest concentration of successful Dems. But I think sometimes they lack perspective about what’s happening in the rest of the state.
The Dangerman
Is this like some sort of weird MAGA dating app? Sweep right once for Chud, sweep twice for Choad? Maybe that’s reversed.
TFG is going to start another riot after he gets arrested (oh please oh please oh please), which should be a nice lead in for the midterms. In my life, I can see the rioters, as most Folks are accepting of masks even if they don’t want to wear them…
…and then we have chudly (choadly?) assholes. One Dude yesterday said to his young apparent grandson (I assume, fairly big age difference) that the mask wearers were sheep. I wanted to jump up and beat his worthless ass for poisoning another generation (safe to say his children have been raised to be assholes, too).
VOR
My state currently has a D governor. We currently have a D President. The Republicans in my state have done everything they can to fuel rural vs. urban conflicts. Then they point at the D governor and blame him for not tamping down that conflict. Same thing with COVID – fuel distrust of the government and vaccine, then blame Biden for people not trusting the vaccine or government.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Agree.
Baud
@cope:
God bless your daughter. Thankless work.
Betty Cracker
@Roger Moore: That’s a good point, and it’s especially true of parties that have been marginalized. There’s a lot of turf-protecting bullshit.
Baud
@MisterDancer:
I may be wrong, but historically, the centers of party power were with the state parities rather than the national party. The DNC as an overlord over the whole party is a fairly recent way of thinking.
gvg
I don’t see any point in opening primaries. I don’t see any evidence that it actually results in more appealing candidates nor engagement by potential voters.
I agree that doing better advising on campaigns would help. I don’t understand general voters to have good advice myself but don’t want to allow republicans to vote in my primary.
I also hate texting from candidates. They all do it and are a nuisance that I resent.
I would like some voter guides from outside organizations that ran down the judges and other “non partisan” positions. At this point I don’t need help on the partisan races because I just vote Dem. However I guess in primaries it would be good to see examples of how they actually voted and dates on different issues.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
IIRC, one of the things that drove liberal Democrats in the run-up to the New Deal years and conservative Republicans in the run-up to the Reagan years equally insane was the number of seat-filling apparatchiks in their parties who’d gotten completely comfortable with the status quo and had zero interest in bringing the party in line with a more activist agenda if that meant they personally were going to find their positions threatened, or even less important.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
I guess it’s not really my place to complain, being a Masshole and all, but the thing that annoyed/annoys me about Demings’s campaign e-mails is that almost every one was a breathless “Val is SURGING in the polls!!!” or “polls show Rubio TANKING!!!!” when they’ve been stuck at 48 percent (El Pendejo) to 46 percent (Demings) for close to a year. It’s sort of insulting.
cope
@Baud: Thanks, she would appreciate your kind thoughts.
J.
New Floridian here. And we are not the only white Democrats who moved to the state recently, though we are outnumbered by older, whiter Trumpers/Conservatives/Republicans, who are not necessarily the same. (We have several neighbors who are registered Republicans who loathe Trump and are pro-environment and some other good things.) While I am rooting for DeSantis’s demise, even if a Democrat takes back the governorship, it’s unlikely the Legislature will flip (see https://ballotpedia.org/Florida_State_Legislature) and it’s too late for redistricting anyway. And while I give money to those fighting heinous GOP initiatives and have sent letters to various Congress critters, I feel like it does no good, that we are doomed. :-(
Ocotillo
In response to a couple of above comments, first off, localizing elections (Fix the roads), here in Texas, Beto seems to be taking that approach in that his focus seems to be on the power grid and it’s recent failure and not much really being done to fix it since. One can only hope it works.
A couple of other comments speak to Hispanics not being a monolith. I get it in Florida as you have conservative Cubans but Texas Mexican Americans seem to be different from California Mexican Americans and if Texas ever has a shot at being purple, let alone blue, we (Dems) need to be more successful in earning their vote here in the Lone Star State. On the surface, the comparison between California Mexican Americans and Texas Mexican Americans is the Texas ones don’t turn out as well as the California ones and when they do, a bigger percentage of them pull the lever for GOP.
wonkie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yeah, That is annoying–Republican voters love to hate and the only message that resonates with them is hater talk. However, messaging might work with independents and messaging can really help with turnout. I think that the message this election should be: don’t let the party of Jan 6 and Trump win the House or the Senate.
JML
Generally, any attempt to federalize a state election on issues/message is probably a bad idea for dems. (people tend to want the stuff from the feds, but most people don’t really like the feds)
But you need your state party apparatus to be professional, and not populated by cronies. You need people in there that can work the donor class for dollars without letting them run the ship. You need professional field operations that are data-driven and consistent, building year after year, rather than having to re-start every 2 years. It’s hard to really do it well.
Baud
@wonkie:
God, I wish. The public just seems to have a mental block when it comes to holding the GOP collectively accountable.
Betty Cracker
@SFAW: Demings’ campaign really does bombard donors with texts and emails. I also find it annoying, but I guess it works because she raises a fuck-ton of money. I mostly delete the fundraising come-ons unread and just contribute when I can.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SFAW: I get so much junk email, I barely notice them anymore. Sometimes I see teh name of a candidate and I have a couple of seconds of confusion as to whether I actually know this person, or…
But the texts. My god, who the hell ever thought that spam-texting was a good idea?
Sure Lurkalot
@cope:
It’s hard to keep swimming upstream. How many decades has (for example) Texas been on the verge of turning blue or even purple? Now the government is asking its citizens to keep track of their neighbor’s menstrual cycles.
My brother’s golf trip to Florida with his high school buddies got canceled because his buddies had no interest in visiting a place with no Covid protocols. Sooner or later that bleeds down to residents…if after years of effort things don’t change or actually backlash to worse…I don’t blame your obviously wonderful daughter that a change of venue is the only way out.
Mustang Bobby
I’ve been back in Florida for twenty years (I did three when I was in college in the early ’70’s) and I have yet to see any life in the Florida Democrats outside of the metro areas such as Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties in southeast Florida, Hillsboro (Tampa), Orange (Orlando), and smattering around Tallahassee and Jacksonville. The rest of the state has been surrendered to the GOP without a fight to the point that the last Senate election that promoted Rick Scott to the Senate, the Dems ran a used Republican; Charlie Crist. The stretch along US 27 from Miami to Lakeland and most locales above I-4 from Tampa to Daytona might as well be Alabama; they even call it Lower Alabama. DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and the likes of Matt Gaetz pick it like low-hanging rotten fruit, and the Dems are their bitches. Val Demmings hasn’t got a chance against Rubio because she’s not white and male.
DeSantis runs on fear and loathing, and no one ever lost an election by exploiting the greed, fear and paranoia of the electorate.
Kay
I will say this for Florida. They still have real local newspapers. All of the information in that substack came out of newspaper investigations into Florida’s rampant corruption.
That’s a big plus. There may be hope for Florida yet.
Redshift
@Geminid: I was going to say the same thing. There are perpetual worries in Virginia of spoilers from the other party voting for what they think is the worse candidate, but there’s never any evidence it actually happens. It’s pretty unlikely when you think about it — the portion of people invested enough to vote in primaries is already pretty small, and only the most hard-core are possibly going to try such strategic voting.
The one time it could have possibly had an effect is when people crossed over to keep Oliver North from being nominated for senator. (The Democratic nomination was uncontested, so there was no Dem primary.) But there’s still no evidence that made the difference, and that was a with a positive, good-faith motivation, not “let’s screw with the other party.”
Betty Cracker
@J.: This is purely anecdotal and I’ve never seen any data on it, but it seems like we get fewer transplants from the Northeastern states now and more from the Midwest, plus deadbeats from California. That’s not good!
You’re right about the legislature, which has been gerrymandered to lock in Republican control. But maybe highlighting their rampant corruption can start to turn things around. I don’t know.
Cameron
I’ve only been in FL for a few years, so I have 0 authority to speak on Democratic Party politics here. I do think the voter registration breakdown that I just got from the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections website makes a strong argument for pounding the shit out of state and local issues. I’m starting to give far more attention to them than anything national or international.
Manatee County voter registration 1/31/22
R – 119,933
D – 80,352
Other – 73,939
Redshift
I hate the spam texts from random candidates, but in my experience, if you reply “stop,” they really do stop (as they’re legally required to do.) At least Democrats do; Ms. Redshift frequently gets spam texts from the Republicans addressed to someone with a different name (and often with really horrible messages), no matter how many times she tells them to stop.
Brachiator
@gvg:
This is an interesting issue. In California, the Democratic Party will send out a voter guide including non-partisan positions.
The League of Women Voters and other organizations also send out a guide, but the League seems to be cutting back on this stuff.
But here is the thing. Local newspapers often included these recommendations, but people are simply not subscribing to local newspapers anymore and expect online news to be free.
Ironically, here the Internet is making it harder to get information. I used to go to a local news stand and buy a couple of state papers during election time specifically to look at the editorial recommendations. The surviving papers are now often behind paywalls, and you cannot “buy” a single copy.
So, part of the messaging problem is that organizations that used to provide messages are declining and people are no longer looking for useful voter information.
I don’t know how you fight willful ignorance.
Geminid
Florida made the news in Israel. A story in today’s Times of Israel is headlined “Antisemites rally with swastikas in Florida, DeSantis spokesperson doubts they’re real Nazis.”
According to the article, Christine Pushaw, the Governor’s spokesperson, questioned whether a group of nazis demonstrating in Orlando were nazis or liberal plants. “Do we even know they are Nazis?” Pushaw tweeted. She deleted the tweet, “but has continued to retweet those agreeing with her position.”
japa21
@Roger Moore:
Obviously I need to use the sarcasm tag more often.
Geminid
@Redshift: In the runup to the 2020 Presidential primary, Hew Hewitt encouraged Virginia Republicans to vote for Bernie Sanders. “So we get a real choice,” he lied on his radio show. But I doubt if any more than a few Republicans took his advice. Same with South Carolina, which also had an open primary.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
DeSantis: “Those were Glocks, not Lugars–false flag!”
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid:
Christine, go ask your Florida Nazis if they’re Nazis. I’m sure they’ll tell you.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: Ugh, Pushaw. Don’t get me started on that horrible hack. Oddly enough, the Nazi march didn’t get a whole lot of local attention, at least not that I saw. I think they were in Orlando?
Roger Moore
@Chris:
I think this is a problem with any large organization. There will always be people who focus more on protecting their individual position than on serving the broader organizational goals. Letting those people take over is one way you can wind up with a sick organization, and keeping that from happening is one important role for upper management. Political parties are interesting in that you can get also get strong pressure from the grassroots.
Mike in NC
This is the year our friends in Land-O-Lakes (a real place!) plan to retire and bug the hell out of Florida forever. They’re from the Asheville, NC area originally.
Roger Moore
@Ocotillo:
I think the biggest thing with Mexican Americans, in both Texas and California, is how recently their families immigrated. There was a big wave of immigration in the early 20th Century, and families who came here in that wave or earlier and have decently pale skin tend to behave more like non-Hispanic Whites than like more recent Hispanic immigrants. I think the big difference between CA and TX is the relative proportions of old vs. new immigration.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
Trump: Fake news!
DeSantis (mini Trump): Fake Nazis!
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I would be very, very careful with those guides. There are lots of groups that put out voter guides, and plenty of them try to make it look like they’re official party information when they aren’t. They’ll do things like give the official party position on the big races but then charge candidates for their endorsement on lower offices. AFAIK, the party doesn’t take an official position on non-partisan offices like judges, so any “Democratic Voter Guide” that gives judicial endorsements is most likely fake. Read the fine print!
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I don’t think that this is true at all, and certainly in California is contradicted by all kinds of history.
Mexico and other Hispanic countries have their own history of racism and colorism, but pendejo gringos keep trying to view this through the prism of race in the United States. It does not work.
Also,
WTF does this mean?
James E Powell
@Chris:
This is definitely true and although we all say this here, you will almost never hear Democratic elected officials or national candidates say this. And there is like some iron law that no one in the press/media can ever say this.
Some of it is messaging, some of it is general beliefs that are so firmly fixed in the minds of the electorate and the press/media that it will take half a century to pry them loose
That said, I completely agree with you on blaming the voters. We live in a nation filled with total a-holes and selfish clowns.
Kathleen
@Chris: I agree with you.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Excellent point. I tend to avoid these.
lowtechcyclist
Too much can be made of ‘messaging,’ but a party or candidate has to have one. Preferably with some clarity, preferably one that resonates with people (as in, gets them to say, “whoa, that’s important, we need to do something about that!), but the first step is to have one. And a lot of Dem campaigns don’t even seem to get that far, IMHO.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: yeah, I’ll be very glad if the 1/6 committee’s public hearings generate outrage, but I don’t think we can bet on it
lowtechcyclist
Well sure, but you go into an election with the electorate you’ve got, rather than the one you’d like to have.
If you’re a Dem and you’re trying to win an election, blaming the voters, even in your internal counsels, isn’t going to help.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Do we feel that way if the voters are to the right of where we want Dems to be?
AlabamaBlueDot
@Geminid: Alabama also does not have party registration. Our Democratic party has been pretty weak for a number of years but we have new leadership that’s been making some progress. We rarely have Republican ratf*cking in our primary because they have all-out war in their own, and they can’t afford to not vote in the GOP primary.
cain
I can get that for one election – but uh.. it’s been going on for many election cycles. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing expecting a different result.
Kathleen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Excellent point. Jane Byrne vanquished the Daley machine in Chicago by campaigning on snow removal. Though I’m sure the seeds of Daley’s demise had been sowed long before that.
Roger Moore
@lowtechcyclist:
The electorate isn’t a fixed group of people. Part of the goal of any campaign is to encourage supporters to become voters. Shaping the electorate is a major factor in winning close elections.
CaseyL
Political consulting = money for nothing. Wish I’d thought to get in on that scam; I’d be rolling now. You don’t even need to win elections, just come up with a self-confident spiel pockmarked with statistics-speak.
Kathleen
@MisterDancer: Truth! ETA we have been reluctant to admit that Democrats are under attack by a well funded and coordinated psy ops machine the purpose of which is to destroy the party and eliminate the last bastion between democracy and fascism, hyperbolic as that sounds.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Yep.
First, Second, and Third Law of Politics: Blaming voters, even when they are dumbasses and totally “at fault,” is often political suicide.
Chris
@Brachiator:
Completely accurate, and I’m not suggesting any politician should ever do this. But speaking as a private citizen commenting on a website… yeah.
kindness
@lowtechcyclist:
The voters are the ones who vote the reprehensibles in. Are Democrats at fault because DeSantis got elected? No, it’s the people who voted and the people who chose not to vote at all. Democrats can try to motivate people to vote for them but they can’t make them actually vote.
And I’m saying this not as a Democrat or the Democratic Party but as an observer on a liberal website.
lowtechcyclist
I agree with the point you’re making, but I used the term ‘electorate’ because I understood it to mean this:
You really do go into an election with the electorate you’ve got, rather than the one you want.
(There was a second definition given, but it was “the office or territories of a German elector.” Didn’t seem applicable.)
Baud
@Chris:
@kindness:
Unlike the GOP, Democrats are viewed as collectively responsibile, so your comments blaming voters are officially Joe Biden’s.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Also, dumb political consultants, and many pundits, insist on viewing Hispanic people as “oppressed, just like black people” and simply cannot see them or, more important, understand how they see themselves.
I also often see this in uninformed comments such as “Cubans see themselves as white, but ‘real Hispanics’ are …”
This is just wrong on so many levels.
Andrew
Florida Democrat here. Every two years I gnash my teeth and await how bad we get stomped in the general election. Right now I would be happy if we got enough Dems into both houses of the Lege, so that if by some miracle we do get a Democrat elected to the governorship we can at least have him or her as a bulwark against the worst excesses of the R’s, without having a veto overriden. I’m not holding my breath. Running as a D in this state, with a few exceptions, is pretty much an exercise in futility.
Kathleen
@Brachiator: In Hamilton County Dem sample ballots include judicial candidates endorsed by Party.
lowtechcyclist
@kindness:
It’s not a matter of fault so much as agency. Any one voter can determine just his or her vote, out of a few million in a state like Florida. That’s a pretty limited amount of agency. Presumably the state Democratic Party, and candidates who run as Democrats, have the potential (whether or not they succeed) in moving the needle considerably more than any one voter can.
In a state like West Virginia, that’s not going to matter; the state’s going to go Republican so heavily that there’s not a damn thing the state Dems can do about it other than pick up a state legislative seat here and there.
But Florida’s been close in Presidential elections for decades, and it’s had its share of close statewide races other than that. And Roger Moore made a valid point that it’s up to the parties and candidates to try to change the composition of who actually votes.
This is particularly important in non-Presidential years, where turnout is usually a good deal lower, and it’s all about who can get their supporters to the polls. You don’t have to win voters over from the dark side, you don’t have to aim your appeals at the median voter. You just have to give a sufficient reason to show up at the polls to the people who’ll vote your way IF they vote. If you can do a better job of that than the GQP does, there’s a real chance you can win. It’s an uphill battle, sure, but not one that’s out of reach from the get-go.
So there’s agency there. It’s just a question of how well the Dems use it.
gvg
@Roger Moore:
I don’t actually WANT a party official guide unless they are warning us someone running as a democrat is actually a republican or liar. Democrats official guides just promote incumbents and they don’t touch the non partisan officials(I don’t think they are supposed to). I want various orgs that I decide are trustworthy based on experience to give me facts. It ought to be papers but it never has been here. It can be league of women voters, Emily’s list, Sierra club, planned parenthood etc. None of them “care” about all issues or are experts on all areas but for real facts, that is what I need.
Another Scott
@Geminid: Yes, it seems like crossover/mess with the other team is rare in Virginia.
One has to be registered 21 days before the election, and one can only vote in a single primary. Since the VA GQP is afraid of their voters, they rarely have simple primaries any more. So far, Team D has picked sensible candidates for the most part.
Presumably messing with the other team only really works when turnout is low. Er, … :-\
I’m generally torn about the US party system. 1) Party members should be able to choose who represents them. 2) Either a Democrat or a GQPer is almost certain to be elected, so citizens should have input on the choice whether they are party members or not. 3) Small groups can take over parties for the worse for the country. 4) Ultimately, voters have to get their way, even if they make stupid choices.
Dunno.
Good luck FL peeps!
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I suspect that a related problem is that the politicians tend to listen to single-issue activists rather than ordinary voters. The activists do their best to present themselves as representing the voters, but often they get completely detached from what the typical voter they are supposedly representing wants.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
But Democrats did this to themselves. They outsourced “issues” to activist and lobbying groups. They fragmented their own organization, “running it like a business”. I think they have to go back to basics and ask themselves “what is a political Party?” – what are the roles or jobs? It’s time. Even if it were running like a top it would be good to look at it. Do they want to go back to a stronger Party structure so there is less push/pull and more control and unity? Are they concerned that the activist groups are ISSUE advocacy so not really invested in a unified Party?
dnfree
@SFAW: I get those SURGING!/TANKING! emails in lurid colors from far too many candidates. I don’t even open them. It’s lazy “messaging”. Who comes up with them, because they all look the same?
Eric Sorensen, who was a TV meteorologist in the Rockford IL area, is running for Cheri Bustos’ seat (she’s retiring). He sends out thoughtful emails about climate change. I’ll probably send him some money because he’s actually talking about an important issue. How hard is that for the rest of them?
Kay
I think the Marc Elias situation illustrates the conflict.
Okay, so “Democracy Docket” is a Dem-aligned org. But they don’t really work “for Democrats”, they work for voting rights (along with a lot of other people). So if a Dem-aligned org makes decisions to pursue cases that other Dem aligned people or orgs are sometimes counterproductive, what do you do?
You can’t order Democracy Docket to not bring a Section 2 voting rights case because it might lead to a bad decision and therefore bad precedent. You sort of put yourself at the mercy of the aligned orgs. Maybe it works out fine! But maybe it doesn’t. You relinquished the money and responsibility but you also relinquished all the control.
I don’t object to Democracy Docket, even the cases they lost, and I think it’s very easy for academics or legal pundits to second guess litigators, but I also see how Dem aligned orgs could take you where you don’t want to go. It’s a dilemma and the Democratic Party just chooses to pretend it isn’t a dilemma.
BlueDWarrior
@Kay: Is that a natural result of the current Democratic base to resist Authoritarian control?
As much as incumbency can be determinative in an intra-party contest, I don’t think Democrats want a strong central party, because then it seems like they are being dictated to instead of engaged in honest back and forth between baseline voters, activist, and (incumbent) politicians.
I mean look at how bad it gets in intra-party primaries when it seems like state (or national) Party is just protecting its incumbents, which is what organized Parties tend to do unless said incumbent has made it a point to fight the Party organization.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: All three of the last Florida Governor’s races have been close. 2010 and 2014 saw the Republican winning by 60,000 and 66,000 out of 5.5 million votes cast. DeSantis won in 2018 by less than 40,000 out of over 8 million votes. With the exception of Rubio’s 2016 win, Senate races have been close also. Democrats have been on the losing side thoughout, but I still think it is a purple state with a gerrymandered red legislature. And Nikki Fried did win the statewide Commissioner of Agriculture contest in 2018. She is one of three good candidates for the nomination for Governor this year
Kay
@BlueDWarrior:
I don’t think it came out of the base resisting control. I think it came out of ideas about business organizations that were fashionable in the 1990s, where they would outsource “voting rights” or “immigration” to specialists, allowing the Party to do…something or other. It’s not a business. They shouldn’t run it like one. On the local level it’s an organization of like-minded people who are interested in politics. It’s no more complicated than that. They require the same kind of tending that any other social organization requires; reasons for them to get together, something to talk about, something to do. People think “Party building” is the same as “organizing” and it’s not. Party building is the predicate to organizing. They need to identify as members before you can organize them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
one of the many reasons I would make a poor candidate is because I would call several voters stupid given any length of time on stage, but the constant refrain of “Democrats suck at messaging!’ isn’t helpful either.
Chris
@Kay:
The irony is that for all the outsourcing that’s happened, what we still don’t really have is ostensibly non-partisan institutions in civil society that can get out the vote for us, lobby hard for us, and so forth. Labor unions played this role in the New Deal coalition, socially conservative churches played it in the Reagan coalition – we don’t really have that now.
(Or rather we do, but not ones that have the broad appeal that unions and churches did – black churches, for example, are often key to getting their voters out, but that’s only going to get you so far in a country where only twelve percent of the population is black).
Kay
@BlueDWarrior:
You see it in national Democratic campaigns. They get the people in a room and start “organizing”. But a quarter of them don’t even self identify as Democrats. They’re not attached at all. They just hate the incumbent or love the candidate and the Democratic Party makes this huge jump and assumes they’re now “Democrats” with no further contact. So in 4 years you have to do the entire thing again.
What is the political Party responsible for and what is the activist group responsible for? Are they allied or are they actual partners? It’s crazily laissez–faire, which is amusing, that they ended up with a Right wing, fragmented, deregulated structure of their basic operations. Take it back. Put in some rules or at least guardrails. Delegate this and keep that.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: I think Fried won that extremely tight race partly because of intra-Republican fights between establishment figures like Adam Putnam, the former Ag Commish who ran for governor but got beat in the primary by DeSantis with Trump’s help. Not to take anything away from Fried’s win, but it wasn’t a typical race with GOP unity. They were at each other’s throats, and Fried’s opponent was part of the hated establishment in an insurgent year.
All that said, I am leaning toward supporting Fried because she puts up a fight. Crist, the former Republican, already lost a gubernatorial race here once, so that’s a red flag for me. But it may be the case that people are tired of DeSantis’s hard-right approach and would be ready for a less polarizing figure like Crist, sort of like how that happened on the national level in 2020. I don’t know.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Roger Moore:
I was hoping somebody else would say that, as I do actually get tired of being the skunk at the BJ picnic. I give you this exchange from Ruben Gallego’s feed.
and my general all-purpose advice to those candidates who do get into the arena cause they’re nicer and more controlled than I am: Don’t talk like a graduate student.
geg6
To each state, their own, I guess. But I will fight to the death any proposal to allow any sort of open primary here in PA. If you want to vote for the Dem candidate for fucking dog catcher nominee, you better be a registered Dem. And fuck you if you aren’t. You have no fucking right to determine the nominee of my goddamn party.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe it could be helpful if the state party recognizes it has a problem and tries something different. FL Dems themselves admit they have a “messaging problem,” but it’s deeper than that. I was surprised but pleased TBT called them out. God knows we can’t afford to sleepwalk into November.
Kay
@Chris:
Right. Unions and churches. So you’re talking about organizations that already did the work of getting a member of a union or a church, who were then approached by political parties. You can’t skip the first step. First make them members then organize them. It’s tough that unions no longer perform the work for Democrats, since Democrats didn’t really prioritize unions so they all but disappeared, but since it’s been 30 years they might want to start thinking about doing it themselves.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Trump called Iowans stupid and they flocked to him.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I like Ruben.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: so you’re saying I have a future in politics?
Actually that moment has stayed with me– “We love the poorly educated!”, with such a condescending tone and smirk.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
All you gotta do is be a Republican who hates non-whites, and you can insult white people to your hearts desire.
Kay
@Chris:
I think Democrats have a clear relationship with unions where people know the rules. They know where the union ends and Democrats start, and no one kids themselves about self interest or conflicts.
So unions are “we want the PRO Act!” and Democrats don’t deliver but unions know they are unions and not the Democratic Party so they’re like “ok, can’t get the PRO Act, we want the NLRB!” and there isn’t the whole “betrayal!” phrase because it’s just a negotiation.
I just think clearer is better. Know your respective roles.
Comrade Colette
@Steve in the ATL: Absolutely. I just renewed my sub – I’m enjoying it much more than I expected. There’s at least one fascinating and unexpected long-form piece in each issue, and the online columns and shorter pieces are fun, too.
Of course, I also like mooning over/laughing at the glossy fashion ads in the hard copy, which may or may not be your thing.
Kay
@Chris:
Like, are environmental activist and lobbying groups the same as Democrats and others who vote on environmental issues? Is that true, or not? If it’s not true is it fine with Democrats that the outside group defines their position, or should they maybe do that? No one votes for the activist group. They don’t have to get any votes.
sdhays
@lowtechcyclist: I find it difficult to quantify this problem after watching the 2016 campaign where people were always whining about Hillary not talking about X, despite the fact that she had just spent the last several days/weeks talking about virtually nothing else.
The media wouldn’t report what she said unless she was slamming Dump or mentioning the word “email”. And Hillary’s struggle was just a very acute version of the Democrats’ usual difficulty setting the terms of debate in a hostile media environment. I don’t know how to fix that problem, but “finding the right message” wasn’t the issue there.
Chris
@sdhays:
Yep.
It’s underrated, but really, what made 2008 and 2020 work as well as they did was that the Republicans had fucked everything up so completely that even the media was actually blinking and reporting on it. Absent that, all you get is a wall of “both sides do it, but Democrats are worse.”
Last August was a case in point – people defending the withdrawal literally couldn’t get on the air, and not for lack of trying. It was just wall to wall “BIDEN KABUL DISASTER” for two or three weeks straight.
I really don’t know WTF to do about it, except that Democrats need to start de-legitimizing the media in their voters’ eyes, like Republicans did before. But it really feels like we’re back to that 1896 standard, where railroads would literally hike the cost of train tickets way way up to wherever William Jennings Bryan was campaigning at the time, and then drop them to rock bottom for wherever McKinley was campaigning.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
Those of us who are of a more suspicious turn of mind think the results are close because the Republicans don’t want to cheat more than the bare minimum required to win.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
not completely off-topic…
Based on teh way a lot of people here talk about Adams, and I’ve raised my eyebrow at him more than once myself, I think a lot of people might not like the messaging that would work for Democrats in Florida
Barack Obama, considered by many of the on-line left to be either an abject failure, a regrettably successful conman or to be filed under “Well, bless his heart, he tried, kind of…” won Florida (and Ohio, and Iowa) twice, part of being the most electorally successful Democrat since FDR. In 2020, his Vice President, underestimated by many (including me) at the beginning of the primary, handily beat all the people who thought the lesson of 2016 was that Bernie Sanders, or Bernie-ism, was the future of the Democratic Party, including Bernie Sanders.
Factors one might want to factor into a discussion about messaging. But what do I know
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wow. Good on Eric Adams.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
one case where I think political messaging was very successful was Glen Youngkin. He ran, as I understand it, a trumpy campaign on Facebook, and played the genial, grinning, fleece-wearing suburban Dad on TV and at his rallies (George W Bush did a similar thing, I believe, he had a much more zealous, Xianist version of his stump speech when his campaigning was closed to outside media, harder to get away with these days). trump himself agreed to stay in the metaphorical messaging basement during the general campaign. Would the various factions of the Democratic coalition let a state party, or a statewide candidate, do the same?
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I suspect some of the outsourcing to advocacy groups was an attempt to make them seem less political. If an idea was coming from within a political party, that made it inherently partisan, which was undesirable if the goal was to get broad approval. So people who were really interested would set up non-partisan advocacy groups and then attempt to sway people from both parties. This is still a useful approach when dealing with issues that cut across parties.
The problem is that everything has become so polarized it’s hard to find an issue that doesn’t become partisan pretty quickly. Those independent groups are only nominally independent. They may be outside the party, but they’re closely enough aligned with one party or the other that they can’t be treated as non-partisan anymore. So you get the worst of both worlds: groups that are outside of party control but are still seen as partisan.
sdhays
@Chris: I wasn’t aware of the train ticket shenanigans, but McKinley (in)famously didn’t leave his porch in Ohio.
According to Wikipedia, the railroads, terrified that Bryan’s pro-Silver-backed dollar position would bankrupt them, heavily subsidized trips to Canton for people to visit McKinley at home! Nothing shady about that!
James E Powell
@Kay:
This. This. This.
Precinct leaders who know everyone in their precinct make sure they are registered to vote & know how & where to vote.
Ward or district leaders who know every precinct leader and make sure they listen to the concerns they send up the ladder & understand the messages passed down the ladder.
Money, not tons of it, but money. So that precinct leaders can do stuff like make copies, send cards, etc. Ward & district leaders who can hold 4th of July picnics & Winter Festivals & Labor Day events, etc.
Republicans are doing this through fundy churches & multilevel marketing networks & country clubs. Democrats have no equivalent outside of African American churches.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
And are not actually partisan, so proudy tell you they’re not actually Democrats, so will literally throw the Democrat under the bus if the GOP makes any concession to them at all, because now they can’t offend Republicans and as long as they’re “making progress” on the issue they can no longer afford to exclude Republicans, who know this, so give them just enough to make them “not Democrats”.
The two parties really take base issues completely differently. Republicans just merge the groups into the Party, so “anti abortion” or “gun nuts” becomes indistinguishable from the Republican Party. That’s not ideal either.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So you’re saying if Val Demings says only cops can criticize cops and vows to take her senatorial salary in Bitcoin, she can win? Good to know! :)
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Mayor Eric Adams has definitely taken a beating around here. But when Sienna polled New York City residents on his job performance, two weeks into his term, 62% gave him a positive rating, and 20% rated him negatively.
nonrev321
BAY County is nothing more than a older womens social club. I went originally to get involved in the Obama election. What a surprise. A few older women, 1 man, maybe half a dozen total really running the show. Probably other older women involved but this seemed the core.
Then, and most likely today today, they have shown that making the Dem party in Bay County anything more than a social club under the umbrella of the Dem party is not of interest to them.
My bet is that if I was to go to a local meeting there would be few to no younger people and few to no persons of color. Its a pathetic mess and the current leaders really don’t want to pass the baton to a younger more energetic generation.
A Ghost to Most
Failed fascist states. Hoocudanode?
taumaturgo
Good. Start cleaning up in Florida and work up to the DNC and the slew of consultant-friendly conservative operators.
LongHairedWeirdo
You think Fox News reported any of that? No, bear with me.
I saw Fox News saying “and those liberals think people who believe in global warming – people like you!” are stupid!”
And it’s like, dude, that’s a fucking lie. I think they’re naive, trusting someone untrustworthy, and misinformed. And no one is calling it out.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The DNC. The propeller-beanie of comments about the Democratic Party.