Photograph Source: Ramseywill – CC BY 4.0
One of the most consequential races in this past election was for U.S. senate in Nebraska, where Independent Dan Osborn lost to Republican Deb Fischer. The race was “unexpectedly close,” reported the Nebraska Examiner November 5. Maybe that was because 49-year-old Osborn is a union mechanic who led the Omaha Kellogg’s 2021 strike and is also a populist, who hoped to spark a working-class movement. He compared Fischer to Hillary Clinton, observing that he agreed with Donald Trump on some issues, most notably “draining the swamp.” That and the fact that Osborn is “not a Democrat” caused Dems to withhold support from him, a stupid move that cost them a probably friendly senator.
Osborn performed quite respectably, winning 46 percent of Nebraskans compared to Fischer’s 53 percent. He likely would have done much better, however, had senate Dems stopped “pretending Osborn doesn’t exist,” to quote Politico October 31. Maybe the Democrats were offended by his many union endorsements or his platform – cutting taxes for small business and the middle class, protecting social security, guaranteeing a “right to repair” for farm equipment, cars and electronics, no more soldiers on food stamps by raising their pay, ending profiteering off senior health-care, legalizing cannabis, ending government handouts to Big Pharma, lower taxes on overtime pay reforming railroad safety, passing congressional term limits and more. What’s missing from this list? The mega-donors, the billionaires like Illinois Dem governor Jay Pritzker, featured at the DNC and all those well-heeled suburbanites on whom senate majority leader Chuck Shumer counted to make up for the Dems deliberately snubbing working-class voters.
And they DO deliberately snub working-class voters. Dems consider their base to be the professional managerial class – problem is there aren’t enough of those people to win most federal elections. This betrayal of working people dates back to Bill “Ship the Jobs to Mexico” Clinton and the Democratic [mis-] Leadership Committee, and it happened about 30 years ago. As Thomas Frank wrote in Listen, Liberal, nothing good would come of it. And nothing did. It led in a straight line to the Kamala Harris campaign, the worst Dem campaign in history, one that relied on Wall Street and warmongers, that chased after endorsements from the Cheneys – Dick Cheney being someone the Dems had rightly and ferociously criticized for promoting torture. Did the Dems actually think we forgot all that? That fatuous invocations of joy and obscene admiration for American military lethality would somehow lure voters to Harris? If so, they were far more delusional than anyone imagined.
As Democratic senator Chris Murphy tweeted November 10, “And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base…Real economic populism should be our tent pole. But here’s the thing – then you need to let people into the tent who aren’t 100 percent on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns and climate.” So the problem for Dems is simple: they let their base become high-income. But by its very nature, that group is not big enough wholly to support a major party long-term. It’s great for identity politics but that, too, got trounced by the GOP.
So this election showed the fatal weakness of relying on identity politics and the trendy rich voters who support it. Kamala Harris may be firm about her pronouns, but she wasn’t about ending the Gaza or Ukraine carnage. And it turned out voters on both sides of the aisle cared a lot, about both catastrophes. Sheesh – Trump, the prez behind the Muslim ban, won the Arab vote in Dearborn, Michigan. He also loudly campaigned on ending the Ukraine war, and rather than hurt him, all indications are it HELPED him.
Even worse, Harris didn’t separate herself from Biden’s chief economic legacy, which, as far as most proles are concerned, is inflation. Groceries, rent, car insurance, gas, medicine, education, mortgage rates – all soared through the roof on Biden’s watch, and she failed to expound a plan to reverse that. Instead, we got admonitions not to let anyone “steal your joy.” How about not letting filthy rich corporations steal our money? That might have gone over better than the lead ballon called joy.
The Dems are, to quote George H.W. Bush in deep dodo, and they know it. How else to explain Nancy Pelosi’s post-election complaint that they expected a competition of some sort for a presidential candidate but Biden sabotaged that by endorsing Harris the instant he was sidelined? Well, Biden got his revenge – a clueless candidate who thought Republicans were going to save her. Problem is, from this perch in the peanut gallery, it sure looks like most Dems were fine with this and succumbed to the hallucination that their skimpy, hip, white-collar base would save them. People like Chuck “Senator from Wall Street” Shumer need to, ahem, go. He loudly boosted the failed strategy of courting solely the upper middle class; imagining him walking a picket line, as Biden did, is nearly impossible. But it’s worth noting here that projections also had Biden losing the key, very diverse working class, so maybe ordinary people figured out that the only thing “Lunch Bucket” Joe had in that pail were IOUs to financial corporations headquartered in Delaware, weapons contractors, and, possibly, shady Ukrainian businessmen.
The real problem dates back to the 2016 Dem primaries and the Clinton campaign’s ruses to disenfranchise Bernie Sanders voters. Working people learned a lesson from that: Democrats will ditch them. Though they may have voted Dem in 2020, in the midst of the covid panic and economic meltdown, such odd circumstances are not the norm. 2024 is the new normal, and if the Democratic party wants to survive, which is questionable, it will swing toward people like Dan Osborn and Bernie Sanders.
The party must expand its base to include the 50 percent of Americans who cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense, who want Medicare for All and barring that, a medical public option, who want a $15 per hour minimum wage, an end to inflation caused by ridiculous sanctions on other countries and the astronomical costs of waging criminal and idiotic proxy wars, whether in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. When climate-change-induced freak weather floods their towns, they want FEMA to show up, not mealy-mouthed excuses, or the obvious truth that if they renamed North Carolina Ukraine, it would get cash in a heartbeat. Most Americans are not wealthy Wall Street investors or lawyers. They need a party that reflects that – and candidates that reflect that. UAW chief Shawn Fain for prez in 2028, anyone?
