By: Tommy Desoutter, Guest Writer
The mainstream media is right about one thing: the midterm elections were a big defeat for the Democratic Party. That said, it has misinterpreted essentially everything else about them. For starters, the election was certainly not a public rejection of progressive policies; the results of state referenda make this very clear. Oregon legalized marijuana, and Alaskan voters decriminalized the drug even as they elected a Republican senator. A number of conservative states like Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota raised their minimum wages, and fetal personhood amendments were roundly rejected.
If the election wasn’t about a backlash against progressive policies, then what did cause the Democrats to lose so many seats? The Republican gains become much less surprising if you examine the nature of the six-year Senate election cycle. The seats contested in this election were last contested in the Democratic landslide of 2008. President Obama has a 42 percent approval rating nationwide, and it’s much lower outside the urban Democratic strongholds of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Given these mediocre numbers, it should have been a no-brainer that some Democrats, who had been swept into the Senate in red-leaning states in the midst of the economic collapse under the Bush Administration in 2008, would lose their seats.
That’s exactly what happened: Democrats were unseated in very conservative states like Montana, West Virginia, and Arkansas, as well as conservative-leaning states like Iowa and North Carolina. This is no cause for immediate panic; in fact, single-party control of both houses could ease some of Washington’s gridlock and produce some actual proposals and bills.
Though the Republican victories in the Senate were a much less significant story than the mainstream media would have us believe, it would be far from accurate to say that the Democratic Party is fine or has nothing to fear. Indeed, the more interesting and important races — the ones that should really send a message — are the gubernatorial elections in the Midwest. Republican governors Rick Snyder and Scott Walker were fairly comfortably re-elected in the “blue” states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Even more notably, the Republican candidates won in Illinois and Massachusetts (yes, you read that correctly), and Republican John Kasich won re-election in Ohio with a whopping 63.8 percent of the vote. These startling victories indicate that the Democratic Party has lost touch with a significant part of its former base: the Midwest and the white working class.
The Democrats’ public emphasis on single women, racial minorities, and issues like climate change and marriage equality has alienated many white men, Christians, and average suburban and rural people who (possibly correctly) believe that Democrats will spend more time trying to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and remove the Ten Commandments from courtrooms than they will spend attracting investment, improving job growth, keeping their taxes low, and making public pensions and debts manageable.
Liberal media outlets like Salon and the Huffington Post aren’t helping their own cause, either — every day they publish new articles saying that white men in the South and Midwest are the cause of every problem with this country. Whites are frequently depicted as racist, misogynistic, unintelligent, uneducated, or irrelevant.
Public media figures like Bill Maher, although funny at times, reinforce that image through excessive ridicule and condescension, and even President Obama once claimed that working class voters in the Midwest “cling to guns or religion.”So the serious question is: why on Earth would anyone vote for a party that treats them and their community as backward people who aren’t good for anything except shutting up and paying taxes? Democrats can’t just demean large portions of the American population and rely on demographic changes to give them victories — they need to find a message that appeals to the legitimate interests of all Americans, even (gasp) Southern and Midwestern white people, rather than being divisive.
