Regardless of which party wins nominal control of Congress, Democratic voters are in for a rude awakening in 2007. A Democratic majority in either body will depend on the votes of individuals such as Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, a staunch Bush supporter re-elected with the overwhelming support of Connecticut Republicans, and Bob Casey, a new Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who is antichoice and opposes any sort of withdrawal from Iraq. Because the Democratic Party lacks the ideological coherence to unite behind a legislative or foreign policy platform, it is the Republican Party, and the Bush White House, which will continue to determine the direction the country is headed in.
The Democratic Party has been the opposition party in Congress for the past 12 years, and it has lost seven of the last 10 Presidential elections. If it takes back the House or the Senate after last night's election, it will only be because there are many Democratic candidates who sound and vote like Republicans. However, claiming that "America is just too conservative" for true Democrats to win elections is defeatist. This very election, a liberal Democrat named Sherrod Brown unseated an incumbent Republican senator in Ohio, a state that voted for Bush in 2004. The Republican ideology is not invincible.
Winning any election begins with an understanding of the electorate. Conventional Democrat logic states that the best electoral strategy is to minimize risk by focusing on centrist voters, and taking the support of core constituencies - such as liberals and minorities - for granted. The problem with this theory is that it assumes that the American electorate is composed of simple categories of predictable votomatons - a tiny group of swing voters, and a broad mass of "solid core constituencies"with rigid political allegiances. Despite everything the mass media has made people believe, the electorate does not function like a bunch of robots. In recent years, for instance, a number of once "solid Democratic" groups, from lower-class whites to Hispanic immigrants to rural southern blacks, have been turning from Blue to Purple, like bruises after a drunken visit from Uncle Rove.
Few voters in America have only one facet to their identity, and this is something the Republican Party has capitalized on. Many Hispanic immigrants, rural blacks and working poor have become swing voters because they are both impoverished - a left-wing identity - and socially conservative - a right-wing identity. Similarly, many social liberals (blue) are also wealthy (red). Such multiple-identity voters, who are not really "purple" because they are not centrist, but who have both a compelling "red" and "blue" identity, make up most of the electorate.
Today's Republican Party counts on the votes of both white supremacists and conservative blacks, homosexuals and gay-bashing fundamentalists, wealthy cosmopolites dining on foie gras in their summer home in France and people ordering "freedom fries" in the drive-through, people who are patrolling the Mexican border and immigrants with families across that line. If it lost the support of any of these groups, the Republican Party's ability to win elections would be compromised faster than Tom DeLay in a fundraiser.
To unify these constituencies, the GOP in recent years has tilted its electoral strategy in the opposite direction than the Democrats. Rather than minimizing risk, it takes hundreds of political risks, by sending similar candidates into very different districts. These candidates tell people in poor rural areas to vote Republican because they're socially conservative, and people in wealthy, liberal areas to vote Republican for lower taxes. This strategy forces voters to choose to ignore a part of their identity, but the benefit is that it exchanges a bunch of contradictory electorates for a very coherent and tightly-knit group of representatives. It is ideological unity that decides true control of Congress.
Imagine a salesperson coming to your door with a mysterious-looking product. When you ask what it does, he replies, "I don't know... what do you want it to do?" Sound like a convincing sales pitch? Yet, this is the strategy the Democratic Party has been taking to voters. It sends a wealthy, pro-business lesbian into one district, a populist Hispanic conservative into another district - and the result is that, after the election, every Democrat represents his district rather than the party as a whole.
Just ask yourself: when the Democrats briefly "controlled" the Senate from 2001 to 2003, what bills were they able to pass to benefit liberals by protecting civil liberties? What bills did the Democrats pass to benefit poor blacks, whites or Hispanics in this same period? They certainly found time to pass Bush's tax cuts, to vote for the war in Iraq and the Patriot Act. Every year that the Democrats "control" Congress without passing legislation that benefits liberals, they lose some of them to the tax-cutting Republicans. Every year that they go without passing legislation to help poor people, regardless of color, they lose some of them to the socially conservative Republicans.
This is the key to winning in American national politics: not just encouraging but forcing various constituencies to disregard what divides them. The Democratic Party needs to pin the tail on its donkey: is it going to be more pro-business or more populist? Is it going to be more liberal on social issues or more conservative? What is its strategy for Iraq and for the broader international arena? Once it has decided which of these positions it endorses, the party can start selling its ideas to voters.
It is too late to adopt this strategy for 2006, and for this reason a Democratic House or Senate in 2007 will still be at the mercy of the Republican ideology, and be unable to deliver to its core constituents on any controversial issues.
It is not too late to adopt this strategy going into 2008. Doing so is a pressing necessity, not only to win back so-called "core constituencies," but to appeal to the average American. Not the average American the media invented, but the real average American, who has a million different identities, usually two or three at a time.
Michal Zapendowski '07 is a wealthy, broke, liberal white immigrant from a Catholic family. Chew on that, political strategists.
