Today we’re going to talk about a white guy from Vermont who changed the world.
No, not Bernie Sanders. We’ll get to him in a second.
When Howard Dean ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004, he was the first candidate to really leverage online fundraising. Maybe he noticed that some of those small-amount contributions were coming from states that typically went “red,” but where Democrats and Independents did live. Maybe he was just smart. IDK. But after Dean lost the nomination, he founded Democracy for America and was later elected to head the Democratic National Committee. As DNC chair, Dean ruffled some feathers when he announced a goal of organizing every voting precinct in the country.
(In case you’re not a party nerd: voting precincts are small areas that you usually only even notice because your precinct determines where you vote. For political parties, party members in each precinct can “organize,” basically meet, talk about any issues and elect delegates to that party’s county convention… Where delegates from other precincts meet, talk about issues, and elect delegates to the Congressional district convention. Then the state party convention, then the national convention. I promise this is more fun than it sounds.)
The conventional wisdom in the DNC at the time was the party could only compete nationally in a handful of states, and that’s where efforts should go. Dean’s 50-state strategy was ambitious, to put it mildly. But he persisted in establishing a Democratic presence in places like North Carolina, which the DNC had written off since Nixon.
In the 2006 mid-terms, Democrats won massive victories at the national and local levels. They didn’t just win back the House and Senate. “For the first time since the creation of the Republican party in 1860, no Republican captured any House, Senate or gubernatorial seat previously held by a Democrat.” Furthermore, “Almost all of the gains made by Democrats came from large gains among independents, not Republicans… In 2004, independents split 49-46, slightly in favor of Democrats, but in 2006 they voted 57–39 for Democrats, a 15-point swing and the largest margin among independents for Democrats since the 1986 elections.”
While the 2006 results certainly were driven by dissatisfaction with President Bush, it’s not the whole story. Dean’s emphasis on party organization announced that the DNC was no longer going to cede whole swaths of the country to the GOP.
I helped organize a few precincts in my county in 2008. Basically, this means finding a consistent Democratic voter and asking them to host a precinct meeting. Then you go through the records of other consistent voters in that precinct – anyone who’s voted in, say, three of the last four elections, including primaries – and ask them to come to the meeting. Precincts, and party organization in general, matter for a couple of reasons. They give rank-and-file voters a voice. Something your precinct resolves to do could theoretically wind up in the national party’s platform, just by working its way up through the conventions.
More importantly, at least for me, organized precincts engage voters and connect them to one another. In one of the precincts I organized, a woman told me she had no idea there even were other Democrats in her area. Precincts are the essential building blocks of a party. Precincts fire people up to get out the vote, and they provide a vehicle for educating voters about candidates and issues. They give ordinary voters hands-on experience with elections, and oftentimes those voters go on to run for local elected office themselves. It’s painstaking, tedious, usually thankless work to which volunteers devote hours because they know it matters. Dean’s strategy laid the groundwork and basically handed a playbook to the Obama campaign in 2008.
All that is a long way of explaining why Bernie Sanders and so many of his supporters annoy the shit out of me.
Sanders has been an Independent for his entire political career. That’s no secret. Even though he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, he has not been shy about criticizing them, calling the Democratic Party “intellectually bankrupt.” If Bernie were running for president as an Independent, I’d have no problems with him. (Well, ok, a few.) But gleefully eschewing a party for 40 years, only to swoop in and take advantage of the party structure that he had NOTHING to do with building now that he wants to be president? Sorry, that’s sketch.
But that’s a small quibble in comparison to the fact that, while Bernie and his voters talk all day about radically remaking American politics, they’re not doing anything to make it happen. Say Bernie gets elected. Now what? Unless he plans on setting policy exclusively through executive order, he’s going to have to talk to Congress at some point. Congress passes legislation, not the president. And please don’t tell me how the force of Bernie’s personality will bowl over that herd of 535 cats. President Obama had rabid support of voters who’d just put him in the White House by a landslide, his party had control of both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term, and he STILL couldn’t get shit done.
But wait! It gets better. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Congressional districts are drawn at the state level. That’s why Art Pope dumped literal millions into state legislative races in parts of North Carolina I’ve never even heard of in order to hand the General Assembly to the GOP for the first time in a century (later giving us the magic of HB2). Because Art Pope understands that even the most national-level of policy wins starts at the state level. Probably even the county level.
Electing one person to president will not accomplish a single thing. I don’t know how many ways I can say that.
If Sanders and his supporters actually wanted to reshape our country’s election/lobbying/highest bidder wins system, they would do what Dean did. They would go house by house, street by street, organizing voters and recruiting candidates to run for office starting at town frickin’ council. Hell, even the Tea Party managed that. In the space of – what, a year? – the Tea Party movement moved from holding tax protests to electing giant chunks of Congress. Even today, the Tea Party’s focus is – guess where? – the local level. Even people who don’t know Medicare is a federal program grasp that real change doesn’t start at the top.
If you want a revolution, you’re going to have to do more than tweet some memes and cast one whole vote. You’re going to have to have meetings. (Sooooo many meetings…). You’re going to lose sometimes. You’re going to spend years at this, and you’re still only going to make incremental progress because most of the country does not agree with you. You are going to have to vote. Every. Time.
Have you ever taken a close look at voter turnout numbers? There’s a drop-off from general elections to mid-terms going back decades. First-time voters broke for Obama in huge numbers in 2008. Do you know why the GOP chalked up historic gains in the 2010 midterm? Because that typical drop-off disproportionally slanted toward Democratic voters. Those first-time voters and Democratic-voting Independents who put Obama in the White House are the ones who ended up costing him the chance to accomplish his agenda. Because they didn’t show.
How will today’s Bernie voters be different? I’m not confident. Ideological purity tests don’t really work in a country as large and diverse as ours. A Democratic Senator from tiny, homogenously liberal Vermont is not going to have the same set of opinions or priorities than one from, say North Carolina. Or Minnesota. Here’s how BernieBros handle that:
I’m supposed to trust them with overturning the Hyde Amendment? Thanks, but no thanks.
I’m not telling you not to vote for Sanders if you agree with him on issues. I’m telling you that, if those issues really do matter to you, it shouldn’t take an election to motivate you. Those problems are still going to be there after Election Day, regardless of who wins. You want a revolution? I know I sound all “you kids get off my lawn,” but it really is this simple: Start where you can actually make a difference, don’t take your ball and go home the first time you hit a road block, and – sorry, but it’s true – stay focused on the boring stuff like precinct meetings in an off-election year.
Because those millions of other voters who don’t agree with you? That’s exactly what they are doing.
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