Expecting 2008,
Democrats got 2016 again, an unnervingly close
election that Joe Biden appears to have won by
razor-thin margins in a few states. If the blue wave
has proved almost as illusionary as the blue wall four
years ago, it is because centrist Democrats, as Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren constantly warned during
the primary debates, have refused to learn the lessons
of 2016. Biden’s campaign was only a tweaked version
of Hillary Clinton’s failed playbook.
This was illustrated
most forcefully by Republican gains among Latino
voters in several states. It is not particularly
surprising that wealthy Cuban and Venezuelan exiles,
screeching about communists on the doorstep, managed
to cut deeply into into the Democratic margin in
Miami. But what happened in the seven major Texas
border counties whose population of 2.6 million is 90
per cent Mexican in origin (Tejanos)?
The national party has many neglected or abandoned
constituencies, including Puerto Rico, Indian Country
and Appalachia, but southern Texas has a unique
strategic significance. This was acknowledged two days
before the election when the chair of the Democratic
National Committee, Tom Perez, visited the McAllen
area, at the southernmost tip of the state. ‘The road
to the White House,’ he declared, ‘goes through South
Texas. Remember, Beto lost by about 200,000 votes in
2018. We can make up these votes alone in the Valley.
If we take Latino turnout from 40 per cent to 50 per
cent, that’s enough to flip Texas.’
But the Biden
campaign failed to pave the road to power with
campaign resources or to pay attention to local
issues. Continuing a long tradition of electoral
negligence, the national Democrats were confident that
Biden would enlarge Clinton’s winning margin in the
region even if they didn’t divert funds or personnel
from the all-important suburban battlefields. The
border, after all, is one of the poorest regions in
the country, with a population routinely vilified in
Republican propaganda as aliens and rapists. In any
case, the polls were predicting historic Democratic
victories; a blue wave along the Rio Grande was
assured.
As the fantasy of
great gains in Texas dissipated, Democrats were
stunned to discover that a high turnout had instead
propelled a Trump surge along the border. In the three
Rio Grande Valley counties (the agricultural corridor
from Brownsville to Rio Grande City), which Clinton
had carried by 39 per cent, Biden achieved a margin of
only 15 per cent. More than half of the population of
Starr County, an ancient battlefield of the Texas
farmworkers’ movement, lives in poverty, yet Trump won
47 per cent of the vote there, an incredible gain of
28 points from 2016. Further up river he actually
flipped 82 per cent Latino Val Verde County (county
seat: Del Rio) and increased his vote in Maverick
County (Eagle Pass) by 24 points and Webb County
(Laredo) by 15 points. The Democratic congressman
Vincente Gonzalez (McAllen) had to fight down to the
wire to save the seat he won by 21 per cent in 2018.
Even in El Paso, a hotbed of Democratic activism,
Trump made a six point gain. Considering South Texas
as a whole, the Democrats had great hopes of winning
the 21st Congressional
District, which connects San Antonio and Austin, as
well as the 78 per cent Latino 23rd Congressional
District, which is anchored in the western suburbs of
San Antonio but encompasses a vast swathe of southwest
Texas. In both cases, the Republicans won fairly
easily.
The explanation? As
Congressman Filemón Vela (Brownsville) was quoted as
saying in the Valley
Morning Star, a Harlingen newspaper, ‘I think
there was no Democratic national organisational effort
in South Texas and the results showed. The visits are
nice, but without a planned media and grassroots
strategy you just can’t sway voters. When you take
voters for granted like national Democrats have done
in South Texas for forty years, there are consequences
to pay.’
In the end it was the
economy that sunk hopes of a Democratic landslide. It
was a gigantic mistake to make the election a
plebiscite on Trump’s bungling of the pandemic without
making an all-out effort to convince voters that a
Biden administration would sustain family incomes and
small businesses until Covid was defeated. The 2.2
trillion dollar relief bill passed by the House should
have been the basis for an aggressive campaign, but
the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, allowed the
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, to take it
hostage and Biden, mumbling through the two
presidential debates, never really crusaded to free
it. Meanwhile, the third-quarter employment figures,
however misleading, gave Trump an unexpected boost;
they were proof, he claimed, of the shining future
ahead. A new national lockdown would send that
‘recovery’ to hell. The Democrats underestimated the
resonance this argument had with the shop-owning and
entrepreneurial middle classes facing extinction or
digestion by Amazon. It wasn’t so hard to convince bar
owners, building contractors, franchise managers,
small manufacturers and the like that closures were a
greater evil than half a million more Covid deaths.
(This is, of course, a global phenomenon: just look at
the role played by hysterical small business owners in
the violent protests against new lockdowns in Western
Europe.)
As for working
people, forced every day to choose between income and
health, Biden’s vow to put science in charge of the
pandemic was easily spun by Republicans as proof of a
economic apocalypse overseen by the dread Dr Fauci.
The Democratic counter-response was weak, in part
because the union movement had even less prominence in
the campaign than in 2016. The uncontrolled spread of
Covid restricted the door-to-door canvassing that has
always been the contribution of union members to
electoral battles. The Biden campaign did give greater
emphasis than Clinton to workers’ rights, collective
bargaining and the $15 minimum wage, but it broadcast
the same empty messages about job creation and the
future of work. ‘Millions of green energy jobs’ is an
abstraction that utterly fails to connect to the
concrete circumstances of Rustbelt and inner-city
communities. Mainstream Democrats have had more than a
generation to respond to the simple question: what
will you do to increase job opportunities here in Erie
(or Warren, Dubuque, Lorraine, Wilkes-Barre and so
on)? They have never offered a serious response.
Concrete solutions would involve geographically
targeted public investment, control over capital
flight and financial outflows, and, above all, a
massive expansion of public employment. These are
avenues most Democrats are too terrified to go down.
Since Reagan,
Republicans have always fought to turn institutional
power against the Democrats, pushing them onto
unfavourable terrain and disorganising their base. In
winning the House Speakership in 1994, Newt Gingrich
introduced the ruthless style of political combat and
absolute oppositionism that McConnell has so
exquisitely refined. The election of 2010 was an even
more important turning point. That year the
Republicans mobilised the full power of the network of
billionaire donors, regional policy centres and
political action committees that they had been
building for thirty years to storm state legislatures
and governors’ mansions across the heartland and
sunbelt. They won 700 legislative seats and flipped
twenty state legislative chambers, numbers that grew
during the Obama years. Since in most states
legislatures remain responsible for redistricting, the
Republicans ruthlessly gerrymandered state and
congressional seats to enshrine their majorities.
That’s why winning back state legislative majorities
in this census year should have been the highest
Democratic priority after the White House and Senate.
The most important target was Texas, where Democrats
were confident they could take the nine additional
seats needed to control the House. In the event, they
didn’t win any, so Republicans will be free to conduct
a new gerrymander.
The United States, as
pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two
almost equal-sized political universes. But power
abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the
evolution is towards differential experiments in
post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak
and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on
the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a
donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street
billionaires, will face a new depression without the
wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does
this point except to total destruction in the 2022
midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?
