Are Democrats in Disarray?
A Q&A with Tom Schaller, author of "Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South."
I first met Tom Schaller 12 years ago in New Hampshire in the run-up to the 2008 presidential primary. We were introduced by a mutual friend, had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Manchester, and then spent the evening sitting on a press riser at then-Senator Barack Obama’s final campaign event in the state. We’ve been good friends ever since and it’s hard to think of a better person to kick off my regular Q&A feature at Truth and Consequences. There are few smarter observers of American politics and that’s also the reason why I asked Tom to write a bimonthly column for the newsletter.
The following conversation took place late last month and has been edited for length and clarity.
About 15 years ago you wrote “Whistling Past Dixie,” which argued the future democratic presidential coalition was going to be bicoastal with the Midwest being the key, the Southwest being the opportunity, and the South being gone. That seems to have panned out in 2020, wouldn’t you say?
Yeah. I did a little homework before our interview today and I looked at the results in the South from the last few cycles and it’s just been a really bad performance for Democrats. You know the Electoral College results, with Obama winning Florida twice, North Carolina once, and Virginia twice.
But I think a good indicator is the state legislatures, because every Southern state has at least a bicameral legislature so that’s 22 chambers. When my book was written Democrats actually held 11 of the 22 chambers. Now they control two: both of Virginia's chambers. And that's it. The US Senate is the same, pending the Georgia results. Virginia is essentially the one state that is a reliable blue state for the Democrats. In the other ten states the Democratic South is worse than it's ever been and it’s as rock red Republican as it’s ever been,
Is there any reason to believe this is going to change and that a substantial investment of resources by the Democratic Party is going to reverse this trend?
I’m reminded of that famous chant in the movie “Meatballs” - “it just doesn't matter.” It doesn't matter if Jamie Harrison shatters every fundraising record and Lindsey Graham is almost crying on TV, begging for money. Democrats can’t flip that seat in South Carolina. It doesn't matter if it’s Cal Cunningham, a white guy with a short haircut who looks all-American and outraised Thom Tillis. Democrats can't flip North Carolina.
There are significant structural hurdles and those structural hurdles aren't going to go away, given that the Republicans control the state legislatures and most of the governors in the South. There are three Democratic governors right now. (Roy) Cooper in North Carolina, (Ralph) Northam in Virginia and (John Bel) Edwards in Louisiana. I think there were four when I wrote the book. Part of the reason it will stay that way is because the Republican governors and state legislatures control the redistricting process every decade. They're drawing districts for both statehouses and certainly the US House of Representatives, where they pack African Americans in a handful of districts, concede those districts and win everywhere else.
There is an obvious rejoinder here, which is that “hey Joe Biden won Georgia,” not by a lot mind you, but when you compare it to where Democrats were in that state 10, 12 years ago, there’s a real trend toward Democrats. In North Carolina. obviously, Obama won the state in 2008 and barely lost in 2012. In 2020, Biden came close. Why are North Carolina and Georgia trending in a different direction than the rest of the deep South?
To be honest, I'm shocked that Democrats carried Georgia and not North Carolina, given that Obama carried North Carolina once.
Georgia looks like a Stacey Abrams phenomena and a massive mobilization project. And I do think there's a model there. If the Democrats could find ten other Stacey Abrams or just deploy her and her team and spread them out across the rest of the South, they might not flip Arkansas, but they could certainly do it in North Carolina. They have already done it without Stacey Abrams in Virginia.
So I think the Democrats have a sort of two pronged question. One is how much is the demographic change gonna help them? In Northern Virginia, Democrats didn’t really have to do much because Northern Virginia counties look like the Maryland suburbs. And so Virginia despite its conservative pockets in the southern portions and in the far western portions of the state is becoming more like a blue state because it's basically a Washington metropolitan suburb or a good chunk of it is.
So if you're of the mind that demographic destiny is the key and you can only speed it up so much, you wait for collar counties in suburban Atlanta and, of course, Atlanta itself and little pockets of Savannah and elsewhere around Georgia to continue to move that way.
But, if you're of the mind that no, this was done through active dedication and just a titanic effort by Stacey Abrams and her team, and you think that's the reason that it accelerated Georgia ahead of North Carolina, it's hard to argue that there's not something there. That is the stronger argument against my book and for saying, look, it can be done and there is a model there for doing it. And I'm always perfectly happy to admit when my thesis doesn't hold and I think that Georgia leapfrogging North Carolina is a perfect example. It does weigh on the side of “there is a path for Democrats” in the South. And that's not to say that Georgia hasn't changed demographically. It did. But those two things, sort of, are moving in concert and that's a perfect storm for Democrats. You have the state that's moving, like in North Carolina or Georgia or Virginia, unlike in Arkansas or Louisiana, and you have an activism component that overlays that. You put that together and you have a really powerful combination.
There is a reality here that the Democrats, even when they won those states didn't need them. Biden didn’t need to win Georgia to win the presidency. Obama didn’t need North Carolina -
or even Florida, which he won twice, to win the White House.
Right. And your argument 15 years ago was that Democrats should focus on the Southwest, consolidate their support in the Northeast and basically fight out the election in the Midwest. And that's basically what’s happened.
Yeah, I think the the prognosis side of “Whistling Past Dixie” is still right. People got hung up on “oh he’s saying screw the South” but the part that people forget about is how to compensate for that in the Midwest and the Southwest. As a result of the 2020 election, Democrats now control all eight Senate seats and all four governors in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico for the first time in American history.
The Midwest is where Democrats are really struggling. It has been the most pivotal region in American politics for 100 years. In fact, I think, I said in the book there's only one successful presidential candidate in the Electoral College who won the Midwest without carrying at least four of those upper Midwest states from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana, as Trump did in 2020. He flipped three states and Biden flipped them back so that pattern continues to hold. And the reason the Midwest is such a pivotal region is because it’s kind of the closest thing we have to a microcosm of the country. It's not the most evangelized region, but it's the second most. It's not the most Catholic region. That's New England and the Northeast, but it's the second most. Its white/black population share is a microcosm of the country. So as the Midwest goes, so goes the nation. The Democrats were doing well there when I wrote my book before the 2006 midterms but in the late stages of the Obama presidency they started to give it back and we saw what happened with what Trump did in 2016.
Well, that gets to an issue that I think is important to talk about here. Before we spoke today I sent you an article that was in the Washington Post about a week or so ago, a very traditional kind of piece about how Democrats, even after winning the election by seven million votes are pessimistic about the future. A lot of it is because they did not make the gains among white working class voters, particularly in the Midwest, that they had hoped to make. Their success in this election came largely from suburban voters and women in particular. The question is whether those gains are sustainable? Can Democrats rely on those voters to continue to support their candidates?
It's ironic that we talk about the Democrats thin margin and all the post election stories start with, “how can the Democrats hold it all together with Scotch tape” even though they've won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections -
— yeah, you and I have talked about this often. The Democrats have been the dominant presidential party since 1992 and we’ve never seen a streak like in American political history.
Yes, but to get back to your point I do think that the suburbs - the increasingly multi-racial suburbs - are key to the Democrats, moving forward. The funny thing to me is you get all these post election analysis about downscale voters and how they've moved toward the Republicans and how college educated whites and college educated non-whites who live in the cities in the suburbs are moving toward the Democrats. But then you see the massive amounts of money that Joe Biden raised, $750 million in two months in August and September. That is just absurd, right? And it does speak to the fact that there is an affluent Democratic base of not super wealthy but middle class and upper class people who are professionals and have six-figure incomes and they are college educated, and they either live in the city or the inner suburbs and they're Democrats now. They can afford to write a $2800 check to Joe Biden. I think that speaks to the votes that are being cast in suburban, increasingly mixed race enclaves but also the financial clout that comes from that. And I do think that is the future of the Democratic Party: flipping the suburbs, holding them, and pulling votes and money out of those communities.
So how do they hold those suburban voters?
A lot of the Democratic problem is the messaging. You can't allow the messaging to be overtaken. I mean, Abigail Spangenberger (a freshman Democratic representative from Virginia who barely won reelection in 2020) got a lot of blowback for saying “defund the police” was a problem for her. That's hard to explain, right? And of course, activists are not asking for defund the police, right? That’s a really bad marketing label on a decent, arguable idea about directing resources and having police accountability and getting the bad apples out of there.
I think Democrats have to be be better in our social media soundbite world to articulate complex ideas in simple language. Republicans and conservatives, whatever you might say about them, have a way of actually overselling what their actual product is with good marketing. And it sounds better in their taglines and their elevator pitches. And the Democrats have the reverse problem. And so what they need to do is explain how they're the party of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and veterans, things that are very popular that people don't define as welfare.
And you need elites ready to step in there and change that narrative and change those memes because time after time when you look at Democratic policies they're very popular. That's a major marketing problem when people are voting against something that they like.
When I was looking back at your book a few days ago something that jumped out to me was your argument that the South is different from the rest of the country in that social and cultural issues tend to trump economic considerations. Is that phenomenon now being replicated across America?
I think it certainly isn't bounded by the South. So many of the things that are more apt or more appropriate to the South exist outside the South. And, of course, there are major pockets of the country, whether it's upstate New York or downstate Illinois that look very Southern in terms of their politics and in terms of their markets and economies and in terms of their culture and even their accents. So I think culture trumps economics for a lot of people. Clearly Donald Trump’s election reinforces the fact that culture is very powerful people are willing to vote against their interests. In response to the pandemic and on issues like Obamacare people are voting and acting against their interests. It happens on guns where rural whites die at a higher rate from violence. You see it with the loss of local rural hospitals and the subsequent loss of health care, which is literally killing people who are voting for politicians who are making decisions that kill them. And you think, “Okay, well, these people who are voting against their interests are ignorant. We just need to inform them.” But for many of them, their culture, flag, or gun is more important and they are willing to die for these cultural principles. And I'm stunned by that. But I have to take it at face value that it's true, that it is more important for some people to maintain a white, ethno-Christian nationalist country than it is to get $2000 from Mitch McConnell.
Let me finish up with what I think is the the biggest unanswered question from 2020 - and one that I think will define the future of American politics - at least in the near-term: who loses more by Donald Trump not being on the ticket in 2024? And that’s of course based on an assumption that he doesn’t run in 2024, which I’m not sure will be the case. In other words can Republicans win without the mobilization that Trump provides them; and can Democrats win without the mobilization that Trump gives them?
I think there's a very clear answer if Trump decides to take his voters and form a separate party or even if they do that contra his wishes. If that party is split in two it can’t win hardly anything. But if he stays within the Republican Party and there's no third party split off I think it's an open question of whether the Trump phenomenon exists because of who the voters are or because of who Trump is. I think if people like Josh Hawley (Republican Senator from Missouri) take the entire Trump policy platform, which is in stark contrast to Republican orthodoxy on trade, on immigration, on multilateralism, and say I'm a Trump Republican do they still win on the issues, or is it Trump specific? The performative effect of sticking the needle in the eye of the media and giving it to the Democrats and talking the way he talks to people, I don't think that's easily replicable. I don't know that any of the potential Republican candidates have the chops to go that far, so we'll see. But then again, we didn't think Trump had the chops to go that far. There are gonna be a lot of imitators, but I think people can see through the veneer of people who are doing it for real and people who are faking it. I think Trumpism without Trump at the top falls a little bit short. You need to have that authoritarian bully personality that's really attractive to people who like that sense of stick in the eye politics, the negative partisanship, the “owning the libs” partisanship.
Let me ask this question in reverse: What about Democrats? There's no question that in 2018 and 2020 their success was a backlash to Trump. Is that gonna be a problem for them in 2022 and 2024?
Well, this is a perfect example of where I feel like the Democrats, you know, does anybody know how to play this game? If the Democrats had elected a Trump-style populist demagogue, with no governing experience like Al Sharpton wouldn't they call them the Sharpdocrats? So I think every Democratic candidate from sheriff to senate, from this point forward, should make their opponents say, “Do you think Donald Trump was a good president?” Because there's not a really great answer for that. If you say no and you’re a Republican, you're absolutely doomed. But if you say yes, you're gonna need to explain that and Democrats are really bad about giving the media stories to report on. And Trump is very good at it. Even if he has to make up a lie or completely invent some fiction he talks about it, and then the media has to report on it. So there's asymmetrical warfare here and I think the Democrats have to stop bringing a knife to a gunfight.