Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
Here we are again: another election. Like all other recent elections, this one, of course, is the most important in our lifetime.
I guess that with another one around the corner, it’s time for a new round of election predictions! And as much as we had to discuss Trump in 2020, he remains a big factor in this one, too. Since 2015, we haven’t been able to discuss U.S. electoral politics without placing Trump near the center.
Imagine traveling back in time to 2008 and telling someone that.
As we approach the 2022 election, it’s worth remembering that elections aren’t just about candidates and offices. Voters also choose whether to adopt various issue-based ballot initiatives. Pundits (and voters) often ignore these initiatives.
Let’s take a look at 4 of these ballot initiatives for leftists to watch. I’ll point out that the outset that there are a few abortion initiatives on the ballot in certain states. California and Michigan, for example, have initiatives on the ballot that would guarantee reproductive freedom if enacted.
But I’m going to set these aside for the moment. They’re important, but they’re already getting a fair bit of attention in light of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Instead, I’ll look at initiatives many leftists probably haven’t noticed.
I want to start with two competing visions for how to put together a leftist electoral coalition. The first one says you put together a multiracial working-class coalition by laying out policies in people’s interest and then advertising those policies. The second says you start by connecting with people on their own terms and by using prior relationships to build personal ties with the candidate and campaign.
The second works better than the first. Or at least Chuck Rocha argues as much in his book, Tío Bernie, about his work with Latinx and immigrant voters on the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.
Here’s the short answer to the title of this post: No.
But for a slightly longer answer, I’ll point out that many things could happen. Kim Reynolds could get caught driving drunk while cheating on her husband. Chuck Grassley could die from old age. And so on. But assuming nothing outrageous happens, Democrats won’t win the major federal or statewide races this fall. They will lose Iowa in 2022. Normal campaigning and GOTV efforts won’t be enough to win.
Incidentally, wealthier Democratic donors and party officials already know this. It’s a big part of why donors haven’t given as much money as usual by this point. A few progressives in the state have even criticized Democrats for ‘throwing in the towel.’
The left leaning candidate almost always loses the Democratic nomination. Why?
Among their major electoral problems, progressives and left leaning electoralists can’t count. In other words, they don’t know what a majority of the Democratic Party consists in and how to get there. Nor is this merely a problem of electoral organizing. It’s also one of the key problems Jane McAlevey sees in many unions in her book No Shortcuts, among other works.
In order to get to some ways to solve all this, I’d like to take a look at the Democratic Party and its presidential nomination. Who does win? And how do they do it? What kind of coalition of voters do they build?
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