If there was one clear takeaway from Hillary Clinton’s address to the party officials assembled in Minneapolis for the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, it was they are certainly Ready for Hillary. Sure, her largest applause lines were for the accomplishments of President Barack Obama or her husband (the majority of which she is now on the record opposing). Still, her workmanlike speech accomplished its modest goal, and the crowd did appear warm to their party’s presidential frontrunner. But while much of Clinton’s address was unremarkable cheerleading for Team Blue, one aspect of her speech was particularly noteworthy. In a rare moment of tough love for her fellow Democrats, Clinton noted that their party has been utterly decimated at the state-level. What she declined to note, however, was that this condition would yield years of hardship when the Democratic Party looks to a farm team that doesn’t exist. A generation of Democrats that were to come of age in the next decade simply will not be there. What’s more, it was Barack Obama who presided over this culling.
“The first thing I would say is we need to elect more Democrats. Okay?” Clinton told a group of Democrats in Iowa earlier this week. “You can’t have a loss like having Tom Harkin retire, and not be really motivated to not get the other Democrats in there who will stand with me.” Apparently, you can. Harkin was just one of the Democrats who were replaced by a Republican in 2014 – in his case, freshman Senator Joni Ernst.
Clinton would not expand on the nature of the Democratic Party’s predicament. Perhaps it was simply too painful to do so. 2014 saw the Democrats lose nine U.S. Senate seats and resulted in a 54-seat GOP majority in the upper chamber. The Republicans confounded political observers who presumed that the party remained overextended in the House following their 2010 landslide victories. The Republicans entered 2015 with 247 seats, up from the 234-seat majority they had heading into last year’s midterms and the largest majority for the party since 1947. But the federal legislature is largely composed of politicians who cut their teeth in state-level legislative bodies, and it was on the local level that Democrats saw their influence contract dramatically.
When Barack Obama took office in 2008, he did so on the crest of a pro-Democratic wave – the second consecutive liberal electoral tsunami – that swept hundreds of Democratic politicians into office along with him. By 2009, Democrats controlled 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. Come January of 2015, Republicans controlled 69 of 99 of state-level legislative houses – a handful of which were secured when state legislators, sensing the wind’s shifting direction, switched parties. At the gubernatorial level, the scale of the wave was most acutely felt. Republicans were expected to lose at least four executive mansions. Instead, they lost only one and picked up four new governorships for a total of 31. By 2015, 32 lieutenant governors and 29 secretaries of state all called themselves Republicans. In 23 states, Republicans controlled all the elected branches of government.
“It is not just enough to elect more members of the Senate and more members of the House in Washington,” Clinton told her fellow Democrats earlier this week. “We need more members in the state Senate. We need more members in the state house.” But the painful scope of this project is so staggering that even Hillary Clinton could not bear to be fully honest about it.
The former secretary of state revisited the themes of her Iowa address in Minneapolis on Friday. “I’m not taking a single primary voter or caucus-goer for granted. I’m building an organization in all 50 states and territories, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers who will help Democrats win races up and down the ticket. Not just the presidential campaign,” she said. “Look, in 2010, Republicans routed us on redistricting, not because they won Congress but because they won state legislatures.”
We can be charitable and presume that Clinton meant that, because of the GOP’s victories in 2010, the party went on to control much of the reapportionment process in 2011 – at least, in those states that continued to have partisan redistricting commissions. But the scale of the GOP’s victories in 2014 (you can’t gerrymander a state) are indicative of the truism that all the cleverly-drawn districts in the world cannot overcome a decisive mandate from a critical mass of voters.
Republicans were in a fortunate position when decennial reapportionment took place after the 2010 elections, and they took great advantage of their position. They did so, in fact, in the same way Democrats had for generations when their party commanded substantial state-level and federal legislative majorities for much of the 20th Century. But pro-GOP maps aren’t the only things keeping Democratic majorities down. By virtue of the “inefficient clustering” of Democratic voters, as Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observed, Democrats are going to have trouble converting their popular vote share into a proportionate percentage of seats.
“The way that the districts are packed and the increasing tendency for like-minded people to cluster together means that Democrats have to win upwards of 55 percent of the overall House vote to come close to claiming a majority of the House seats,” theWashington Post’s Chris Cillizza summarized. Hillary Clinton might have coattails if she were to win the White House, but it’s extremely unlikely that the will be that long; particularly given the fact that she is seeking a historically atypical third consecutive term for her party. When the president governs as Barack Obama has, flouting the will of the electorate and enraging his opponents far more than he energized his base (the Affordable Care Act and his unilateral executive actions on immigration, to name two catalysts), it invites the kind of routs that the Democrats experienced in 2010 and 2014.
It may be comforting to contend that the game is rigged and Democrats would do better politically if only the winds of fate had prevented Republicans from controlling the redistricting process, but it’s a fable. Hillary Clinton is taking a step toward being honest about her party’s predicament with its members, but she cannot be entirely forthright about the scale of the problem without indicting Barack Obama’s approach to governance. That is not happening any time soon. Democrats appreciate Barack Obama’s aggressive style, and they have not yet come around to the realization that it has put their party in the worst position it has been in since prior to the New Deal. Hillary Clinton is taking the first steps toward diagnosing her party’s malady, but she cannot accurately prescribe a remedy without alienating the voters she needs to win the nomination.
There will be no emerging from the wilderness anytime soon.
