Elections, War, and the Future of Democracy

By Jim Miller

Monica Montgomery Steppe’s win in the San Diego County Board of Supervisors District 4 race last week was expected but still constitutes a historic triumph for the first black woman ever elected to serve in that capacity.  

Her easy victory over the Reopen San Diego leader, Amy Reichert, sent the rightwing darling packing for the second time in as many elections and is evidence that San Diego has the potential to transform itself from simply a place where Democrats can win majorities to a county where a genuinely thoroughgoing progressive agenda might be enacted.  

Montgomery Steppe, who won with the support of progressive labor, a host of local activists of various stripes, and rank and file Democrats is both more deeply rooted in her district than the scandal-plagued Nathan Fletcher was and more representative of the kind of candidate who will make our region more equitable for everyone, particularly those left out of the political calculations of many of our current Democratic leaders.  

As she noted in her victory speech last Tuesday evening:

• “We’re celebrating tonight, but when we go home tonight, we will see someone sleeping on the street,” she later told the crowd assembled at the UDW Hall. 

• “It’s time for us to move forward. It’s time to for us to create a quality of life for every single person who wants to live here and who wants to thrive here. And it’s time to center the people in the policies and in the culture and in the bureaucracy.”

Here’s hoping that with the re-election of Terra Lawson-Remer in the next round of contests, Montgomery Steppe will be part of a re-invigorated progressive, female, racially diverse majority on the County Board of Supervisors that will move us forward toward a San Diego that is not just less hostile to change but embraces social and economic justice as part of its identity.

Last Tuesday was also a good night for the national Democratic party as abortion rights prevailed in deep red Ohio, a pro-union Democrat won re-election in Republican Kentucky promising “big raises” for teachers, and the GOP’s rising star in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, got his clock cleaned in a battle for control of the state legislature where he weighed in big, promising new abortion restrictions and continued assaults on educators.  

Overall, the right-wing attack on education was roundly rejected by the electorate.  AP reported that:

• Voters in some of the highest-profile school board elections across the U.S. rebuked conservative candidates in local school board elections who want to ban books and restrict classroom conversations on race and gender.

• In recent years, down-ballot elections have become proxy votes for polarizing national issues. Liberal and moderate candidates took control in high-profile races Tuesday in conservative Iowa, as well as swing states Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Surely this won’t end the Republican addiction to culture war issues, but perhaps it’s a sign that they are not the electoral panacea they had hoped they would be heading into 2024.  

In sum, it was a good night. 

But, despite this happy news, the national picture is far from rosy.  As Nate Cohn wrote in the New York Times: 

• Put simply: Tuesday’s results don’t change the picture for President Biden heading into 2024.

• The polls and the election results are surprisingly easy to reconcile. The surveys show millions of voters who dislike Mr. Biden but remain receptive to other Democrats and support liberal causes. The polls also show Democrats with particular strength among the most highly engaged voters, who dominate low-turnout elections like Tuesday’s, while Mr. Trump shows his greatest strength among the less engaged voters who turn out only in presidential races.

• As a result, the same data showing Mr. Biden in jeopardy is entirely consistent with Democratic strength Tuesday. The fact that many of the voters he will need are now supporting other Democrats and liberal causes, as they did Tuesday, may ultimately be exactly what allows Mr. Biden to win in the end. But it doesn’t mean his political position is secure. If anything, his weakness among even these voters reveals the extent of his liabilities.

Thomas Edsall echoed Cohn’s caution in a column that went straight to the heart of one of Biden’s most significant vulnerabilities—the war in the Middle East:

• Biden cannot afford to lose even thin slices of the Democratic electorate, Cain argued: “As the Siena/NYT poll indicates, small swings in turnout of the Democratic base can doom Biden. This is what happened to Hillary behind the blue curtain in 2016.”

• “The longer and bloodier the war," Cain added, “the harder it will be for the Democratic coalition.”

My friend Doug Porter stole the lead from the column I was going to write for today about the nasty polarization in the United States, noting last Monday that, “At this point nothing said about the Gaza war is immune to rage-fueled commentary.” 

What is most important about the current political mood is the fact that much of the angry feuding is going on within the Democratic base and this could be a fatal problem for Biden in his seemingly inevitable rematch with Trump.    

This should alarm anyone who thinks it is critical to prevent a second Trump term that would be fertile ground for right wing populist authoritarianism.  As Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect:

• The larger problem is a convergence of events that reinforce underlying doubts [about Biden]. The most important of these are two wars at risk of becoming prolonged quagmires. And in the case of Israel, rather than looking strong by standing by an ally, Biden looks weak because Netanyahu is openly defying Biden’s plea to reduce civilian casualties. Netanyahu’s war has become Biden’s war, and it is hard to see a good outcome anytime soon.

Kuttner makes this observation as part of his more comprehensive analysis of why Biden is losing almost all the swing states in a recent poll published by the New York Times that sent ripples of despair throughout Democratic circles across the U.S.  

Whatever your opinion is about the conflict in the Middle East, it should be clear that alienating hosts of young voters who may have problems with Biden’s foreign policy along with a large portion of disillusioned Arab Americans in key swing states is not a winning recipe for the sitting President.  Kuttner is right to note that obsessing about extremely early polls is, as he puts it, “lazy journalism,” but he is also correct that this doesn’t mean that “everything is fine.”  

In addition to the political dilemmas posed by the bloodbath in Gaza that followed the horror of 10/7, the Democrats also continue to suffer from the erosion of support amongst working class voters that now seems to be bleeding from the white electorate to significant percentages of African American and Latino voters as well.   

This phenomenon has been well documented by Thomas Frank who, in several of his recent books, has outlined how a “backlash populism” that replaces class politics based on economics with attacks on the “cultural elite” has been effectively deployed by the right for decades before Trump perfected the formula with his signature style of angry authoritarianism.  

The Democrats, Frank argues, have helped make this possible, by abandoning the old New Deal ethos in favor of neoliberal, market-based policies that leaves working class voters cold and open to Trump style demagoguery.  

Peter Coy highlights new research that seems to back up Frank’s work, citing a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “‘Compensate the Losers?’ Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the U.S.”:

• The argument, in a nutshell, is that the Democratic Party has gained educated voters but lost less educated voters because of a change in how it tried to help the working class and the poor. Instead of trying to prevent market forces from generating inequality, it has leaned toward giving free rein to market forces and then fixing the resulting inequalities through the tax-and-transfer system, taking some of the gains of the most successful and sharing them with the least successful.

This working paper, Coy goes on, documents how the working class shift away from Democrats began with the rise of neoliberalism in the Democratic realm as “New Democrats began to exert more influence over the party.”  

Hence, it would seem, that while Biden is on the right track when it comes to supporting unions and things like the successful UAW strike, if the Democrats ever want to decisively defeat Trumpism, they need to double down on the economic issue and not let it be drowned out by endless grim war news from the Middle East and Ukraine.  

To be fair, Biden tried to return more boldly to the ethos of the New Deal with his earlier Build Back Better legislative agenda that included some solid liberal populist economic policies that were ultimately blocked by Democratic Senators Sinema and Manchin in line with the Republicans. Nonetheless, he is still living in the political reality created by the New Democrats. Indeed, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.  

In a brilliant piece in Tom Dispatch, Liz Theoharis makes the connection between economic and foreign policy quite clear: 

• Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency away from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to (as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t afford universal healthcare or genuine living wages, the military budget for 2023 is $858 billion and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases globally. 

• Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who claimed last year that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”  

Thus, when Donald Trump starts railing against “the war mongers”, perhaps it would be wise for Biden to pay more attention to the vein that he is tapping rather than glibly dismissing him like Hillary Clinton did in her unsuccessful run in 2016 when he assailed bad trade deals that hurt working people.  The consequences of doing so again would be genuinely dystopian both at home and abroad.  

While MSNBC anchors and the Democratic establishment are in a permanent tizzy about Trump’s legal travails, a large chunk of the country simply isn’t paying attention or just doesn’t care, thus making a return to Trump’s homegrown fascism very possible if the Democrats neglect to listen to the very voters who can save us from such a fate. Trump may be unhinged, but he still knows how to divide and conquer with the best of them. 

So, while the news from last Tuesday’s election is encouraging, big challenges loom for the Democratic Party and American democracy.  A year out, it’s still not too late to change course and, as former President Obama recently argued, focus on, “keeping open the possibility of peace, security and dignity for future generations of Israeli and Palestinian children — as well as for our own children.”  

One thing however is abundantly clear: endless war is not the answer.