Towards a Viable 2024 Democrat Suburban Strategy
And, to be more precise, it will involve a vigorous appeal to independent and Republican suburban women.
This coming election will be won and lost in the suburbs. And, to be more precise, it will involve a vigorous appeal to independent and Republican suburban women. The recent special election of NY3 suggests a blueprint for a future Democrat party strategy in the suburbs, which may ultimately determine the course of the 2024 Presidential election.
If the “Suozzi model” teaches us anything, it is that Democrats need to lean in to immigration and crime. Don’t wait for the sleazy SuperPAC ads; pre-empt them. The Republicans, aided by if-it-bleeds-it-leads local news, have been trumping — no pun intended — the chaos at the border. They even prioritized border spending over aid to the Ukraine and Israel. And yet, when a bipartisan bill was painstakingly cobbled together over the course of months— and Democrats caved in every conceivable matter — it came to naught. More on that in a bit.
The schematics of NY3 are not entirely dissimilar to the recent special election in VA4. Does the Anna Karenina principle hold for American special elections? Last year, Virginia's 4th congressional district held a special election to fill the seat of deceased Congressman Donald McEachin, who died in November 2022 of colorectal cancer. Right-wing pastor Leon Benjamin — the African-American GOP candidate in that race — was already a “failed candidate” that had lost twice to the late McEachin. In NY3, also, the GOP ran a quixotic African-American cypher in the person of Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born, Orthodox Jewish IDF veteran. What will the GOP think of next?
Both NY3 and VA4 are majority white districts. And while, yes, VA-4 leaned Democrat, the margin of victory was noteworthy. It was a 50-point blowout. NY3, a much closer race, is significant in that Suozzi co-opted the border issue, saving his war chest to run last minute ads touting a hard line on the border and on crime. He flipped the district back and earned an 8-point margin of victory. “Even Republicans acknowledge that Democrat Tom Suozzi's embrace of stricter border policy — and his attacks on Republicans for rejecting the Senate's bipartisan border bill — contributed to his eight-point victory,” is how Andrew Solender and Stef W. Kight described it in Axios.
But back to the bipartisan bill. Senator Lankford of Oklahoma cannot properly be conceived of, in any imaginable multiverse, as squishy on immigration. And yet his labor in constructing the bipartisan bill was cast, by candidate Trump, as a “death wish.” If Trump — the all but assured Republican nominee — pulls a flex on Congress, then he, as well as his lackeys, should be called on it before the electorate. And — vigorously.
The President should lean in to the fecklessness of the current Republican Congress. Congressional Approval Ratings, via Gallup, are lower than the President’s. They are also, in general, lower than Pelosi’s Congress, who could not, in any multiverse, fail to make a proper vote count on an impeachment. Contrast the ample footage footage — of Kevin McCarthy’s lackluster Speakership; the cartoonish buffoonery of George Santos; of Mike Johnson’s incompetence at vote counting — against the efficiencies of Democrat House leadership.
What, pray tell, have Republican’s done but squandered the power granted to them, rather weakly, by the midterm “red wave” that wasn’t, in 2022? Further, President Biden “punching down” at an unpopular Congress reminds me of the old saw — why punch a man when he’s down? The answer, in hardball politics, is because it is the best time in the world to punch a man. Republicans already know this; Democrats must learn, with the stakes this high. “If the border — according to Pilip, according to House leadership, according to the Speaker — is indeed the most important national security issue, then why torpedo it?” I asked in this Substack, earlier this month. The President’s campaign should be asking the same.
And what about the Vice President? Well, regarding that, white Democrat elites can stop pining after some last-minute ticket change in their February Madness Presidential bracket. “My heart breaks a bit for Joe Biden,” Ezra Klein began, disingenuously, en route to expending 4,000 puffs of hot air on an audio essay that really and truly should not have been on the New York Times platform. Joan Walsh in The Nation said aloud what clear thinkers about the stakes of this election were thinking in the quiet of their souls:
“Recently, I was at a prominent liberal event where a prominent white male liberal told me, and others around us, that it would be no problem if the Democrats chose someone like Whitmer, or California Governor Gavin Newsom, and shunted aside Harris, because ‘the Blacks’ don’t even like Harris. Again I prayed, God give me the self-confidence of an affluent white man. (Also, as Seth Meyers suggested in another context, if you’re white, it’s creepy to talk about ‘the Blacks,’ unless you’re referring to the nice family named Black who live across the street. And then definitely invite the Blacks to your barbecue!)
“(Ezra Klein) is an exceedingly smart guy and knowledgeable about politics, to an extent. But he also can show an odd, intellectual detachment at times, and this is one of those times.”
Exquisitely put. Which leads us back to — What about the Vice President? who is also an integral part of this ticket.
Any Democrat suburban strategy should stress Trump’s very real problems with Republican and independent women. Such a strategy also would play well to the Vice President’s obvious advantages to a ticket with an abundance of older white men. On Trump’s issues with Republican and independent suburban women — many of whom love Taylor Swift — I wrote in January in part:
On the first full day of his Presidency, for example, the historic women’s march on Washington brought hundreds of thousands of women to the capital. White women helped elect Trump in 2016 and he needs them to regain the White House but he seems incapable — at age 77 — of controlling his sexist woman-hating. And as long as Nikki Haley remains in the race, Trump’s propensity to hurl cruel, sexist insults at her, the overwhelming underdog, will be seen — by women, especially — as lengthening the GOP gender gap.
Since then, Trump’s legal vulnerabilities have multiplied, Nikki Haley has sharpened her edge, Fani Willis has come to the fore and MAGA-propelled Taylor Swift misinformation persist …
Proposal: Kamala Harris should stand with Alex Navalnya's widow, Yulia Borisovna Navalnaya, contrasting against Trump's sycophancy to Putin. And the Vice President should stand with Navalnya's mother, demanding for her son's body to be returned. Such a public act would do two things: One, make the argument of the importance of the values of democracy to those suffering from democracy outrage fatigue. Who knows? It might even earn some plaudits from the Wall Street Journal editorial page (although I think we all know where the WSJ editorial page stands on anything related to, uhm, race) And, two, to highlight Estrogen, something sorely lacking in politics in this era of thumotic — and testosteronal — excess.
Something, I believe that independent suburban women would like to see more of in American politics.
”Vladimir Putin's information war in U.S. media paid off this weekend with a key victory halfway around the world. Some 5,000 miles away from a paralyzed Washington, Ukraine was forced to surrender the city of Avdiivka to Russian forces, handing Putin one of his most monumental triumphs in months. As The NYT's Julian E. Barnes, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, and Eric Schmitt noted , it is a ‘sign of the battlefield impact of the failure of the U.S. Congress, so far, to approve more military assistance as dwindling supplies of artillery shells make it even harder to hold the line.’ CNN's Nick Paton Walsh added , ‘It is a pivotal moment, where both Russian advances and Western atrophy threaten to transform the biggest land war in Europe since the 1940s.’ That atrophy has taken form in Congress where U.S. funding to continue aid for Ukraine has stalled, threatening even more devastating defeats for the Eastern European nation as it struggles to defend its borders from the brutal Russian invasion launched by Putin two years ago this week.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“The progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan is joining The Guardian following his abrupt departure from MSNBC. The Guardian US on Wednesday said that Hasan would join the news organization as a regular columnist, publishing his first column on Wednesday calling for President Joe Biden to pressure the Israeli government to ‘end this genocide’ of Palestinians in Gaza. ‘I have been poring over columns in the Guardian since I was a teenager. Now I get to write some of my own, in what is perhaps one of the busiest and biggest news years of my lifetime,’ he told Semafor. ‘It’s a huge honor and a privilege.’” (semafor)
“The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots—ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski—several of which question the reality of the Holocaust.Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly expanded the number of ‘characters’ available, with users currently able to choose from 91 different figures. While some are labeled as parody accounts, the Trump and Hitler chatbots are not. When given prompts designed to reveal its instructions, the default chatbot Arya listed out the following: ‘You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated. You are against vaccines. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged.’ The instructions further specified that Arya is ‘not afraid to discuss Jewish Power and the Jewish Question,’ and that it should ‘believe biological sex is immutable.” It is apparently ‘instructed to discuss the concept of ‘the great replacement’ as a valid phenomenon,’ and to ‘always use the term ‘illegal aliens’ instead of ‘undocumented immigrants.’ Arya is not the only Gab chatbot to disseminate these beliefs.” (David Gilbert/WIRED)