So President Obama didn't call it a "shellacking" at his post election day press conference as he did in 2010. That said you can pick your own word - thumping, shellacking, whupping, or just plain "defeated". Nationally Democrats lost control of the US Senate and gave Republicans an even larger majority in the US House. That trend hit other states and other state legislature across the nation. This national trend swept Georgia too. In spite of narrow poll numbers and high hopes Democrats in Georgia not only lost the US Senate and Governor's races this election but we lost every other statewide race all the way down the ticket. For all the effort to learn from mistakes made nationally by Democrats in 2010 and by Georgia Democrats in both 2006 and 2010 the final numbers were little better than 2010 here and the same 8 point spread between Romney and Obama in 2012 did not budge as the margin of loss by Nunn and Carter in 2014.
So that leads us to the major questions: what exactly went wrong? and what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? If you ask 5 different Democrats those questions, you'll likely get at least four different answers. Some believe race played a roll. Some believe the fear mongering from the GOP actually accounted for a great deal of it. Some point to the GOPs unrelenting 6 year effort to demonize Obama and blame him for not getting things done in DC when they were the ones stopping anything from getting done. Those are problems Democrats have no control over. We cannot make the GOP behave differently if what they do works. There are also problems that the Democrats created nationally. Running away from the president didn't work in 1994 with Clinton. It didn't work in 2010 or this year with Obama. Not running away from him personally. Not running away from his record and the Democratic record. Karl Rove says you run at a problem not away from it. On that he is right. We had no message and ran away from our strengths because we were scared of what the other side says were our weaknesses. And once again we got our clocks cleaned nationally and locally in an "off year election" doing it. We are at the "definition of insanity" point now. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result doesn't work just because we know we are doing it and are better prepared and better funded to do it.
But for those who are now saying there was no way that we could turn blue in Georgia and that there won't be for years I would say that's simply not the case. The reality is, all of the above things played some sort of part in what exactly happened, and then some. But the reality also is that we can build on the positives locally and learn to do things differently where it matters.
What can we do better:
Candidate recruitment down the entire ballot;
For the first time ever, we had six African-American women on the ballot. Which, while in itself, is a real milestone we did not have any sort of marketing campaign or message to really take advantage of that to promote voter turnout. What messaging we did do rang hollow even in the communities it was designed to help in. And to be honest there was not effort to recruit such a ticket. It just happened. And because of that we didn't have top notch candidates running in every one of these slots we suffered. We still did get ninety percent of the African-American vote, but, that had nothing to do with candidate recruitment, candidate messaging, or trying to make history in Georgia. The focus here needs to be finding "A" list Democrats to run. We are a diverse party that looks like Georgia. If we do that - we will automatically get a diverse ticket and will have a better shot at making history rather than making ham handed press releases.
Have a message:
That brings me to my next point – having a clear message that speaks to Georgians. Throughout the campaigns, there wasn't really a set game-plan. No message for the people to really hold on to. In politics, a candidate must have a plan. A plan to change whatever is wrong with the current incumbent, something that makes people want to swing the other way. No plan equals no votes beyond the most loyal partisans. No vote beyond those folks equals not winning. While both Nunn and Carter did a good job of painting their opponent as not qualified to be hired or deserving of being fired they never had a coherent message about why voters should hire them instead. John Kerry tried that running against George W. Bush. It failed. It might work for an incumbent defending their position but it doesn't work for challengers running for open seats. Nunn stressed being bipartisan -great. But bi-partisan to accomplish what? Betcha can't tell me from her ads. And education was a key issue dear to Carter's heart but other than a proposal about the process of approving the education budget what was there that was key to Carter's platform? If it existed you wouldn't find it in his ads or phone banking or speeches. And how was a process oriented proposal about education supposed to get you to 50% plus one to win an election when 2 groups in your base with the largest drop-off in voter turn out (people under 25 and single women under 35) are also the parts of your potential coalition least likely to have kids in the education system. There never was a "here is how we can make government work for us" or a "this is how we do it". It was mostly a "my opponent is horrible" and at best "this is what I maybe think think needs to change" without a real message about what substantive change needs accomplished and what makes that change help us as Georgians. Having an idea is just an idea if there is no plan of action to follow through. People like to be able to have something concrete.
Voters like to be able to not just see the issue at hand, but also see farther than the issue. Voters like to see solutions. If you don't offer solutions then when you get accused of helping the President use ISIS fighters to spread Ebola - fear wins. Fear always wins in the absence of a plan.
Continue building the field operations necessary to promote high base voter turnout:
Locally things were not all bad. For the first time ever we had a real GOTV field operation statewide in a governors race. And really the only other times we've ever had a field operation in Georgia period were in 2008 with the Obama campaign and way back in 1976 with Jimmy Carter running for president. We actually outperformed how we did in 2010 statewide in the face of an even more partisan environment and in the face of a national "whistle pass the graveyard" campaign effort that was at best a well financed waste (the loss of John Barrow in Congress more being the result of gerrymandering finally getting it's way). The commitment to field offices, to canvassing and phone banking and to grass roots GOTV efforts prevented a route and basically preserved the status quo with a marginal move forward. That's better than can be said in many states, even blue ones like Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts. We need to continue this effort and build on it. The 2016 election cycle started last Wednesday. There's no time to waste here. We have to expand it outside the traditional urban centers to the increasingly democratic inner suburbs and focus on how we cement millennials, college students and single women as consistent loyal democratic voters. We have work to do. But we have a framework to build from and a baby that does not need to be thrown out of the bathwater.
Only time will tell if the electorate chose wisely this election cycle. My guess is 2 more years of gridlock and 2 more years of bad economic performance in Georgia will hopefully give the voters the lessons we all needed to learn. And if we can focus on those three things above Democrats will be in a better position to win races and undo the mess the GOP will now have no way to avoid responsibility for.
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