Democratic grass roots success playbook lesson 101
The New York Times opinion column by Frank Bruni:
When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.
Cooper, Kelly, Beshear and Shapiro might have benefited from flawed opponents, propitious circumstances, other lucky breaks. But, many Democratic officeholders in red and purple states also have instructive qualities in common, starting with what Shapiro’s attention to I-95 reflected. They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.
“When people wake up in the morning, they don’t think about their party,” Beshear told me. “They think about their jobs. They think about the schools their children are going to. They think about the roads and bridges they’re traveling on and whether they’re safe.” The first of Gretchen Whitmer’s two successful campaigns for governor of Michigan is perhaps remembered best for her pledge to “fix the damn roads,” which was not only a concrete promise but also a kind of branding: She was more invested in results than theatrics. She cared less about preening than about potholes. She was blunt to the point of cursing.
Governors, admittedly, have advantages. They and other politicians operating at the state and local levels often aren’t expected to tackle — and don’t receive blame for — some of the especially big, tough issues by which presidents are judged.
Inflation is Biden’s problem, not theirs. Immigration, too. While state-level politicians do adopt (or fail to adopt) plans to combat climate change, federal officials are often in the foreground of those debates.
Whitmer tailgates at football games, visits sports bars and has a pronounced Michigan accent. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat in purple Wisconsin, has an uncloaked weakness for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins and speaks in a fashion so folksy that Wisconsinites can buy T-shirts emblazoned with one of his trademark phrases: “Holy mackerel!” Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is seeking a fourth term representing the deep red state of Montana, and Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat elected in purple Arizona in 2020, have careers well outside any Democratic mold. Tester was (and is) a farmer. Kelly, the son of two police officers, was a naval aviator and then an astronaut.
In Shapiro’s first full day in office, he sent a clear message to working-class voters by signing an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. He stresses the dual imperatives of holding college up as a possibility for anyone interested in it and of respecting people without college degrees and supporting careers that don’t call for one.
Cooper frequently visits farming areas and small towns, not just because he grew up in rural North Carolina and is comfortable there but also because he wants to be seen in “places where many Democratic leaders don’t go,” he told me. It sets the right tone. “I’ve spent time listening to people in rural areas about their hospital being on the brink, needing more economic development, needing high-speed internet,” he said. And he has been able to explain to them how his agenda recognizes and addresses those very issues.
While Laura Kelly’s 2018, and 2022, victories in Kansas relied heavily on Democratic voters in urban strongholds, she pays careful attention to rural precincts, too. When we spoke recently — she placed the call, without any intermediary telling me to hold for the governor, and introduced herself simply as “Laura Kelly” — she shared a memory: Decades ago, when she was running for the State Senate, one of her chief advisers told her to ignore the rural part of the district because “there weren’t enough votes to make a difference,” she said.
The framing of issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.
I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.
He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”
“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”
“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.
“That didn’t feel right to me,” she continued. “So I spent an inordinate amount of time there.” She ended up winning by fewer than 100 votes. “If I had not knocked on all those doors, I wouldn’t have been in the State Senate, and I wouldn’t be governor.”
State and local politicians also have relationships with voters unlike the ones forged by Washington lawmakers, who swim (or, really, splash around noisily) in the media-roiled, shark-infested waters of the nation’s capital. Voters largely regard their governors and mayors as administrators and service providers, so governors and mayors can prioritize administration and service in a manner that makes their efforts more visible and palpable to voters.
But in my recent examination of and conversations with Democratic governors, other Democratic officials and political experts in red and purple states, I was struck by the priorities they articulate and by how they articulate them. They take pains to rebut the accusations of elitism that Republicans direct at Democrats, or they have biographies and backgrounds that make those charges laughable. They also find ways in which to establish some separation from their party, and that’s not simply and solely a matter of necessity, given their states’ political leanings. It’s also an assertion of independence and authenticity in an era of profound political cynicism. Even Democrats in the bluest and safest of states can learn from that.
Shapiro proudly displays his deep Jewish faith, and while that puts him in a religious minority, it also distinguishes him from Democrats who often play down religion. He and his advisers have found that it’s a bridge to voters of all creeds, who relate to, and respect, his devotion.
He also indulges his tendency to speak in sports metaphors. The first words of a video that he released in tandem with the announcement of his campaign for governor: “Each of us has a responsibility in life — to get off the sidelines, get in the game.” He tells Pennsylvanians that his goal as governor is “to put points on the board.”
She has created an Office of Rural Prosperity within the Kansas Commerce Department. Just before our conversation, I read a transcript of the State of the State remarks that she delivered a few weeks earlier. It focused largely on jobs, and the word “rural” showed up 43 times, including in the characterization of “rural Kansas” as “fundamental to our identity.” The word “abortion” showed up precisely zero times, which I noticed mainly because the issue was front and center in Kansas just a year and a half earlier, when voters there rejected a measure to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution.
I mentioned that omission.
“Not an accident,” she said. “I am and always have been a pro-choice human being,” she continued, but she determined over the years that raising such “a very divisive issue” with constituents when she wasn’t absolutely compelled to didn’t make sense. “It wasn’t a way that they were going to hear me any better, and it wasn’t a way to find common ground,” she said.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the defense of legal abortion has unquestionably given Democrats an advantage over Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers in red and purple states don’t shrink from it. But “since the Supreme Court overturned” is crucial, because only then did some Americans fully realize that the abortion debate wasn’t an abstract, ideological one: It concerned a fundamental freedom for women. It affected critical medical care.
“The prospect of Republicans banning abortion was not a big winner for Democrats until Republicans actually started banning abortions,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Voters are used to hearing about how apocalyptic the other side is. You have to have actual evidence.” The Roe reversal — and cases like those of Kate Cox, who was carrying a fetus with a deadly chromosomal abnormality and had to leave Texas to end her pregnancy — enables Democrats to discuss abortion rights in blunt, concrete, visceral terms.
“For too long, we’ve made politics too flashy, too Hollywood,” Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor, told me. He was on the ticket with Shapiro, and he explained that their formula for victory was not to be “wrapped up in what’s going on on MSNBC, on CNN, in some local coffee shop that’s 90 percent Democratic. Most people don’t live in those echo chambers.”
Cooper’s long campaign to garner enough Republican support to pass Medicaid expansion in North Carolina — which was finally accomplished three months ago — didn’t hinge on partisan name-calling. But it did involve extensive meetings with law enforcement officials to persuade them that they’d be helped if the mentally ill people who commit some crimes had the treatment options that Medicaid expansion would provide. Toward the end, he said, “we would have some tough-on-crime Republican officials come into the legislature and say these people need health care, not handcuffs.”
The specificity and detail with which state-level Democrats, working on a smaller canvas, can portray problems, sketch solutions and describe successes make me wonder if Democrats would be wise to pitch more of their policies and concentrate more of their energies outside Washington. They often find better traction and make readier connections that way.
I think of Shapiro’s livestreaming of the fleet work on I-95. I think of many key lines from Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth remarks in January, when he advanced measures regarding climate change, economic development and job creation without dwelling on clinical phrases like “climate change,” “economic development” and “job creation.” He gave shout-outs to several companies “building the two largest electric vehicle battery plants on planet Earth, in Glendale, Ky.” He noted that “approximately 400 Kentuckians” had been hired. This was no fancy policy seminar. It was a straightforward report card.
That’s what Mallory McMorrow is always urging. Too many Democrats sound as though “they’re giving a lecture at a university rather than talking like a normal person,” she told me. She is the Democratic state senator in Michigan who captured national attention with a speech denouncing Republicans’ characterization of Democrats who support gay rights as “groomers,” and she has demonstrated a flair for getting a point across. “No matter what issue you’re talking about or how complicated it is, talk about it like you would talk to your friend in a bar, and if you can’t do that, you need to keep trying,” she said.
McMorrow presides over the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, and she said that when arguing for crucial investments, she tells stories, like the one about Michigan missing out on a second Amazon headquarters because Maryland had better transit and education options for the company’s workers. Michiganders felt that loss, she said. They don’t feel statistics about where the state ranks in per capita spending on infrastructure.
Framing the issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.
I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.
He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”
“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”
“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.
 |
| On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying gasoline lost control as it was attempting to exit the highway and caught fire under the overpass carrying Interstate 95 (I-95) at the Pennsylvania Route 73 (PA 73, Cottman Avenue) interchange in the Tacony neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia. |
Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.
“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.
But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.👦😎
In less than two weeks, the road reopened.
Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.
Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024, could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.
Across the country, there are Democrats who have outperformed expectations and had political success in places that aren’t reliably blue. Look at Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who won a second term last year, even though Trump took that state by 26 points in 2020. Trump took Kansas by almost 15 points, but its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, secured her second term in 2022. In North Carolina, where I live, the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won election and then re-election in years when North Carolinians simultaneously delivered the state to Trump. Obviously, some of Trump’s supporters also voted for Governor Cooper.
“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.
But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.👦😎
In less than two weeks, the road reopened.
Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.
Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024, could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.
Across the country, there are Democrats who have outperformed expectations and had political success in places that aren’t reliably blue. Look at Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who won a second term last year, even though Trump took that state by 26 points in 2020. Trump took Kansas by almost 15 points, but its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, secured her second term in 2022. In North Carolina, where I live, the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won election and then re-election in years when North Carolinians simultaneously delivered the state to Trump. Obviously, some of Trump’s supporters also voted for Governor Cooper.
Cooper, Kelly, Beshear and Shapiro might have benefited from flawed opponents, propitious circumstances, other lucky breaks. But, many Democratic officeholders in red and purple states also have instructive qualities in common, starting with what Shapiro’s attention to I-95 reflected. They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.
“When people wake up in the morning, they don’t think about their party,” Beshear told me. “They think about their jobs. They think about the schools their children are going to. They think about the roads and bridges they’re traveling on and whether they’re safe.” The first of Gretchen Whitmer’s two successful campaigns for governor of Michigan is perhaps remembered best for her pledge to “fix the damn roads,” which was not only a concrete promise but also a kind of branding: She was more invested in results than theatrics. She cared less about preening than about potholes. She was blunt to the point of cursing.
Governors, admittedly, have advantages. They and other politicians operating at the state and local levels often aren’t expected to tackle — and don’t receive blame for — some of the especially big, tough issues by which presidents are judged.
Inflation is Biden’s problem, not theirs. Immigration, too. While state-level politicians do adopt (or fail to adopt) plans to combat climate change, federal officials are often in the foreground of those debates.
Whitmer tailgates at football games, visits sports bars and has a pronounced Michigan accent. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat in purple Wisconsin, has an uncloaked weakness for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins and speaks in a fashion so folksy that Wisconsinites can buy T-shirts emblazoned with one of his trademark phrases: “Holy mackerel!” Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is seeking a fourth term representing the deep red state of Montana, and Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat elected in purple Arizona in 2020, have careers well outside any Democratic mold. Tester was (and is) a farmer. Kelly, the son of two police officers, was a naval aviator and then an astronaut.
In Shapiro’s first full day in office, he sent a clear message to working-class voters by signing an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. He stresses the dual imperatives of holding college up as a possibility for anyone interested in it and of respecting people without college degrees and supporting careers that don’t call for one.
Cooper frequently visits farming areas and small towns, not just because he grew up in rural North Carolina and is comfortable there but also because he wants to be seen in “places where many Democratic leaders don’t go,” he told me. It sets the right tone. “I’ve spent time listening to people in rural areas about their hospital being on the brink, needing more economic development, needing high-speed internet,” he said. And he has been able to explain to them how his agenda recognizes and addresses those very issues.
 |
| North Carolina elected a Democratic Governor Roy Cooper |
The framing of issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.
I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.
He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”
“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”
“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.
“That didn’t feel right to me,” she continued. “So I spent an inordinate amount of time there.” She ended up winning by fewer than 100 votes. “If I had not knocked on all those doors, I wouldn’t have been in the State Senate, and I wouldn’t be governor.”
State and local politicians also have relationships with voters unlike the ones forged by Washington lawmakers, who swim (or, really, splash around noisily) in the media-roiled, shark-infested waters of the nation’s capital. Voters largely regard their governors and mayors as administrators and service providers, so governors and mayors can prioritize administration and service in a manner that makes their efforts more visible and palpable to voters.
But in my recent examination of and conversations with Democratic governors, other Democratic officials and political experts in red and purple states, I was struck by the priorities they articulate and by how they articulate them. They take pains to rebut the accusations of elitism that Republicans direct at Democrats, or they have biographies and backgrounds that make those charges laughable. They also find ways in which to establish some separation from their party, and that’s not simply and solely a matter of necessity, given their states’ political leanings. It’s also an assertion of independence and authenticity in an era of profound political cynicism. Even Democrats in the bluest and safest of states can learn from that.
Shapiro proudly displays his deep Jewish faith, and while that puts him in a religious minority, it also distinguishes him from Democrats who often play down religion. He and his advisers have found that it’s a bridge to voters of all creeds, who relate to, and respect, his devotion.
He also indulges his tendency to speak in sports metaphors. The first words of a video that he released in tandem with the announcement of his campaign for governor: “Each of us has a responsibility in life — to get off the sidelines, get in the game.” He tells Pennsylvanians that his goal as governor is “to put points on the board.”
She has created an Office of Rural Prosperity within the Kansas Commerce Department. Just before our conversation, I read a transcript of the State of the State remarks that she delivered a few weeks earlier. It focused largely on jobs, and the word “rural” showed up 43 times, including in the characterization of “rural Kansas” as “fundamental to our identity.” The word “abortion” showed up precisely zero times, which I noticed mainly because the issue was front and center in Kansas just a year and a half earlier, when voters there rejected a measure to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution.
I mentioned that omission.
“Not an accident,” she said. “I am and always have been a pro-choice human being,” she continued, but she determined over the years that raising such “a very divisive issue” with constituents when she wasn’t absolutely compelled to didn’t make sense. “It wasn’t a way that they were going to hear me any better, and it wasn’t a way to find common ground,” she said.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the defense of legal abortion has unquestionably given Democrats an advantage over Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers in red and purple states don’t shrink from it. But “since the Supreme Court overturned” is crucial, because only then did some Americans fully realize that the abortion debate wasn’t an abstract, ideological one: It concerned a fundamental freedom for women. It affected critical medical care.
“The prospect of Republicans banning abortion was not a big winner for Democrats until Republicans actually started banning abortions,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Voters are used to hearing about how apocalyptic the other side is. You have to have actual evidence.” The Roe reversal — and cases like those of Kate Cox, who was carrying a fetus with a deadly chromosomal abnormality and had to leave Texas to end her pregnancy — enables Democrats to discuss abortion rights in blunt, concrete, visceral terms.
“For too long, we’ve made politics too flashy, too Hollywood,” Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor, told me. He was on the ticket with Shapiro, and he explained that their formula for victory was not to be “wrapped up in what’s going on on MSNBC, on CNN, in some local coffee shop that’s 90 percent Democratic. Most people don’t live in those echo chambers.”
Cooper’s long campaign to garner enough Republican support to pass Medicaid expansion in North Carolina — which was finally accomplished three months ago — didn’t hinge on partisan name-calling. But it did involve extensive meetings with law enforcement officials to persuade them that they’d be helped if the mentally ill people who commit some crimes had the treatment options that Medicaid expansion would provide. Toward the end, he said, “we would have some tough-on-crime Republican officials come into the legislature and say these people need health care, not handcuffs.”
The specificity and detail with which state-level Democrats, working on a smaller canvas, can portray problems, sketch solutions and describe successes make me wonder if Democrats would be wise to pitch more of their policies and concentrate more of their energies outside Washington. They often find better traction and make readier connections that way.
I think of Shapiro’s livestreaming of the fleet work on I-95. I think of many key lines from Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth remarks in January, when he advanced measures regarding climate change, economic development and job creation without dwelling on clinical phrases like “climate change,” “economic development” and “job creation.” He gave shout-outs to several companies “building the two largest electric vehicle battery plants on planet Earth, in Glendale, Ky.” He noted that “approximately 400 Kentuckians” had been hired. This was no fancy policy seminar. It was a straightforward report card.
That’s what Mallory McMorrow is always urging. Too many Democrats sound as though “they’re giving a lecture at a university rather than talking like a normal person,” she told me. She is the Democratic state senator in Michigan who captured national attention with a speech denouncing Republicans’ characterization of Democrats who support gay rights as “groomers,” and she has demonstrated a flair for getting a point across. “No matter what issue you’re talking about or how complicated it is, talk about it like you would talk to your friend in a bar, and if you can’t do that, you need to keep trying,” she said.
McMorrow presides over the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, and she said that when arguing for crucial investments, she tells stories, like the one about Michigan missing out on a second Amazon headquarters because Maryland had better transit and education options for the company’s workers. Michiganders felt that loss, she said. They don’t feel statistics about where the state ranks in per capita spending on infrastructure.
Framing the issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.
I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.
He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”
“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”
“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.
Labels: Frank Bruni, Governor Josh Shapiro, Governor Roy Cooper, Gretchen Whitmer, Mallory McMorrow, Michigan, Pennsylvania, The New York Times
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