Imagine that you’re Moses and have just toiled up the side of Mount Sinai. But instead of a matched set of stone tablets and an H-1B visa to the Promised Land, you find this chiseled note from the Almighty:
“You’re early. Come back in another 20 years.”
This is how it feels to be a Georgia Democrat, one week after a national Republican wave poured cold water on the first step of your exquisitely planned, four-year comeback program. The wilderness years for Democrats may be far from over.
An autopsy is in the works.
For months, millions of rare campaign dollars fell into Georgia like manna from heaven, lured by the promise of demographic changes and two capable candidates, Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter.
The cash fell on barren soil. African-Americans again marshalled themselves to the Democratic cause in the targeted numbers, but white voters declined to renew the partnership that kept Democrats in control of the state until 2002. According to exit polls, the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate and governor received 25 percent or less of the white vote.
The current formula for Democratic victory is 30 percent of the white vote, and 90 percent of the black vote.
The backbiting was immediate, and important. “We needed to change the electorate,” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed told the New York Times. He had advised the two candidates to spend more resources finding, registering and turning out 600,000 African-American and 200,000 Hispanic voters who aren’t on the current ballot lists.
State Democratic party chairman DuBose Porter disagreed. “I think his numbers are way overstated. And I wish he had done more to help in this election,” Porter said.
Pay attention to this argument. An election for state party chairman, scheduled for February, will be built around it. And it could go a long way toward determining who will be the Democratic nominee for governor in 2018.
Porter has promised an examination of what went wrong, which will parallel a national postmortem announced by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Porter expects a state version to be finished by February, but the probe can’t begin until Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office releases a final report on who voted, and who didn’t.
“We’re going to do a good bit of analysis. Are we sitting still?” Porter said. “No.”
The Democratic party chairman said the investigation would meet requirements outlined by state Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, who wrote this in an email to Porter: “The members of this working [group] should not be party staffers nor people who participated in the gubernatorial or senatorial campaigns. A diverse set of co-chairs should be appointed….”
The bottom line for Democrats is whether future efforts to boost support among white voters is futile – or cost-effective.
Last week, two Democratic strategists, Tharon Johnson and Howard Franklin, were on Bill Nigut’s “Political Rewind” program on WRAS (88.5FM). I was there, too.
Johnson, who has worked on the campaigns of not just Kasim Reed, but U.S. Reps. John Barrow and John Lewis, pointed out that Nunn and Carter probably dropped a combined $30 million on TV ads aimed at white voters – to little measurable effect.
“We did not focus on our base voters. We did not focus on the 1.6 million registered African-American voters that are out there,” Johnson said.
Franklin chimed in. “If you’re getting 22, 23 percent of the white vote, and you’re spending two-thirds or three-quarters of your money to do so – you could get a bump in African-American turnout spending half a million dollars,” he said. “A vote by a white person or a black person is still a vote.”
Some of this argument is mired in the competition for the limited number of dollars available during any political campaign – a contest between those who purchase TV time, sometimes reaping a percentage of money spent, and those who specialize in a ground game.
But the argument also makes many nervous. Reed, Johnson and others aren’t pushing the abandonment of white voters — far from it. Younger white voters are an essential part of the coalition they see. But others fear that such talk raises the immediate prospect of a completely racialized Democratic party – as is currently the case in South Carolina, Alabama or Mississippi.
Cabral Franklin is the son of Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta, and David Franklin, one of the best political strategists the state had to offer in the 1970s and ‘80s.
In an interview, Cabral Franklin, no relation to the above-mentioned Howard Franklin, tried to pick a middle path more like the one that Georgia Democrats are likely to see themselves presented with next year.
First, Cabral Franklin said, Democrats can’t be seen abandoning white voters. “You can’t elect anybody to any statewide office in this country when you only get one in four whites. Maybe New Mexico,” Cabral Franklin said. “Democrats have to figure out a way to get more than one in four whites.”
He agrees that more African-Americans need to be targeted, but thinks the benefits are limited. “You can maybe improve turnout by five to 10 percent. There are some voters who are not going to vote during a midterm — you can throw as much money at them as you want,” Cabral Franklin said.
What Democrats will have to do, he said, is begin treating white voters – in particular, white female voters — like Republicans treat African-American voters. As valuable targets who need to be cultivated by hand, rather than just through 30-second TV spots. Knocking on their doors, calling their phones, and sending them direct mail.
“I’ve been involved in this in 2010 and 2014, and I know for a fact that it wasn’t done in either of those two years. I don’t buy this racial argument,” Cabral Franklin said.
The problem is that all of this requires more money. Which will be hard to come by now, unless some well-heeled – and I mean that literally — Democratic presidential candidate decides to invest in the Georgia wilderness in 2016.
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