Who will lead Dems out of wilderness?
Party may be in worst shape that
it's been in years
Come January, the party will have at least 11 fewer U.S. senators, 63 fewer House seats and 12 fewer governors than when President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Nationally, there will be about 800 fewer Democratic state lawmakers.
By some benchmarks — the control of state capitols, for instance — the Democratic Party is in worse shape than it has been in more than a century.
But Democrats, after several periods of exile from the White House, are no strangers to the political wilderness — nor fractious infighting over how to find their way back.
The most immediate battle is for leadership of the Democratic National Committee. The contest will pit Washington insiders against Beltway outsiders, liberal backers of Bernie Sanders against more centrist Hillary Clinton holdovers, and advocates of a full-time chairman versus those who feel it is fine to hold another job as well — even serving in Congress.
Several contestants have emerged, including Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who ran the national party in the run-up to Obama's 2008 election, and Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a favorite of Sanders and the incoming Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer of New York.
The vote will take place sometime after President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration Jan. 20.
The broader fight grows out of Clinton's stunning defeat. Few will loudly criticize Obama for having failed to strengthen the party, or lay down a firmer foundation, during eight years as Democrat in chief.
Instead of expanding the political map against Trump into the Republican-leaning reaches of Arizona and Georgia, Democrats are reckoning with the loss of Michigan and Pennsylvania, states they won in the last six elections, and Wisconsin, which had not voted for a Republican for president since 1984.
“How does the party come back? That's the million-dollar question,” said Jill Hanauer, a longtime Democratic strategist who has focused on expanding the Obama coalition of minorities and young voters into swing states.
“If anyone thinks they can answer that today, don't listen. It's just begun.”
The last time the party faced such deep existential angst, after three straight losing presidential campaigns, Democrats shifted their philosophical course and moved closer to the middle, nudged by a fresh-faced Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton.
Paul Begala, who helped Clinton win the White House in 1992 and worked this year for a political action committee backing his wife for president, acknowledged it was time for a new set of Democratic leaders to emerge.
That said, he suggested the party's message should be a throwback to the one that helped elect Bill Clinton in a time of similar voter anxiety and frustration: “It's still the economy, stupid,” Begala said.
“If Democrats can't speak to the pain of poor people and working-class people” — whether in Appalachia or the inner cities — “then we don't deserve to be a party,” Begala said.
But Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who specializes in African-American voters, warned against focusing too much on the proverbial angry white male who helped deliver Trump's upset victory.
“It's hard for me, making a cold calculation, to understand why we spend even more money and even more effort going after an increasingly resistant, shrinking marketplace,” Belcher said.
“If we expand the electorate, we have a majority. That's where the future is.”
Beyond the ideological argument, Democrats are also talking about the process. After past setbacks, the party overhauled its presidential nominating system and changed the political calendar, ideas being floated once more.
Supporters of Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who ran against Clinton in the primaries, are still furious at the favoritism shown by the Democratic National Committee and insist on reducing the influence of “super delegates.”
“There is no doubt the Democratic Party would have been stronger in 2016 if we had a field of seven to 10 strong candidates — senators, governors, mayors — who were actively debating the future of our country,” said Lis Smith, who helped manage O'Malley's campaign.
“We need to open up the whole party, not make this a cabal of insiders who are nostalgic for names from the past.”
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