The race was nationwide in scope, with appearances on national television and in person from coast to coast. It would require heavy-duty fundraising, at a pace at least on par with a congressional race. But the whole process would play out in a matter of weeks, and the vote itself was completely in the hands of the 447 members of the committee, an electorate not that much bigger than when I had run for class president at Saint Joe High.
I got a list and started calling the members one by one, pacing in my South Bend dining room as I asked for their views on the race. Most were encouraging, or at least not discouraging. Surprisingly few said they had committed to any candidate just yet, and many said they believed the race remained “wide open.” The more people I called— from freshly-voted-in Bernie delegates in California to dyed-in-the-wool Washington operatives who had been in the party for decades—the more I sensed that people were looking for something different. And as I made the case for more attention to the struggles and successes of communities like mine, I found that even coastal members were coming to understand why this was an important perspective for the party to better take on board.
In the course of the conversations, as I tried to engage national party officials on the perspective of my hometown, I also found that my own viewpoint widened into a broader account of where our national party needed to go, and several changes that would need to happen.
First, it had become clear, we needed to stop treating the White House like it was the only office that mattered. By the end of 2016, Democrats were shockingly at the lowest level of congressional and state capitol influence in nearly a hundred years, having lost over a thousand state and federal seats in less than a decade. As the Obama White House learned to its great frustration—and as I was experiencing firsthand as a mayor in a state with a Republican legislative supermajority—even when you are in power you can only get so much done without control of legislative seats and governorships. Much of the anguish in Democratic circles at that time understandably focused on the disaster of losing the presidency, but for these reasons it seemed clear to me that the party would have been in serious trouble even if we had won the White House in 2016.
Conservatives, by contrast, had patiently and cleverly built majorities around the country from the bottom up, fortifying their state and local power bases over the decades while presidencies from either party came and went. Partisan gerrymandering made these legislative majorities self-reinforcing, all but locking them in, a decade at a time. Meanwhile, in parallel to their campaign work, the right’s think-tank apparatus also paid careful attention to the power concentrated in offices from school board to state senate.
I pointed to the example of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Funded by the Koch brothers and other conservative and corporate interests, it has grown to become one of the most influential think tanks in America—yet it doesn’t engage on federal policy at all. Instead, it generates model legislation for adoption in state legislatures and finds sympathetic state house and senate members to carry the bills. Legislation is often nearly identical from state to state—so much so that journalists sometimes find copy-paste errors where the wrong state is mentioned in the text of a bill. Tellingly, by 2014, ALEC had decided to expand its model beyond the state level—not by going federal, but instead targeting local policy through a new offshoot called the American City County Exchange. Those on the left were belatedly catching up to this kind of organizing after realizing the cost of shortchanging state and local policy work over the years.
In addition to overlooking state and local government generally, it had also come to feel that the Democratic Party was neglecting the industrial Midwest in particular. Every restored house, improved street, and good job we helped deliver in South Bend had shown me that practical leadership guided by progressive values could deliver results in a part of the country that had simply been written off. In political terms, there was great opportunity to present a hopeful economic message to blue-collar workers experiencing major economic disruption, as an alternative to the litany of resentments being offered by the other side. Beyond South Bend, many of the smartest and most original politicians I had met were state and local elected officials, quietly doing impressive work in the American heartland. But as a party, we had become less likely to put forward leaders from the region, and less likely to compete at all in some parts of the country once known as bellwethers. If a place like northern Indiana was proving steadily less likely to vote Democratic, that called for more, not less, engagement by the party.
We had come to look at the politics of different American regions—the Republican “red” states and liberal “blue” states—as immutable. But I had seen from close up how important it was that Democrats continue to compete in tougher territory. Joe Donnelly had proven this in Indiana, getting elected to the Senate in 2012 as a Democrat even as the state went decisively “red” in the presidential race that same year. Joe carried fewer than thirty of our state’s ninety-two counties. But he prevailed, because he won the most populous areas and made sure not to ignore the others. He took pride in the hole that a reporter once noticed in the sole of his shoe as he worked his way through countless parades, county fairs, and dinner speeches in conservative counties. This strategy served him well, even—or especially—in those counties he couldn’t actually win, because losing them 60–40 instead of 80–20 helped make it possible for the bluer counties to put him over the top.
Yet national Democrats seemed increasingly to write off red states—or red areas within blue and purple states—completely. The result was that many parts of our country had heard so little from Democrats and progressives that anyone living there who sympathized with our party might assume they were totally alone. If that loneliness prompted them to keep quiet about their values at coffee after church or on the local radio call-in shows, then the sense of a Republican monopoly on opinion in these communities would become self-fulfilling.
Yet this conservative dominance was relatively new. As late as 2005, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle, was from South Dakota—the same state that had produced Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern a generation earlier. Go back even further in history, and figures like Eugene Debs of Indiana and Bob La Follette of Wisconsin show that a century ago the American political left was arguably being led from the Midwest. Treating the middle of the country like unshakably Republican territory would serve us poorly in the long run.
Worse, a culture had begun to take hold in some Democratic circles that addressed our part of the country with condescension, bordering on contempt. A party once built on looking after ordinary Americans was now beginning to feel like the preserve of comfortable, educated, upper-middle-class city dwellers. Often I would hear a well-heeled fellow Democrat shake his head at how a low-income conservative voter could be so foolish as to “vote against his self-interest,” oblivious to the easy retort that would be available to such a voter: “So are you!”
I knew that bedrock Democratic values around economic fairness and racial inclusion could resonate very well in the industrial Midwest, but not if they were being presented by messengers who looked down on working-and lower-middle-class Americans.