Post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) is a logical error: That because y happened after x, that doesn’t mean that x caused y. It is the plague of political punditry.
The plague of political strategists, partisans, and hopers is the false choice: If x didn’t work, then surely y will. You lost because you didn’t follow my advice/preference.
Jon Ossoff’s defeat in GA-06 allows everyone to trot out their favorite hobbyhorses for a spin. Many of these explanations are plausible. I’m not sure which one I believe. But we all owe ourselves a great deal of skepticism and self-interrogation in eliding a.) what we’d prefer, and b.) what actually seems to be true.
Here’s North Shore sensation Rep. Seth Moulton:
#Ossof Race better be a wake up call for Democrats – business as usual isn’t working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future.
— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017
We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent not a smaller one. Focus on the future.
— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017
I have so many questions … Was Ossoff’s race “business as usual”? How? Did he disappoint by not winning, or did he max out Dem potential in what had been a blood-red district — boding well for Dems in other, slightly friendlier districts?
Anyway, Twitter being what it is, I look forward to Moulton’s jobs proposals. I strongly suspect they might look a lot like the 2009 stimulus: Infrastructure; high speed rail; job training and education; renewable energy, etc. In other words … pretty standard Dem party stuff. It would require monetary investment and indeed, Big(ger) Government, which sounds to a lot of people like higher taxes.
In the Obama era, the GOP congress refused adequate infrastructure spending, and in fact dis-invested in the economy through budget cuts like the sequestration. These cost jobs! As intended, this created frustration and kept the Democrats from delivering on promises — even to the detriment of the economy. Hillary Clinton’s jobs plans ( for instance) were doubtless met with skepticism: How are you going to get it through Congress? That’s the extraordinary success of GOP obstructionism: Mitch McConnell knows what he’s doing.
Moulton notably supported Ohio Rep Tim Ryan’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi is being blamed for Ossoff’s defeat, since the GOP ran ads tying the two. To blame Pelosi for Ossoff’s defeat is illogical post hoc ergo hoc thinking. The GOP will simply demonize whomever takes her place.
Even if one stipulates that GOP ads tying Ossoff to Pelosi “worked” (i.e. drove GOP base votes to Handel), it’s implicit that in GA-06, the GOP base exist in numbers sufficient to swing the election. Is there a message to similarly drive the Dem base in a place like GA-06? Is there a Dem base in GA-06, enough potential D voters whom Ossoff simply didn’t reach? Or are we still laying that groundwork in a heretofore hostile district?
I’ll say this, with regard to messaging: The best defense is a good offense. I rarely see Democrats really feast on Republican opposition to jobs investment, and the GOP’s willingness to take away people’s health care. There is often a visceral quality missing from Dem messaging: They vote against your jobs. They want to take away your health care. It’s an outrage. That’s a message that a moderate or progressive can use. It’s not about white papers or policy; it’s about making people take a side.
People want justice in the economy. They want to feel it. Trump has been great at making that visceral connection — in fact, that’s all he has as a cover for a rather ordinary, plutocratic GOP agenda. Surely the Dems can find their own strong voice.
In any event, let’s disentangle “I would prefer x” from “x will be a political winner.” It’s easy to assert the former; harder to demonstrate the latter.
Money well spent. The district was not competitive, and we made it close. If he had been a better candidate, he might have taken it. It was expensive, and that’s concerning, but at least we stimulated the local broadcasters.
Moulton (like many of the people who will react to this) is correct regardless of the outcome.
I think Charley hit’s the nail on the head with the visceral linkage to GOP policies and lost health care and lost jobs. The guy running against Paul Ryan seems to get how to do this. And he looks like a Trump voter while Ryan looks like a stuffed suit. Ossoff sort of looked like Ryan and talked like Ryan, running on restoring civility, changing tone, and the exciting issue of deficit reduction that nearly zero Americans care about. Not to say he wasn’t the best we could do for that district, glass half full, etc., I do think his message isn’t compelling enough to run on nationally.
Tim Ryan had a substantive critique of Nancy Pelosi, which was that everyone says she is doing fine because she’s the best fundraiser and parliamentarian the party has every seen. Except fundraising alone doesn’t get us back in power, and parliamentarian skills are only helpful when you have a majority which she has not commanded in nearly 9 years. The top three house leaders are all over 70, as our most of our potential nominees. We should have a young, dynamic, policy oriented Speaker pushing our agenda and not them. Tim Ryan focused on middle class job creation, middle class healthcare, and middle class insecurity. It’s fair to say this is the agenda people like Moulton and Lynch who voted for him want us to focus on. It is totally fair to blame lack of action on those things on the Republicans and totally fair to own those things when Democrats do them.
I don’t think we owned ACA and really sold it as a middle class program until the 11th hour when it’s demise is now on the table. Had we run on it the way we have ran against AHCA maybe the 2010 and 2014 midterms would’ve been better.
Another issue nobody wants to talk about is immigration. Peter Beinart has a great post on how the Democrats used to be in the center of this, criticizing Republicans for importing low wage workers and George Bush’s agribusiness pork barrel immigration deal. Now it’s considered racism to make the salient point that with black unemployment at 31%, white male unemployment in places like Akron, Youngstown, at the same levels, that it’s simply a lie that ‘they do the jobs Americans don’t want to do.’
Plenty of Americans are hungering for those jobs, they simply refuse to do it at the poverty wages and without the worker protections agribusiness gets away with. I live in a town where the middle class was build on the backs of meatpackers who finally unionized and got to send their kids to college and buy affordable homes. People forget these unions were racially integrated and black and white members did equally well at staying in the middle class (bearing in mind the black workers had to work twice as hard for just as much due to redlining, predatory loans, etc.). Mexicans in Chicago are assimilated because they have equal access to the same city jobs the Irish and Polish middle classes were built on, attend the same parochial schools, and are heavily unionized.
$30 million from the party to on the ground unions and community organizations that actually drive voter might be better than $30 million spent on ads bitching about Trump and complaining about Russia. The real fraud Trump is committing is running as a fake populist. You won’t beat fake populism with the same old calls to civility and centrism the Beltway insists on, you will beat it with actual populism that delivers for the middle and working class families of America. Focus on that, and we win. And that doesn’t mean Bernie or Clinton, it means taking the best elements of both campaigns and ditching the stuff that didn’t work. It means running more Steve Lynches in the middle of the country to win back a House and Senate that can veto the Trump agenda. You care about impeachment than donate to a Lynch clone in swing states to get a Democratic speaker again. And maybe kick a few coins to the hardhat from Kenosha taking on the stuffed shirt from Janesville.
Ossoff’s result is promising, not unpromising. Maybe I missed something, but he seemed like a flawed candidate NOT LIVING IN THE DISTRICT HE WAS RUNNING IN. He lacked a resume and residency, but his vote tally came pretty close to his opponent’s.
Issues are important as are candidates and marketing, but people don’t just switch party because they think the other party has better ideas. Party identification is a deep, emotional phenomena. Messaging isn’t going to affect that much in the short term.
Also, we need to come together as a party. If we are afraid to hold our nose and support people who don’t meet our ideological expectations, we lose. We need a Democratic majority, which will probably not consist of a majority of progressives, but without a majority it doesn’t matter what we believe. Progressives should get all of the influence they can garner, but they should remember that without party, principles don’t matter.
Mark is right on. I wish Striker were here. There was a guy who knew how to win working class voters since he was one. And he loved Lynch since Lynch fights for union jobs. Bart Stupak was a guy who fought for union jobs. And candidates like that win districts where Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton, or to be fair, Bernie or Warren couldn’t hold a fundraiser or a rally. We got to be a bigger tent but focused on our core issue: helping working Americans get ahead. Everything else falls under that umbrella.
Justice in the economy, or simply “Justice”. I’ve been searching for a word to sum up the Democratic platform and “Justice” seems to fit best.
Republicans have “Freedom”. Why not “Justice” for us?
I read where we need to stop using the term “regulations” and instead, call them “protections”. Republicans want freedom from regulations, we want to insure justice with protections.
I like “justice”. I also like “fairness”.
The GOP (and the 1%) wants to rig the economic system — and the political, media, and education systems that support it — so that the rest of us have no realistic chance to achieve a modest middle-class lifestyle no matter how hard we work, how smart or well-educated we are, or how well we do what we are supposed to do.
Most of the wealthy and very wealthy are, like Mr. Trump, born to their wealth — very few people become wealthy. Worse, most of the wealthy and very wealthy truly believe they “earned” their wealth. To paraphrase prospective “Secretary of Offense” Barry Switzer, too many — like Donald Trump — were born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
This is absolutely unjust. I suggest it is also fundamentally unfair.
I recall the Pledge of Allegiance….with liberty and justice for all. Again, Republicans and libertarians embrace freedom/liberty so let’s use “Justice”. We all said the pledge in school.
The answer is pretty clearly no to the question of maxing Dem potential, right? He got fewer votes than the Democrat, Rodney Stooksbury, who ran in November, who didn’t really exist – no campaigning, no website, $0 spent. Yeah, specials have much lower turnout, but this one had more attention than any special in history, and frankly more attention than any House race possibly ever. Maybe those D voters wouldn’t come out nor would non-voters, but a campaign focused on winning moderate, Republican-leaning folks won’t bring out potential Dem-leaning marginal or non-voters.
I’m really confused why this race got so much attention. He was an awful candidate (no experience, not in district) with no message. The other special elections ended up being much closer than expected and got almost no attention or money. This race was millions down the drain on terrible campaign consultants.
On Moulton’s point, I’m not sure the debates are a rehash of 2016 but rather the fundamental question facing the party for the future – Is the Democratic Party going to be a party for the people or a party for the donors?
It won’t happen to this extreme of course when many on the other side are well-known, well-funded incumbents, but so far the overperformance of Dems in specials even when we lose suggests that as many as 80 House seats could theoretically flip to us next year. Again, won’t happen to that extent, but plenty of reason for hope, especially since historically the non-WH party generally enjoys a midterm advantage anyway.
The consultants who took $23 million from rank and file democrats and got fewer votes than a straw candidate did with $0 should be identified and made an example of.
That being said, it’s important to contest every race the dems can. There are too many republican congressmen who are more afraid of being primaried by tea party types than of a challenge in the general election. Close calls, even when the dems lose aren’t useless.
I think the problem is both simpler, and worse, than what you describe: it is an absolutism that ignores fact… more like, post hoc ergo apocalyptic hoc… as in, “Gee, Clinton only got three million more votes? Worst. candidate. ever. Everything thing she did was wrong and she killed my puppy!”
A narrow loss (in fact, on a technicality) is recast as a walloping. Well, no it isn’t. George McGovern, in 1972? He took a walloping. Hillary Clinton? Not so much. Had this been a bar fight Donald Trump would have lost more blood, more of his teeth would be strewn about and he would have won only because his brother-in-law owns the bar…
And then, because we’ve erroneously cast it as a walloping, we say “everything must change!” putting back in play all those people who DID vote for Clinton, which is a majority, on her merits, which are considerable.
Can anybody find the sanity in this? I can’t.
This is disturbing, not just for the reasons described above but also because “need a genuinely new message” sounds both mercenary and dilatory.
Here’s a though: let’s look to the past. We don’t need a ‘new’ message. We need a message that worked before and can work again.
The problems we are experiencing now are as near as never mind the problems we experienced in the Hoover era and which were addressed expertly and eloquently, first by FDR and then by Truman. The only difference is that the bad guys were (then) try to stop the solutions from being enacted but are (now) trying to dismantle the solutions implemented. But they are mirroring now what they did then WITH EXACTLY THE SAME MOTIVES..
Anything that worked against Hoover will work against the present day GOP. Anything that worked for FDR will work for any candidate who cares to adopt it. Anybody who emulates Harry S Truman will succeed. One has only to read any of FDR’s speeches to find clarifying gems of political wisdom that will directly apply to many of the political problems of today.
Could not agree more with this statement. Not a fan of Seth Moulton and his New Dems “new message” that is just re-branded neoliberalism.
We need a message, a value statement that applies to and is understood by anyone in the working class of this nation.
Progressives have a proud history of solving problems — From FDR’s Great Depression – era New Deal to Obama’s health crisis Affordable Care Act.
petr is spot on. Check out my post : What’s to be done.
While this is certainly true, it’s a little wide of the mark, in this instance… It’s not that we have the capability to provide solutions, though we do, it’s that we have the actual solutions.
When you first identify, for example, the need for a bridge over a river you must make the case for the bridge and the expenditure necessary to put it there. Those opposed to the bridge will fight you. If you win and get the bridge, you have ‘solved’ the problem of not having a bridge where you needed one…. but your work is not done. Time passes and the bridge falls into disrepair. Those who were initially opposed to the bridge are still opposed and will fight to prevent further expenditures necessary to repair. It is at this point when you recall the arguments necessary to implement the bridge in the first place and use them to fight for the continued existence of the bridge. You do not need ‘new ideas’ You need to re-visit the ideas you’ve already had and strengthen them. The rationale that built the bridge is the same rationale used to repair the bridge.
The Democrats implemented the New Deal. Over the past 30 years Republicans have slowly been chipping away at the New Deal. This is not a new problem. This is the same old problem: they have only attacked our solutions. Saying that we need ‘new ideas’ is running away from those very same solutions.
FDR showed us the way out of this madness. : ” Better the government that lives in the spirit of charity than suffers the coldness of its own indifference.”
We’re going to allow the GOP to pick our party’s leadership? Screw that. They focused on Pelosi because “San Francisco values” dogwhistles “Liburell!!” and “Gay Agenda!!’ to their base. We lost races in four bright red districts – that’s not the End Of The World As We Know It.
17 years as the leader of the Democrats in the House and only 4 as Speaker. How long do the Dems have to be wondering aimlessly in the desert to until stand Pelosi’s one major quality–her ability to raise money–is not enough. If the team keeps losing, fire the manager: Nancy Pelosi.
The GOP retained four bright red districts. Whoop-de-doo, If the GOP wasn’t squealing about Pelosi they would’ve cried Bernie or Obama or Clinton., Screw letting the GOP decide who the leadership is.
I’d put this differently, but in general I agree. She should stay now, but step aside if we don’t take the House in 2018.
Without Leader Pelosi we would not have the Affordable Care Act — the most consequential legislation of the last 20 years.
Funny how the only accomplishment people cite from her tenure is nine years old and about to be repealed.
Ryan challenged Leader Pelosi and lost. End of story.
Yeesh. Not a good effort here jc.
Except as a bogeyman, was Pelosi even a factor in this race? That is, did she headline events for Ossoff or otherwise personally participate in this race?
She hasn’t been a factor in any house race aside from fundraising for the past seven years. That’s the point. Even Tito and Theo got fired after failing to make the playoffs two years in a row-time for new blood.
I don’t always agree with Seth but find the dismissal here amusing. After all-most people here burned him in effigy for having the guts to take on a flawed incumbent in a primary. Had he listened to the local establishment Rep Richard Tisei would be on his third term would be saying he had “concerns” about AHCA before voting on it anyway.
Maybe it’s time to listen to the only member of our delegation who’s kept a swing district blue? He certainly has a better record of doing that in the last four years than Speaker Pelosi. It’s not about the ads-that’s a straw man. It’s about repeatedly rewarding electoral failure with promotions and second chances. And she’s not the only figure we can point to (DWS, Coakley, Clinton, Finegold, Strickland, Hoyer, and the legendary Bob Shrum).
Leader Pelosi just won re-election by her party Caucus over Ryan with an overwhelming vote of confidence from those members who know her best.
You are missing citing a causal connection between Pelosi and losing elections. I’m willing to be persuaded, but so far I see post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc again.
And we should have kept Francona, btw.
And my point is why blame someone who is not in that particular driver’s seat. Her role in the House is to be the LEGISLATIVE leader for the caucus. If her title were DCCC Chair you might have a better case.
I can agree with this brilliant analysis in its details and still not agree that it makes sense for Pelosi to continue in perpetuity. She has been a brilliant speaker of the house, but the question is not the past, but the future: would Nancy Pelosi or Tim Ryan be better able to craft a message that will get the Democrats back the House in 2018. That is the only question. I don’t claim to have the answer.
I think this question should be put off for at least a week or two to defeat Trump-Deathcare, a radical bill that would crush Medicaid, end nursing home care for our mothers, and send the poor back to emergency rooms at the last moment before death.