2016 Postmortem

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The failure of Democrats to realize how deep the Republican commitment to opposing their agenda runs has led to strategic errors. Take the earliest battles of Obama’s presidency, when he extended a hand to House Speaker John Boehner, only to have Boehner leave the table at the last minute. Or granting concessions (more than $1 trillion in spending cuts, with no tax increases) to the Republicans during the high-stakes debt ceiling negotiations in 2011, which only emboldened Republicans to pursue the tactic again in 2013. As the Onion perfectly satirized, “Obama: Debt Ceiling Deal Required Tough Concessions by Both Democrats and Democrats Alike.” In a Health Affairs article, Helen Halpin (who advised the Obama administration on the development of the Affordable Care Act) and Peter Harbage note that Sen. Max Baucus spent “months” trying to forge a bipartisan bill, sapping precious time that Democrats simply didn’t have.

This flows from the Democratic desire for bipartisan policy, but also from a technocratic disposition. Many liberal commentators are holding up Trump’s support among beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act to claim that the idea that policies would become entrenched is fundamentally wrong. In fact, it’s right — the problem is that ACA was not properly designed to mobilize political support for it. The administration failed to use the exchanges to register voters (as they were required to by the National Voter Registration Act). Where the Medicaid expansion passed, it did indeed mobilize turnout.

Research is further establishing the feedback loop between progressive policy and Democratic vote share, not debunking it. The fallacy lies in believing that programs will simply mobilize people by dint of their existence. In reality, of course, most Americans aren’t schooled in policy. Institutions like unions and community organizations (like ACORN) traditionally mobilize these beneficiaries. Social Security privatization didn’t work because groups like the AARP have cropped up to defend these benefits.

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http://www.salon.com/2017/01/08/what-went-wrong-with-the-democratic-party-three-big-failures-that-led-to-the-current-debacle/