The Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association is unique among the various Democratic Party organs that slosh cash around ahead of elections. Recently reconstituted after years of dormancy, the DLGA is one of the few places where the national party builds someone an electoral ladder. Should you be the right candidate, the group will help you assemble a campaign team, raise money and run for the quixotic office of LG. And then, should you make a name for yourself, the DLGA will help you run for something more, shall we say, prestigious. Like governor. Or senator.
So when the DLGA goes looking for the right candidate, its choice could have ramifications that echo into the future. Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis is the DLGA’s current vice chair and one of the leaders helping the group prepare for its first candidate recruitment drive. On his short list: people with regular lives.
“We need more candidates for office who have authentic, lived experience,” he told NOTUS. “Quite frankly, we need less lawyers running for office, less millionaires.”
Online, on TV, on podcasts and in private conversations, Democrats are locked in an argument about what they need to be to win — and how much that deviates from what they want to be. Can the party be a bulwark for emerging civil rights movements, or does that leave them too vulnerable to conservative claims that they’re radical? Can they be a party that attracts educated middle-class voters and still reach the working class? Can they center their aging heroes while also promising a new and different future? Can they go on Joe Rogan but also be the voice of people disturbed by the audience he represents?
These questions all lead to the two big ones rippling across the party: Who is a Democrat now, anyway? And who is a Democrat who can win?
Privately, some Democrats grumble that the party has only recruited candidates who neatly align with the views of the party’s socially liberal college-educated voter bloc. Those Democrats argue the party should be receptive to candidates who hold positions — on everything from transgender student athletes to abortion — not entirely in keeping with Democratic orthodoxy.
“Voters have a good bullshit radar and want candidates who are unafraid to say what’s on their mind,” one strategist involved in candidate recruitment said. “Democrats are only shooting themselves in the foot if we continue to run candidates who just check the boxes on issue after issue.”
Senate Democrats who won in November think they know the key to successful candidates and campaigns going forward: Go everywhere, talk to everyone and focus on the economy.
And don’t talk about racial, sexual or gender identities.
“Personally, I think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic senator-elect from Michigan who won a narrow race in her state, told reporters recently. “People need to be looked at as independent Americans, whatever group they’re from, whatever party they may be from. And you have to approach them with an open, generous heart because anyone in this situation is, I think, approachable and gettable, but you have to go there.”
Senate Democrats have some reason to gloat. Their party lost majority control of the chamber but still won four races in states Trump also won, what they called a remarkable achievement in a political era where ticket-splitting voters had been increasingly rare. Slotkin said her victory was in part because she would show up in deep red areas in Michigan where no Democratic candidate had visited in decades, helping her eke out just enough support in those rural counties to win statewide.
Slotkin said that showing up where other Democrats haven’t meant more than traveling to physical locations — it also meant going on conservative-friendly podcasts and radio.
“This is an uncomfortable thing to say in a room full of media, but our media channels and the way that we communicate with people, we can’t just talk to ourselves,” Slotkin told reporters at the press conference with other winning Democrats. “We need to see where people are getting their news and go to those places.”
NOTUS asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer whether that party’s message meant that it needed to recruit candidates who would be comfortable talking on a program like Rogan’s podcast.
“We have to reach out to everybody,” Schumer responded. “That’s what we should do.”
An experienced ear has heard a lot of this before. After Democrats lose, they usually become excited about, well, moderate white people. Davis rejects this. The DLGA represents one of the most diverse groups of Democratic elected officials, stats it added to on Election Day when Rachel Hunt won the LG job in North Carolina, one of only two statewide Democrats across the country to flip a seat from red to blue.
“We should have a bunch of candidates that is truly representative of America. That means women, people of color, Black and brown, different voices, not just in gender and race, but in lived experience,” Davis said.
His own background is Black working class, a demographic that Democrats — with dismay — watched move toward the Republicans. Davis said the best candidate can win people back, but that requires a support system that makes it possible for working-class people to compete in increasingly expensive races.
“The best candidates often end up being the people who you have to convince to run for office,” Davis said. “Part of the process is making sure that we’re leveling the playing field and making different types of people think about harnessing their power and pursuing public office, and making sure that we as an organization are doing everything we can to support candidates from diverse backgrounds.”
Democratic strategists say the party needs to recruit candidates whose appeal extends beyond the college-educated voters who now form the party’s base.
“I do think we’ve forgotten — some of us at least have forgotten — we need to be talking to the entire country and not just the college-educated upper-middle-class folks who vote for us all the time,” said Justin Barasky, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Sen. Sherrod Brown’s campaign in 2018. (Brown lost reelection this year while still significantly outperforming the top of the ticket.)
Barasky said the party should continue to recruit a diverse slate of candidates, just so long as they’re conscious of reaching out and appealing to working-class voters. Candidates who emphasize an issue like student loan forgiveness, for instance, aren’t talking to a lot of the country.
“Some states, we’re talking to barely 10% of the country,” Barasky said. “And there are so many other kinds of debt we should be focusing on helping people with.”
Democrats have had some of their greatest successes not playing it safe, if safe is what appeals to a room full of consultants in Washington. President Barack Obama led Democrats to two historic victories in 2008 and 2012 (but with shocking losses directly afterward in 2010 and 2014). The lesson, according to those who were there, is that the best candidate-recruitment efforts are the ones where the candidate emerges naturally.
“I’d quibble with the thesis that their pedigree will be determinative,” said Eric Schultz, a longtime Obama aide who also won races for Democrats down the ballot. The loss to Trump is a shock to Democrats, like it was in 2016. But this time, Schultz said, there are a ton of Democrats ready to step up. Unsaid by him: The lanes are finally open. President Joe Biden won’t run again, and now that Vice President Kamala Harris lost, there’s not really anyone occupying the “Up Next” position in the party hierarchy.
“One difference between now and 2016 is that Democrats have a strong and diverse bench of talent of leaders that weren’t generally in sight eight years ago,” Schultz said, referring to governors, cabinet members and others. “I have no idea where any of them went to college, but Democrats don’t need to have a postmortem on shifting more to the left or more to the center — we need a giant turn towards channeling what people are feeling in their day-to-day lives.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro and Alex Roarty are reporters at NOTUS.