In the flood of advice about how Democrats can do better in the next elections, one salient point has too often been overlooked. It is, more than anything else, that
Democrats need a coherent message that can have widespread appeal, not just on the national ticket, but across the land, in state and congressional
contests as well.
I know: I didn't have a single message that appealed to a majority of voters, and I lost my bid to become a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Swearing that I would stand up for Oklahoma better than my opponent wasn't enough. I faced a difficulty shared by many other Democratic candidates around the country: I was unable to offer a story as convincing to voters as the Republicans'. While this failure was my own, I do believe it illustrates the difficulty any Democrat has when running for a major office in a red state like Oklahoma, where President Bush received two out of every three votes.
Consider the advantage enjoyed by my opponent, Republican Tom Coburn. He could travel to every part of Oklahoma, speaking to every possible constituency, and deliver a
consistent, widely shared Republican message to every audience: He wanted less government, lower taxes, and a return to the moral values found in religious teaching.
Sure, Coburn might emphasize one of these themes more than another, depending on his location. But in his dozens of public appearances, the message was always more or less
the same; the stump speech was very predictable. And it worked. Coburn won, 53 percent to 41 percent (6 percent voted for third-party candidates).
I campaigned in a more traditional way, one I thought would work. When stumping in farm country, I tried to focus on agriculture; in the suburbs, on public education; in small towns, on economic development. The message was always very narrowly tailored, largely because each of the coalition groups my campaign was trying to assemble
either didn't care about the agenda of the other target groups -- or actually disagreed with it.
For instance, when I emphasized my strong support for gun owners -- very important in most red states -- many urban and suburban voters rebelled. Or when I supported a ban
on partial birth abortion -- also an essential position in any red state -- strong supporters of abortion rights threatened not to vote in the Senate race or to vote for a third-party candidate (exit polls in Oklahoma revealed that 7 percent of self-identified liberals did vote for a third-party candidate).
Such is the dilemma of a red-state Democrat: If you tack to the left, you will be woefully out of step; if you tack to the right, you alienate a small but significant part of the Democratic base. Either way, the red-state Democrat loses. The substantive discord among Democratic interest groups is deafening, and, unlike the GOP, the non-negotiable
demands of Democratic interest groups are often in conflict.
The success of Coburn's approach -- and that of other Republicans across the country -- is that the simple message of traditional values and less government united every possible constituency. This is not because every possible Republican voter agreed with the message; far from it. I routinely talked to business leaders who supported gay marriage and abortion rights, but were voting Republican because of their intense desire to have lower taxes and less regulation.
Conversely, I met many people who cared not a bit about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but would have marched across hot coals to stop abortion. Republican
success is found in the party's ability to weave a coherent story about where the country should go and in the fact that no constituency defects from the GOP coalition simply because it doesn't agree with a particular part of that narrative. Any particular issue in the GOP platform that doesn't enjoy majority support -- and many issues don't -- has the countervailing advantage of powerful intensity. And the non-negotiable demands of all the Republican interest groups are compatible, if not identical.
So what to do? I've concluded that the only way we can gather under one tent all the Democratic interest groups, plus the essential portion of swing voters we need, is with an overarching message -- like the Republicans' -- that appeals to voters at both a higher and deeper level than just their own favorite policy positions. Democrats must try to develop a vision for a better country that both inspires political activity and unites groups with very different policy agendas.
To do this, Democrats should move away from any hope of bringing peace to irreconcilable moral disputes. Instead, Democrats should create a meta-message, one
based on hope, values, and strength, that can be offered to voters everywhere. As today's outsiders -- the Republicans rule everything in Washington -- Democrats can also cast themselves as the nation's insurgent reform party, with a focus on small "d" democratic reforms. Examples would include campaign finance reform, an end to the revolving
door between government and the lobbying world, procurement reform, and stronger ethics rules for officeholders.
Reform of the political process offers Democrats a message that can transcend intractable substantive disputes about abortion, gay marriage, church-state relations, and gun control. Pro-life and pro-choice voters can agree on the need for transparency in government. Supporters of gay marriage and its opponents can see eye to eye on the need to end the corrupting influence of outsized campaign contributions.
An emphasis on democratic reform is especially likely to find support among swing voters in the red states of the Midwest and Mountain West, where people see themselves as part of the forgotten "moderate middle" of American politics. Such voters are typically
nonideological, congenitally suspicious of government and the religious right, and disdainful of partisanship.
I met many of these voters on the campaign trail. While offering their support to me, they usually stated that they were supporting Bush because he was perceived as more willing to reform a corrupt political process than the quintessentially establishment John Kerry. And true to expectations, on Election Day in Oklahoma, I won self-described moderates (about 45 percent of voters) by 15 percentage points, while Bush won this same group by 12 points.
Throughout the Midwest and Mountain West, a similar story can be told. In Montana, for example, Democrat Brian Schweitzer took an astonishing 64 percent of self-identified
moderates, winning the governor's race in a red state, while Kerry could persuade only 48 percent of the same group.
From my experience, an emphasis on political reform would resonate deeply with the disaffected, nonideological part of the electorate. It would be the coherent narrative that every Democrat could adopt, whatever other policy differences might exist. An emphasis on political reform would also break the Democratic Party out of sterile debates about vexing and controversial social matters,
on which a greater diversity of opinion could be tolerated. Given the institutional corruption of House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and friends, political reform is one of the most urgent priorities of the nation.
It is from this union of electoral appeal and political necessity that a Democratic resurgence can be born.
