American Forum Exclusive: Democrats Thinking Locally

With President Obama’s reelection a mere four months behind us, Washington’s political class of pundits, consultants and cable television talk show host are now feverishly contemplating the 2016 presidential election. Not a day, it seems, goes by without Chris Matthews and company ruminating (read championing) a Hillary Clinton run for the Democratic nomination while lustfully sizing up potential GOP contenders from Kentucky's Senator Rand Paul to New Jersey Governor Chris Christi.

American Forum has learned, however, that stateside, Democrats are focusing their attention on the 2014 midterm election- not 2016. Yesterday, I spoke with Ohio Democratic Party Communications Director, Jerid Kurtz, regarding the party’s plans for 2014. Kurtz told this blogger that Ohio Democrats have their “sights set firmly on the Governor’s office” that is currently occupied by Republican John Kasich. In his first year in office Kasich and the GOP controlled legislature stripped public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights. Ohio voters responded by repealing the law in a 2011 referendum. Kasich and Republicans in the legislature also passed a vote suppression law that cut the number of early voting days. As a result of these highly controversial and unpopular moves, Kasich’s standing with Buckeye State voters took a plunge.
 



Washington Press Corps jumps to 2016 CNN Video

In December of last year the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that a Quinnipiac University survey placed Governor Kasich’s approval rating at a mere 42 percent with only 36 percent Ohio voters feeling that he deserved a second term. By February 2013 however, Kasich’s approval had improved somewhat in the Quinnipiac poll with 46 percent of those polled suggesting that he should be re-elected. Regarding Republicans super gerrymandering of congressional districts, Kurtz noted that Democrats had considered  “placing a referendum on the ballot” that would repeal the GOP drawn districts. This effort was hampered, however, when GOP legislators added an appropriation to the redistricting bill. The Columbus Dispatch reported that “By adding $2.75 million to House Bill 319…, Republicans are attempting to make the bill take effect immediately, instead of giving opponents 90 days to collect signatures for a referendum effort. The map passed on a party-line vote.”  I asked Kurtz if it was indeed too late for independent groups to force a ballot measure that would 1. create a nonpartisan redistricting commission and 2. mandate a fair redistricting for 2014?”  He responded that he wasn’t sure and reiterated that the Ohio Democratic Party was focused the unpopular Gov. Kasich.

Democrats are wise to keep their eyes on 2014. Midterm elections are notoriously low turnout elections which favors Republicans. In 2010 they (Democrats) took their eyes off the ball and were run out of office from Michigan to Virginia. Over the next two years unified Republican Party office holders took administrative actions and passed dozens of vote suppression laws aimed specifically at disenfranchising minority voters, college students, senior citizens and all Americans living in urban centers. The GOP vote suppression efforts exposed the party’s acceptance of the concept that they simply could not compete with Democrats in the arena of ideas, particularly in a presidential election year when more Americans vote. But Democrats too have shown their acceptance of such notions, that they can’t compete in certain regions of the country such as in southern and mid-western states. It took former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, as Chairman of the DNC in 2005, to usher in “the 50-State Strategy—an ambitious effort to build the Democratic Party from the ground up in every single precinct, city, and state in the country.” The strategy worked. Democrats picked up senate seats in states that the party had long given up on including in Alaska where Mark Begich was elected to the US Senate in the same year that Barack Obama was elected our nation’s first African American President.
 

The Republican Party, both nationally and in the states, have embarked on a sneering scheme to maintain themselves in office by way of electoral chicanery. For their own selfish purposes Republicans are employing immoral tactics that denigrate the very ideals of American democracy. In Wisconsin, Michigan and Virginia the Democratic Party should inaugurate a unified strategy to challenge the Republican Party’s lockstep effort to suppress the vote by gerrymandering districts. Where the ballot option is available, as it may still be in Ohio, Democrats must eschew complacency of process and take the fight for electoral fairness directly to voters. In so doing they will be standing up fairness, for the future of American democracy and for what is right.

This article is the first installment of our exclusive “What Are They Thinking?” investigation. We are asking Democrat Party leaders, liberal think tanks and organized labor for their ideas, plans and strategies for addressing important political and policy issues between now and 2016

by Brent Scott

Executive Director

Vote By Mail America