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Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.
Before we start today:
- The Digital Strategy Summit kicks off next week! Check out the sessions and register now
- The digital politics world — and I — lost a good friend
Democrats Must Compete in Truly Hostile Territory This Year — Or Else
In 2016, the Democratic organization American Bridge plans to invest in voter persuasion and turnout in places the national party and major donors often ignore. Via the NYT [link unlocked]:
A major Democratic super PAC hopes to stretch the midterm battleground map by kicking off a roughly $50 million advertising campaign targeting Republicans in more than a dozen House districts and four Senate races, most of them in traditionally Republican areas…
Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, said in an interview that Republicans were vulnerable in parts of the country that had been exceedingly tough terrain for Democrats in recent elections.
“We’re going to Republican territory and planting a flag,” Mr. Beychok said.
The campaign will run on TV, radio, streaming and digital channels, with ads targeting voters in parts of Iowa, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Ohio that Democrats have largely written off in recent years. The program emphasizes outreach to working-class voters based on American Bridge’s research into their “frustrations and priorities”. Notably, Bridge plans to start early, with its ads intended to make inroads before the fall campaigning blitz.
It’s a good start! I’d love to see national funding expand downballot to state legislative races, but simply getting out in hostile territory at all is better than Democrats usually manage to do. Likewise, I hope these ads can help prime the pump for field outreach in the same areas, but on their own they’re a lot better than nothing.
Why spend money on races that may not pay off? For one thing, if 2026 truly is a Democratic wave election, some Republicans who’d be safe in a normal year could find themselves vulnerable. What would suck? Waking up the day after November’s election with a bunch of Democrats losing by a few hundred votes. In those cases, even relatively small investments in media and field organizing could put unlikely candidates into office.
But more generally, Democrats need to show up even in areas they’re likely to lose this year, if only to build relationships in long-neglected places. As NC Democratic chair Anderson Clayton put it:
“Rural North Carolina didn’t leave us overnight, but we’ve got to invest in it for the long haul,” she said.
That’s meant contesting nearly every legislative seat, she said. “People in rural North Carolina are finally going to have a Democrat to vote for.”
When I worked on projects with the Michigan Democratic party in recent years, they emphasized building the vote from the bottom up. That included nurturing good local candidates to fire up Democratic voters in districts where they’d lost the habit of turning out.
Similarly, the NC party is giving grassroots tools like the VAN (Voter Activation Network) to candidates rather than charging them for access. The better local campaigns can perform, the better congressional and statewide campaigns can build on them. And for all the criticism DNC chair Ken Martin has earned since his election last year, the national party is funneling money to state parties at a rate that can help them build the technical and human capacity they need to put up a fight everywhere.
Most political coverage this year will focus on a handful of priority races for Senate, Congress and governorships. But Trump’s raging unpopularity opens the door for Democrats to begin to open minds long closed off to our ideas — something we desperately need. As I wrote a few years ago,
…most of Trump country won’t give Democrats the time of day. If you live in a place like East Texas (where I grew up), you can go a long time without encountering a liberal/progressive/Democratic idea in its undistorted state, at least if you’re White.
Waiting in the doctor’s office? Fox News is on. Waiting to have your brakes fixed? Fox News is on. Clumping on the treadmill at the gym? Fox News is on. You can switch the channel, but you can’t change the narrative: before Sinclair brought Boris Epsteyn into millions of living rooms, local news in places like Texas was already out-Foxing Fox. Meanwhile, conservative talkers fill the radio dial, mocking straw-man liberals to their advertisers’ content.
If you’re a White Democrat in Trump country, you learn to keep your mouth shut — which only compounds the problem. As political science research has shown for decades, most of us make voting decisions based largely on what we hear from friends and family. The current crop of Trump voters may have no one in their lives presenting an alternative to the vision put forth by the Right-wing media machine.
America doesn’t have decades to wait for us to get our act together. If Democrats, liberals, progressives and our pro-democracy allies want to fix America’s problems over the long term, we need to persuade skeptical and even hostile voters to give us a chance. Otherwise, our 2026 victories could be as fleeting as Donald Trump’s attention span.
– cpd
Top photo via Pixabay