Can Democrats save themselves?

Published 12:28 pm Monday, June 12, 2017

HALCOTTSVILLE, N.Y. — On a recent weekend at the farmers market here, Fred Margulies sat under a “Vote Where It Counts” sign and beckoned second-home owners to re-register in this area upstate instead of wherever their main residences were — New York City, most likely.

To win the House in 2018 and buck President Donald Trump’s worst impulses, Democrats don’t need more votes in Manhattan and Brooklyn. They need them around Halcottsville, in the 19th Congressional District, where the party should be able to prevail but keeps falling short.

Its optimism grows with Trump’s woes. But will Democrats put forward the right candidate for a largely working-class region whose barns need paint, whose town centers want for bustle and whose manufacturing plants are too few and far between?

Margulies told me that a man might fare best, especially someone who doesn’t feed residents’ fears that they’re “under the thumb of the city.” But in the Democratic primary last year, Margulies spurned a male contender with unquestioned local ties in favor of Zephyr Teachout, a Manhattan law professor who’d just moved to the district to run. She got the nomination, then lost by about 9 points in the general election.

“I liked her mind,” Margulies said. “I guess I’m not practical.”

Well, the time for romance is past. The 2018 midterms could hinge on how ruthlessly pragmatic Democrats are.

From the scandalous look of the last week, dominated by James Comey’s testimony, Democrats are beautifully positioned to trounce Republicans wherever Republicans are trounce-able. But the party has done an ace job of sabotaging itself before. The 19th District, also known as the Hudson Valley, tells that story well.

So could Georgia’s 6th District, the Atlanta suburbs where a fiercely contested special election — the most expensive in the history of House races — concludes June 20. If the Republican, Karen Handel, emerges victorious, it will in part reflect the shortcomings of her Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. At 30, he has an underwhelming résumé and occasionally callow air, and lives near, but not in, the district that he’s vying to represent.

Next year, Democrats shouldpick up many seats in Congress, given the usual midterm correction and the unusual melodrama in the Trump administration. Control of the Senate is probably beyond the party’s reach, because Democrats have to defend two states to every one that Republicans do, on turf that’s plenty red. Control of the House, though, is entirely possible, even with all the gerrymandering that has occurred. But that presumes that Democrats can get their act together.

They’re still not sure how much of Trump’s victory had to do with Hillary Clinton’s flaws versus the party’s poor grasp of America, and the more they focus on the former, tattling for the tell-all book “Shattered” and then tittering over its revelations, the less they own up to the latter.

They’re still searching for a concise, coherent message. They’re still feuding: the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing versus the moderates. And they’re still indulging in elitist optics at odds with the lessons of 2016. Although new research commissioned by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC, concluded that many Obama-to-Trump voters believed that Democrats are out of touch with less affluent Americans, a recent, high-profile Democratic brainstorming session in Washington was held at the opulent Four Seasons Hotel.

Then there are the candidates, who sometimes step forward, or are elevated, independent of any master plan. Democrats in the 19th haven’t been riding optimal ones.

Their horse in 2014 was a pampered foal, Sean Eldridge, then 28, who is married to Facebook multimillionaire Chris Hughes and qualified for the race by purchasing a $2 million country house just an hour from the $5 million country house the couple already owned.

His bid was cast as a tale “of nouveau riche liberal ambition, real-estate excess and carpetbaggery run amok,” Michael Barbaro wrote in The New York Times, and, shockingly, he never captured the hearts of the region’s dairy farmers. Although the district is almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and Barack Obama won it by about 8 points in 2008 and 6 in 2012, Eldridge suffered a 30-point defeat.

He ran against a popular, deft incumbent who then decided to retire from the House after 2016, so Democrats nursed renewed hopes in last year’s congressional election. Party chieftains in Washington put the Hudson Valley high on their wish list of House seats to turn blue.

Teachout was the favorite of the local progressives who held sway in the primary. She had been anointed by Sanders. She had attained some celebrity by challenging Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 re-election bid. So they passed over Will Yandik, a relative moderate whose family farm went back several generations and who had graduated from a local high school before getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the Ivy League.

“I don’t know that I would have won,” Yandik told me. “I would have come closer than Zephyr Teachout.” Looking ahead, he said that “in a swing district where every single percentage point matters, the inability to demonstrate a cultural connection to the district is a liability.”

He’s taking a pass on 2018 but is watching to see whether Democratic primary voters “are going to be strategic and pick a centrist and someone with deep roots — someone who can beat John Faso — or whether they are going to adhere to their progressive principles and put a firebrand like Zephyr Teachout up again.”

The Hudson Valley is shaping up to be a laboratory for how Democrats do — or don’t — stage a comeback.

Among Trump voters, there’s frustration, even anger. I ran into one of them, Renee Gardner, a hotel maid, at a Memorial Day weekend street fair in the center of Fleischmanns, a once-prosperous village along a stretch of the Catskill Mountains that has been called the Jewish Alps. She sat alone in a gazebo as a band played Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

“Everything Trump was talking about sounded fantastic,” she said. “And I believe most politicians are crooks, so let’s get a real person in there — even if he’s a crook, too. But I’ve learned a lot by watching that gay woman and Anderson Cooper.” She was referring to Rachel Maddow. And she has reached a conclusion about Trump, bolstered by his incessant tweeting: “He’s a moron.”

She was fairly certain that she voted for Faso in 2016 — “I’m not very political,” she explained — but hadn’t yet contemplated 2018. When she does, will she find a candidate to her liking?

A perfect candidate is hard to find. But Dustin Reidy, who recently started a voter outreach group called NY 19 Votes, said the district could succeed with someone, man or woman, black or white, “who can really connect with voters by talking about the bottom line — wages, pocketbook issues.” I agree.

I heard complaints that Teachout’s approach was “too intellectual,” “too global.” So far, the candidates for 2018 do seem more narrowly attuned to economic issues.

Democrats in the Hudson Valley are especially focused on health care, as I could tell from a demonstration against Faso in Kinderhook, just outside his office there. Many of the signs carried by about two dozen protesters referred to Obamacare, though my favorite ridiculed Trump’s exemption from military service with the words “Show Us Your Bone Spurs.” On the reverse side it said, “We Shall Overcomb.”

But health care wasn’t a bridge to victory in the recent special election in Montana. Maybe that’s because of the state’s conservative bent, or maybe Democrats need to recalibrate. I also worry, based on my travels through the Hudson Valley, that anti-Trump political activism is scattered across too many issues and subgroups.

I saw panic about the country’s direction. I’m not sure I sensed a commensurate cunning. I saw passion. But passion doesn’t equal unity, and unity is the surer way to overcomb.

Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since 2011, joined the newspaper in 1995. Over his years, he has worn a wide variety of hats, including chief restaurant critic and Rome bureau chief.

]

Marketplace