How Democratic Progressives Survived A Landslide - AmericanProspect (Long/Great Info)

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How Democratic Progressives Survived a Landslide
They ran against Wall Street and carried the white working class. The Democrats who shunned populism got clobbered.
By Bob Moser - AmericanProspect
2/11/12

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Ann Kirkpatrick was surely toast in 2014. The two-term Democrat represented one of the most sprawling and politically unpredictable House districts in the country, an Iowa-sized expanse of northern and eastern Arizona dotted with fiercely conservative small towns, heavily Democratic small cities like Flagstaff and Sedona, and 12 Native American tribal lands with varied political loyalties. An affable Anglo who grew up on the Fort Apache Reservation, where her father ran a general store, Kirkpatrick owed both her wins—in 2008 and 2012—to presidential-year turnout in the half-minority First District; without it, in 2010, she lost. No Democrat, in fact, had won a midterm election in this district, which was once represented by John McCain, since 1950.

After pulling off a 9,000-vote squeaker in 2012—Mitt Romney more than doubled her margin of victory as he also carried the district—Kirkpatrick landed immediately on the National Republican Congressional Committee’s list of the seven top Democratic targets for 2014. Which meant she would be facing not just another likely Republican wave, not just another whiter and older midterm electorate, and not just a powerful and well-connected opponent—Andy Tobin, Republican speaker of the state House—but a Dresden-level air assault from outside groups as well.

If you asked the political wizards of Washington, Kirkpatrick’s only hope would have been to sing from this year’s midterm hymnal: Run away from Obama and the “Democrat” label as hard and fast as humanly possible; vow to “fix” the Affordable Care Act rather than defend it; hit your opponent for being “anti-woman”; promise nothing but “bipartisanship” and deficit-reduction if you’re sent back to Congress—oh, and run a superior field operation to draw out the minority voters you’ve been ignoring with your Republican-Lite campaign. Model your campaign on Michelle Nunn’s “I’m as Republican as my opponent” run for Senate in Georgia, say, or Senator Kay Hagan’s Obama-dodging effort in North Carolina—two campaigns that Democratic strategists considered pure genius all the way to Election Day. (In a National Journal “Insider’s Poll” taken just before the midterms, both Democratic and Republican leaders deemed those the “best” Democratic campaigns of 2014 by a wide margin.) And if you must choose an issue to run on, follow Nunn’s and Hagan’s lead and try something inoffensive like “education,” or debt reduction. Just don’t wade into any pesky details.

Few Democrats in Congress were as well positioned as Kirkpatrick to undertake a campaign of Clinton-style triangulation. She voted “just” 89 percent with President Obama, according to the Sunlight Foundation—one of the lower partisan-purity tallies on the Hill. But Kirkpatrick had tried the “no-D Democratic” approach before, in 2010, when she spent the campaign on the defensive after voting for Obamacare, insisting she was actually a model of “independence” and pledging fiscal responsibility and aisle-crossing. She got whomped. So this year, Kirkpatrick made the curious strategic decision to run as herself: a deal-cutter who brings millions in grant money to her cash-starved district; an opponent of EPA regulations when they threaten local jobs, and an environmentalist otherwise; and, most important, a progressive populist on such defining issues as immigration reform, corporate taxation, and health-care reform. She’d talk about her independent streak, sure—because it’s real—but the meat of her campaign would be about what government can, and should, be doing for local folks in need. And rather than focus her efforts on conservative white voters, she would spend much of the campaign on tribal land, which accounted for 25 percent of Kirkpatrick’s total votes in 2012. (By contrast, her Republican opponent won only 3 percent of his votes on the reservations.) She’d invest in the most targeted effort to turn out Native Americans that anyone had seen. In sum, Kirkpatrick would—disaster alert!—play the role of herself in the campaign, and try to reassemble the minority coalition that elected her in 2008 and 2012.

This was not supposed to work in 2014...

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Much More: http://prospect.org/article/how-democratic-progressives-survived-landslide