You Can't Sell People on Your Brand While Trashing Your Brand

About 48 hours before the polls closed, President Barack Obama was making his final appearances of the election cycle, appearances for Governor Dan Malloy and Governor-Elect Tom Wolf. In a year that was tough, both brought the President in to campaign for them in dense, minority-filled, base vote areas. Something funny happened. Neither was hurt outside of those urban areas by the President's presence. Neither lost either.

Unfortunately, most of the ticket across the nation did not bring in the President. They instead spent the cycle running away from the President, trashing him at every turn. Begich, Pryor, Lundergan Grimes, and others ran from the President as fast as they could, and they all.... lost. It didn't help a single one of them. There was no benefit. Republican voters still associated them with the President's negatives, which they were reinforcing of course, and Republican politicians gleefully went along with it. Democrats, by denouncing their President, were reinforcing the argument being used against them- that the President and his Congressional allies were weak, ineffective, and in fact destructive to the nation.

This cycle started out as a sort of jump ball. Nothing was happening in Congress, and either side could have been blamed. If Democrats had a strategy worth using, they would have embraced the President and pounded on the shutdown more effectively a year ago, and they would have been able to blame an ineffective, frankly bad Speaker of the House for the problems in Washington. Instead, Democrats conceded the blame game, while also not passing anything of substance into law, leaving the public to assume it was their fault.

No matter how bad the leader of your party is doing, no matter how bad the messaging is, you have to stay on message and on the team. You can't run wild cat. You need to be a loyal and effective messenger, and you have to sell people that there is something positive about your brand. We're churning out 200,000 plus jobs a month, gas prices are falling, Dodd-Frank is working, eight-million bought health insurance on the exchanges, green energy is at the high point of it's production, and the President as a result has a story to tell. His own team made it look like a failure. For that reason, they lost, and lost badly.

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What the White House, DNC Got Wrong in 2014, and for that Matter, 2010

The Obama campaign machine is the single greatest political campaign machine we've ever seen assembled (at least until the next President, as all build and improve on the last in this area). They ran through two national elections, and a long, hard primary fight, and won two national elections. Their success in Presidential elections is as good or better than we've ever seen, and it's fair to call them experts. They do a great job putting together a campaign.

That's Presidential elections though, and not midterms. In midterm elections, he has one of the worst records we've seen in modern times. While President Bush did well the first time, and President Clinton the second time, President Obama got crushed both times, losing a house in both midterm elections he lead the party into. It was ugly, to say the least.

I think the biggest fault of the Obama team in both midterms was acting on a desire to change the electorate we were dealing with in both elections into something it wasn't. In 2012, voting rights, access to contraception, marriage equality, and other socially liberal causes moved large numbers of voters into the Democratic column, and made the party a juggernaut at the polls. In 2014, the electorate that came out didn't care about that. The Obama team, as it did in 2010 when touting it's achievements at the time, did not do a good job pivoting onto issues that mattered to the electorate at hand. He never was able to sell this electorate on his record of results- which is pretty damn good- or talk to them on issues that they cared about (with a few exceptions). If we wanted to talk about issues such as immigration, or contraception, or anything else, we needed more concrete examples of action being taken, and better messaging about what was done (since things were). The messaging was just, for lack of a better word, off.

Now, if they had been on, would they have avoided this electoral fate? No. We would have lost seats. We would maybe even have lost the Senate. We would have lost less though, and been closer in several states that ended up costing us badly. With that said, I don't think the President or the DNC deserve the largest share of the blame. No, my next post will talk about who should be blamed more.

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Impeachment? Vetoes? Welcome to President Obama's World

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Work With Mitch? Find Common Ground? Um...

For six years, Mitch McConnell has pretended that President Obama wasn't the winner in either election he ran in. He's spent six years making sure his caucus unanimously votes "no" on everything. He's obstructed the agenda that people voted for, and he's single-handedly done more to make sure the President can't enact all of his agenda than anyone else.

So now the President should work with him?

Aside from the basic principle of it, which is that this man and his caucus should be shunned by all Democrats, what would there even be common ground on? Repealing health care? The continuation of the petro-dominated energy market, or even worse, making coal a bigger part of our energy strategy? Maybe more laws to protect the gun industry? Or, perhaps, repealing Dodd-Frank and going back to too big to fail? If not that, why not tax reform that protects the rich and corporations?

No, there's nothing to work with Mitch McConnell on. The President should get out his veto pen, and we'll settle this in 2016.

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Never Run From Your Leader and Your Beliefs

Democrats never learn. Republicans did not run away from President Bush in 2006, and while they took losses in that election, they lost 30 seats, which seems mild next to 2010 or 1994. There's a lesson to be learned.

We spent this entire cycle pushing the President away, and watching our dispirited base mope through the election. As he sat on the sidelines, we performed worse in just about every race than the polls said we would. The connection is clear.

No matter how far you run away from your own party in an election, the other side is supposed to make you wear it. Republicans are good at this. Whether it was Lundergan Grimes, Nunn, Pryor, Begich, or whoever else you want to talk about, bashing the President didn't help our candidates in any race. You lose any positives you should get from them, and you don't gain anything.

We already should have known this though. In 2000, Al Gore worked hard to separate himself from Bill Clinton. He lost that election. In 2002, Democrats tried to be war-hawks to win an election. They lost. Get the pattern?

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Explaining Mid-Terms for Stupid People

Mid-term elections are older, whiter, and more male. The women who vote are whiter and more-often married. This is simply reality. It's also reality that an electorate that is made up of these voters is more conservative than Presidential electorates. That's who votes in a mid-term election, and you probably can't drastically change it unless you run an extremely precise campaign, one that is often times impossible. The electorate is just going to be less liberal than Presidential years.

Knowing that, you talk to the electorate that you have. Democrats did not do that. The same catch-phrases that worked in 2012 didn't work in 2014. Democrats never understood that. They spoke to an electorate that would never exist. They lost, and lost badly, as a result.

The 2014 election is over though, and that is the end of it. What happened last night is fairly irrelevant to what will happen in 2016. That last night's electorate would prefer a Republican to Hillary Clinton in 2016 is not shocking. The electorate was a fairly conservative electorate. It's also a much smaller electorate than the one that will vote in two years.

Basically, mid-terms have a smaller number of voters, and they are older, whiter, and more male than Presidential years. While both are elections, please don't confuse Presidential elections with mid-terms.

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