In his book “Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics,” former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed described 1989, the year the group was founded, as a dark one for religious conservatives. The once-powerful televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were discredited by lurid scandals. In Virginia and New Jersey, anti-abortion Republican candidates lost gubernatorial races to pro-choice Democrats.
The movement that had been so formidable at the start of the decade “seemed dead, and cultural elites danced on its grave.”
Seeking resurrection, the religious right turned to local politics, investing in the bench of the Republican Party. “We are training people to be effective – to be elected to school boards, to city councils, to state legislatures and to key positions in political parties,” Pat Robertson wrote in a 1991 Christian Coalition fundraising letter.
If there is one threadlike silver lining to Donald Trump’s election last year, it’s that it has forced the left to emulate the Christian right’s extremely successful strategy for building political power. For decades, Democrats have paid far less attention to local politics than Republicans. That’s part of the reason the party lost almost 1,000 state legislative seats – there are 7,383 in total – over the course of Barack Obama’s presidency. But in the past year, citizens nationwide – particularly women and people of color – who were horrified by Trump’s victory have decided to run for office in their own communities. And on Tuesday, many of them won.
The most important Democratic victory Tuesday was that of Gov.-elect Ralph Northam in Virginia. But there were countless down-ballot triumphs across the country.
For the past year, the Democratic Party has been engaged in an angry internal debate over identity politics, which are often framed in opposition to a purely class-based appeal.
At times, it feels like progressives are doomed to re-litigate the 2016 Democratic primary forever, tearing each other apart while Trump tears down the republic. But if you squint at Tuesday’s results, you can sort of see a synthesis emerging between Obama and Hillary Clinton’s theory of the emerging Democratic electorate – in which Democrats win by appealing to a coalition of white professionals and minorities – and Bernie Sanders’ focus on grass-roots organizing and economic populism.
In some ways the election was the revenge of the Obama coalition. Educated white liberals joined people of color to elect an amazingly diverse group of candidates. A Latina single mother, Michelle De La Isla, was elected mayor of Topeka, Kan. Wilmot Collins, a refugee from Liberia, won the mayoral race in Helena, Mont. Seattle elected its first lesbian mayor, Jenny Durkan. The election was a reminder that white men needn’t be the center of the political universe.
Ultimately, the main lessons from Tuesday are probably more strategic than ideological. Democrats need to contest every seat they can, no matter how red. They should also recognize that young people are crucial to their fortunes, and make it easy for them to run. One person who played a key role in Democratic victories Tuesday was Amanda Litman, a 27-year-old veteran of the Hillary Clinton campaign who co-founded Run For Something, which trains and supports progressive millennials seeking political office. More millennial candidates, Litman told me, “means more millennial voters,” and millennials are largely left-leaning.
Run For Something is part of a robust progressive grass-roots infrastructure that has emerged from the wreckage of the 2016 election.
In the past year, membership in the Democratic Socialists of America has more than tripled, to around 25,000. Every congressional district in the country now has at least two chapters of the Indivisible movement, and on Thursday, Indivisible launched a new program to mobilize these chapters for elections. In the past, the right was far better than the left at channeling its activist energy into electoral politics, but that’s finally starting to change. Perhaps the Resistance can do for Democrats what the religious right did for Republicans. If so, it will start local, but it won’t end there.
The New York Times