In the wake of yet another loss in a special election, we are once again engaged in hand wringing over why the Democratic Party keeps losing despite strong tailwinds. One of the arguments that keeps popping up is the party leadership has become too old. Recent discussions about Nancy Pelosi usually include the fact that she is 77 years old. Diane Feinstein at 84 is the oldest member of the Senate. Based on the evidence, however, age should be seen as an irrelevant factor is the party choice of voters. Of the ten oldest people in the Senate, seven of them are Republicans. Chuck Grassley, Orin Hatch Richard Shelby, Jim Inhofe, Pat Roberts and John McCain are all over 80. If age was a strong determinant of voter preference, democrats would have some advantage.
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Another factor cited in claims that the party leadership is out of touch by virtue of wealth. Here too, if you bother to look, of the top 10 wealthiest members of Congress, five are Democrats and five are Republican. I does say something to me that currently the wealthiest member is Greg Gianforte. The noted assaulter of the press is worth 315 million Dollars. (If you have enough money, you really can get away with crimes the rest of us would end up in jail for committing.) We should try to understand why so many members of a purportedly representative government fall within the much maligned 1%. When it comes to wealth, Congress stands in stark contrast to the population as a whole, but neither party can lay claim to being more representative of the lower and middle class.
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Could it be that leadership has been too long on the job? The longest serving senator is currently from Vermont. Pat Leahy was first sworn into the Senate in 1975, the year I graduated from grade school. When he completes his current six year term it will be 2023, the year incidentally that I hope to retire. That is 48 years, a literal lifetime, being represented in the Senate by this one man. The thing is, he does a good job, has not gotten rich in the process, and is respected by everyone in the chamber. More to the point, if length of tenure were a factor in voter choice, the Democrats have only 3 of the ten longest serving members. After Leahy, the next five most senior members are all Republicans including Orin Hatch, who is 83 and was first sworn in in 1977.
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If age , wealth, or tenure are evenly distributed between the parties, then they should be discounted as factors in recent electoral defeats. I would qualify that be saying that there is another cost to being around for too long. Minority Leader Pelosi has been in the top role for Democrats long enough for the conservative smear machine to construct a narrative about her and to cement that perception in the minds of their voters. It has been repeated over and over that she represents a district that is wealthier, gayer, and more liberal than the real America. Her San Francisco district is the wellspring of political correctness, and when her constituents aren’t engaged in ungodly behavior, they are busy creating the technologies that are making middle Americas jobs and prosperity disappear. While I am diametrically opposed to these views, I have to conclude that for the people who hold them, she becomes the issue.
This was what the party leadership failed to understand about Hillary Clinton. By every measure she was the better candidate. There simply was no way in a two year campaign to undo decades worth of indoctrination by the media arm of the opposition. The narrative was set, repeated and reinforced by Republican partisans via the Benghazi affair etc. for decades.
The Democratic Party needs to put forth new faces in order to have the opportunity to define themselves in the mind of voters before the right wing attack machine beats them to it. The party needs to bring forth fresh ideas so that they can foil the prepared scripts Republicans have relied upon to discredit the Democratic platform. And, more than anything, the party needs to coalesce around broad, simple statements of purpose and stop campaigning in the manner of a power point presentation.
Bernie Sanders had a good run in 2016 because Fox News et.al. got caught flat footed. They did not have time to define him in the minds of their base, and so he was able to set his own narrative. He read the political moment correctly with his message of economic fairness, which he was able to express in simple terms. I wish the party apparatus had seen the opening he created and changed their approach. Having lost then, and continuing to lose now, I hope they can see the need for change not in ideals, but in the faces and ideas they present to the voters. Age has nothing to do with it.