Back in April, I wrote that while Hillary Clinton may be the candidate of the present for the Democrats, the future would belong to someone more in the mold of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her erstwhile primary rival, the democratic-socialist she just couldn’t seem to shake until the very end.
Well, the future came a lot sooner than expected.
Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the presidential race and the clean GOP sweep of both houses of Congress means that it’s the Democrats, not the Republicans, who are left leaderless and wondering what on Earth happened to send 2016 so screwy. They’ll presumably be spending a significant amount of time trying to put back together the pieces of a party that was beaten across the country, even as its nominee quite possibly won the popular presidential vote.
But winning the popular vote is no consolation in the face of a united GOP government. And believe this: Come January, the Democrats are going to be run roughshod over for a while thanks to their near wipeout in contested Senate races, and they’ll be suffering without President Barack Obama or a clear figure in the Congressional leadership to guide them. The minority leaders in Congress — Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer — don’t exactly have a national “fire up the loyal opposition” aura about them.
As NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald summed up, “Stunned and horrified by their loss, Democrats will likely waste little time preparing to fight Trump in the 2018 midterm elections and eventually the 2020 presidential election. But first they will have to decide what kind of party they want to be, without a leader to unite behind.”
The choices for who will fill the Dems’ leadership void obviously start with those in the wing that has been ascendant for the last couple of years: Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. There will be all sorts of woulda, coulda, shoulda coming from the left in the coming days — in fact, there’s plenty of it already — but surely some focus is going to be on whether someone more in the Sanders mold, with his anti-corporate populism and focus on trade, could have done better in the Rust Belt than did Clinton.
It was there, after all, where Clinton’s famous blue wall cracked apart, with bricks falling out in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, likely, Michigan. Those latter two provided Sanders with two of his biggest victories during the primaries, in hindsight a harbinger of doom to come.
I’m certainly not sure that a Sanders, Warren or even a Vice President Joe Biden could have run better with the white working class voters in the Midwest who helped put Trump over the top, or if any of them could have done more to inspire the Democrats in that same region who didn’t show up. Given the depth of the polling error before the race, I’m going to grant the exit polls detailing what maybe went wrong some healthy distance. But Clinton’s establishment cred — along with a healthy dose of misogyny and racism, to be sure — likely did her no favors in the region.
In any case, given their media presence and their influence with the kind of young voters Democrats are going to need in coming cycles, the party in 2017 is Sanders and Warren’s to lead until proven otherwise. They’re the most popular actors in it not named Obama, and their message is the one that makes the most sense to amplify in the short term.
But perhaps that’s overthinking it: Maybe Clinton’s loss is a strange blip, the confluence of an unpopular and undeniably establishment candidate in a strange year hitting the perfect Electoral College disaster, aided by the FBI and even a foreign power tilting the scales against her. After all, Obama won twice, handily, and Clinton may very well have received more votes than her opponent, too, once it’s all said and done. Trump may very well win, in fact, with fewer votes than losing candidates Sen. John McCain or Gov. Mitt Romney received. The Obama coalition could just be dormant, not defeated forever.
Could someone, then, such as incoming Sens. Kamala Harris or Tammy Duckworth, or perhaps Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand or Cory Booker, revive the electorate that put Obama over the top? Do the Democrats even need a fight, or can someone just split the difference between the party’s wings? Or maybe they’ll just muddle along for a while, waiting for a GOP overreach to spin sentiments in their favor?
Those are the question Democrats will be looking to answer over the coming months. And they’ll have to search for them in the shadow of an unqualified, unpredictable president all too enamored of authoritarianism and the party that enabled him. The work starts now.
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Without Clinton or Obama, Who Will Lead Democrats in Age of Trump? originally appeared on usnews.com