Here's Why the Democrats Are Going to Come Back

If the prospect of the next three years and change of Donald Trump's presidency fills you with dread, consider this: For Trump to lose, the Democrats need to win.

That should make you feel a lot worse.

The idea that Democrats are incompetent has been ingrained in American culture for decades. Partly that's because before Bill Clinton's win in 1992, the party lost five of six presidential elections, even as it held a pretty firm grip on Congress. In 1989, newspaper humor columnist Dave Barry joked that Democrats are "the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire."

Lately, the party has been leaning into its loser stereotype especially hard. After shedding hundreds of elected offices across the country under Barack Obama, the Democrats managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2016 even though the alternative was a sleazy reality TV host who literally bragged about sexually assaulting women.

Now completely out of power, Democrats are helpless to stop Republicans from massively cutting Medicaid, gutting regulations, and investigating the phantom "problem" of voter fraud. They've lost four congressional special elections already this year amid heated intra-party debates on economics and abortion. In California, a Democratic stronghold, protests broke out over the election of a new party leader this spring, and the state legislature's Democrats were recently slammed by Bernie Sanders, among others, for killing a single-payer healthcare bill.

When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) unveiled some potential new stickers this week, they were widely mocked for sporting the kind of milquetoast BS slogans that carried Hillary Clinton to an early retirement. Among the offerings was this gem: "I Mean, Have You Seen The Other Guys?"

There are no shortage of suggestions for how the Democrats can fix themselves. Bernie Sanders, a potential 2020 contender, wants the party to reinvent itself in his image by adopting more socialist (or socialist-ish) policies on issues like healthcare and education. A couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs want to run candidates with platforms made up of ideas determined at least in large part by internet poll results. In a New York Times op-ed, Mark Penn, a Democratic strategist who helped Hillary Clinton lose to Obama in 2008, insisted the party return to the centrism of the 1990s.

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These sorts of paroxysms are common when a party gets embarrassed. In 2013, after the GOP looked back at the thrashing it received the year before, the party released an "autopsy" concluding that Republicans should embrace immigration reform, stop being so closed-minded, and avoid being associated with Wall Street excess.

So what saved the GOP in 2016? Naturally, a race-baiting billionaire who denounced every inconvenient fact as "fake news."

The Democrats obviously have problems. Donald Trump showed that they were vulnerable to being portrayed as the party of elites. There is a real conflict between Democrats happy to take corporate money and those who feel they need to embrace full-throated populism. Gerrymandering in states controlled by Republicans makes it more difficult for Democrats to retake the House. And it's not clear who the next generation of leaders will be after septuagenarians like Sanders recede from the scene.

But the party doesn't need to reinvent itself. Raising the minimum wage and expanding government-run healthcare—policies backed by nearly every Democratic politician—have broad support. Trump is incredibly unpopular. Democratic candidates have done surprisingly well in lower-profile special elections. And, as Clinton stalwarts love to point out, she earned more votes than Trump in 2016.

What 2016 proved more than anything is that policy prescriptions are no match for a powerful message. Obama could weave a story of America that made hearts—even many Republican hearts—swell. Trump, more salesman than poet, persuaded people that they were being screwed over by an establishment that hated them. Sanders painted a similar picture of a nation in decline that only he could save—and very nearly pulled off the impossible by beating Clinton in the primaries.

Political junkies tend to talk about politicians in terms of policies and ideologies, but the cynical truth is that the story politicians tell is often more important than their platform, especially when they're courting low-information voters. A post-election poll of voters who backed Obama and then flipped to Trump found that 42 percent of them thought Democrats' policies would favor the wealthy. Only 21 percent of them thought that about Trump—who, of course, is now presiding over a Republican effort to cut taxes on the rich by taking away health insurance from the poor.

Democrats do not need to go back to the whiteboard to come up with new ideas. Clinton's website was overflowing with policies, including stuff specifically targeted to groups she was accused of ignoring, like manufacturing workers. The problem was she couldn't turn those policies into a story—at least not one those Obama-Trump voters who swung the election were willing to believe.

The good news for Democrats is there is no shortage of stories to tell. Cory Booker righteously condemns the racist prison-industrial complex. Elizabeth Warren can explain how big banks and monopolies cheat ordinary Americans. Sanders has gone after big pharmaceutical companies, a fight that has put him at odds with Booker, among other Democratic senators who apparently don't have beef with the hated industry.

By the time of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, the party's story will probably be a little clearer. Maybe Democrats will begin to actually adopt the kind of anti–Wall Street populism Trump pretended to represent. Or they could inveigh against the broken healthcare system and call for sweeping reform that goes far beyond the Affordable Care Act. Maybe they will do something novel, like endorse a "Worker's Bill of Rights" that raises the minimum wage, pushes back against anti-union laws, and places new penalties on companies that outsource jobs.

But 2020 is a long ways away. In between now and then lies the 2018 midterms, where the story—from Democrats—is likely to be that Trump and his Republican allies are corrupt and incompetent. It's always easier for the opposition party to rail against DC dysfunction, which is one of many reasons some observers are predicting a wave election that puts Democrats back in control of the House. (If that happens, get ready for a new media narrative about how Republicans are the ones on the ropes.)

"To win again, the Democrats don't need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice," Franklin Foer recently wrote in the Atlantic. "But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country's bastions of gloom."

That places the problem in its proper context—to win, the party needs to think about its branding, not changing its core values. Democrats should be thinking about how to persuade voters to join them, not how to change in order to cater to voters' preferences.

For starters: Get some better fucking stickers.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.