Dems seek party salvation in redistricting and loosening voting laws

Dems seek party salvation in redistricting and loosening voting laws

Oh, Democrats. Why can’t you look in the mirror and just admit your problem? The Democrats suffered a massive blow when President Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton in the presidential Electoral College race. But Democrats also suffered in Congress and at the state level.

To fix that, the party wants to fight over the next round of redistricting and loosen the voting laws.

Guess who will guide the push?

Former President Barack Obama and his former Attorney General Eric Holder!

Obama and Holder are in charge of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC). This committee wants “to withdraw the congressional district maps that currently tilt in favor of Republicans.” From Politico:

The NDRC aims to tackle a central problem for Democrats: They complain about the need for redistricting reform all the time and have dozens of aligned interest groups pushing their own efforts, but none has gone far — and that’s left the party on the ropes every cycle. Lower Democratic turnout in midterm years has enabled Republicans to win governors’ races and statehouse races that consolidate power in state capitals and Washington by being the ones to draw the maps that everyone needs to run on.

They argue that Democrats have been losing races in large part because they’ve let Republicans tilt the field. The result: The ranks of up-and-coming Democrats have been thinned, and there are fewer and more difficult races for the ones who are left to run on.

But Holder and Obama are not the only ones. Priorities USA, a super PAC that donated more than $190 million to Clinton, decided to change its outlook and call itself the “nation’s largest funder of voting rights lawsuits.” This group will put lobbyists at the Hill to persuade “lawmakers to vote against certain bills and funding litigation to challenge laws already on the books.”

Priorities USA Chairman Guy Cecil promised his group “will wage as many battles as the resources allow us to wage on this front.”

Cecil thinks that having someone provide identification makes it hard to vote.

Former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander (D) has developed the Let America Vote nonprofit group. Kander barely lost out on a Senate seat in 2016 obviously due to horrible Republican districting. So his group will “‘expose the true motivations’ behind the Republican push for stricter voting laws.” From The Hill:

“When your democracy is being undermined by the president of the United States, we have to fight that on all fronts,” Kander told The Hill. “It’s all part of a larger discussion that exposes the fact that the Republican strategy here is not trying to persuade people their ideas are best; it’s about picking and choosing who actually gets to vote.”

Kander and Cecil will work together since each one also works with the other group. Kander remains on the Priorities USA board and Cecil works “on the advisory board” of Let America Vote.

The Democrats do have a few smart people within the party who understand why their candidates lost. New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Raymond Buckley, a candidate for the DNC chair, told his party to “grow up” last weekend at a forum in Baltimore. He reminded them that the Democrats did not concentrate on the issues that actually concern regular Americans:

Buckley said the Democrats ‘did not offer a positive message to anyone I … am related to.’

‘We did not offer a message to my neighbors, we did not offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky,’ he added, pointing to the states nominee Hillary Clinton lost throughout the Rust Belt.

What the Democrats did do, Buckley stated, is say ‘how offensive.’

‘Grow up,’ he shouted.

‘That is not reality for most of America,’ he said.

Fact is, the majority of Americans care about the economy and jobs. Gay marriage, abortion, letting a transgender person use another bathroom just do not register on most American’s lists of concerns.

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) said on Meet The Press that the party has lost a “key part of their base” because the leaders insist on focusing on “identity politics.” Trump won because he spoke to those ignored. Even Obama made remarks about Clinton ignoring key demographics in states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Webb continued:

“You’ve lost white working people. You’ve lost flyover land, and you saw in this election what happens when people get frustrated enough that they say, ‘I’m not going to take this,’” he said.

“There is an aristocracy now that pervades American politics. It’s got to be broken somehow in both parties, and I think that’s what the Trump message was that echoed so strongly in these flyover communities.”

Someone needs to tell the Democrats that no amount of redistricting will work if they keep playing the identity politics game.

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