A Democratic strategist key to President Obama’s win over John McCain has declared that Democrats need a complete overhaul if they ever intend to win back the presidency.
Steve Schale issued the dire warning in an op-ed penned last week for The Bulwark, a conservative news and opinion website highly critical of Donald Trump.
Schale, a seasoned political operative who served as state director for the Obama campaign in Florida, used the platform to call attention to the state of his party in the wake of Kamala Harris’s still-fresh loss.
Citing a losing streak seen in the Sunshine State going back to 2012, the strategist with nearly 30 years experience suggested things would only worsen in the absence of ‘real structural changes’ to the party.
‘IT IS TIME TO STOP talking about 2024,’ the first line of the rundown read – before providing suggestions to secure future elections like spending more money on ads addressing the state of crime and the economy and more voter research.
He went on to question how a party that once boasted the ‘broadest’ following and the biggest Senate majority just a generation ago has become ‘a shell of itself’ – or, in his words, ‘a political organization that can hardly be classified as a national entity anymore.’
Framing other losing metrics from once-blue states like Iowa and Ohio as worse than ‘a canary in a coal mine,’ the ex-Obama aide went on to air a more crushing metaphor to illustrate the current lack of awareness from his contemporaries as to the greater problem.
‘It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home,’ the man credited with getting Floridians to vote blue for the first time since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976 said. ‘Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is.’
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Ex-Barack Obama aide Steve Schale issued the dire warning in an op-ed penned last week for The Bulwark , a conservative news website critical of Donald Trump. The Flordia -based political operative got Floridians to vote for Obama in 2008, the fist time the state went blue since 1976
He used the platform to call attention to the state of his party in the wake of Kamala Harris’s still-fresh loss, which saw her cede ground in states like Florida, Iowa, and Ohio, all of which have not gone blue since Obama in 2012
‘We can no longer do that or we will find ourselves in an even worse situation than we do following the 2024 election,’ he continued. ‘Now is not the time for quick fixes. We must make real structural changes.’
The rest of the rant spanned more than 2,000 words with several subsections, one of which was titled Florida Was a Warning.
In it, Schale pointed out how Democrats had been ceding ground in states bearing large amounts blue-collar voters for multiple election cycles now – and that Hispanics who showed up for Trump this time around had been turned off by the party’s ‘socialism talk’.
‘Polling in both Illinois and Florida showed Democratic Hispanic primary voters starting to react negatively to the socialism talk that came out of our 2020 presidential primaries,’ Schale wrote.
‘[S]o much so that we did pro-[Joe] Biden mail calling out the “revolution” posture coming from some of the presidential candidates in both states to make it clear he was focused on bread-and-butter issues.’
Calling Trump’s gains among Hispanics in Florida ‘significant’ – up 27 percent from Hillary Clinton and 7 percent from Biden just four years before – Schale said Biden’s administration ‘largely ignored the growing problems associated with the rhetoric of the extreme left.
‘In doing so, it let the narrative settle in,’ he wrote, referring to the progressive economic agendas seen during the presidencies of Obama and Biden, and more progressive stances toward cultural and social issues that came with it.
Both are now commonplace within the party – and Schale said some reassessment is in order.
Schale, seen here providing expertise during the 2019 inauguration of Ron DeSantis, has been high-profile political figure in the Sunshine State for nearly three decades. He wrote of his own party Wednesday: ‘Now is not the time for quick fixes. We must make real structural changes’
The experienced political operative appeared to suggest that Democrats have become out of touch over the years, after once being the party championed by the working class
He sought to explain how Trump found himself backed by 46 percent of all Latino voters in the country -including many in the Sunshine State
Framing prominent Democrats’ current state of mind as a sort of willful ignorance, Schale used the results seen in the state where he has worked for the past 26 years – or more specifically their reaction to the loss – as an example.
‘Democrats largely wrote it off as an outlier – Florida being Florida, and all,’ he wrote. ‘But eventually, we saw that Florida hadn’t been an outlier at all.’
He then set out explaining major significant that occurred up and down the ballot that allowed Trump to gain a second foothold in the White House.
Schale also sought to explain the GOP’s successful flip of the US Senate and retention of the House – phenomenon he chalked up to, at least in part, the party’s failure to identify the problems facing certain sections voters.
For example, social issues like transgender rights are likely not on the forefront of the minds of a working class Latino family in states such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania, both of which voted Trump after voting Biden four years before.
‘Moves like this,’ Schale wrote, ‘[lead] to the shifts we saw with African American and Hispanic voters.’
Referencing ‘long-term’ changes to progressive infrastructure previously touted by his old boss meant to keep the party in power for years to come, Schale suggested this ‘long-term winning coalition is pretty much gone.’
‘Not only has this experiment failed at the core organizing level in states like Florida, but it has encouraged the idea that Democrats are beholden to progressive groups and values,’ he added.
Florida was one of several states that went red for the third time straight, as factors like the border, economy, and premiums put on things like social justice are believed to be the blame for Trump gaining ground
‘It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home,’ the man credited with getting Floridians to vote blue for the first time since Jimmy Carter won the state in 1976 said. ‘Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is’
Schale, who today runs his own consulting company, went on to declare that Democrats will need to reach out to middle of the road voters if they want to win any future elections, instead of staying rooted in partisanship.
He also aired a need to address what he framed as the conservative right’s ‘advantage’ in the podcast and social media sphere, while finding new avenues to reach certain voters.
In conclusion, the party needs to return to investing in all 50 states, he insisted – something that may require a shift in thinking from doubling down on current strategies that he compared to shouting in an echo-chamber.
‘Increasingly, our side believes we should only communicate on issues where voters give us an edge.
‘But when the median voter isn’t there, or is worried about other issues, our communication echoes in a void,’ he wrote. ‘It is no wonder so many voters wonder what the hell we are all about.
‘Going forward, the map is going to change,’ he went on to insist. ‘To build any kind of sustainable majority to elect a president, our coalition must evolve.
‘We must win states we traditionally lose, meaning we must do a better job of listening to, and eventually persuading voters whose world views are different than the coastal leaders of our party.
‘Get this right, and we set ourselves up nicely for the next decade,’ he concluded, pointing to other recent losses in the House and US Senate (pictured). ‘Get this wrong, and we could be in the wilderness for a very long time’
‘And in my home state of Florida, we’ve seen what happens when we stop listening,’ he continued.
‘Without course corrections, more and more states are going to live through what I have lived through for the last eight years.
‘Get this right, and we set ourselves up nicely for the next decade,’ he concluded. ‘Get this wrong, and we could be in the wilderness for a very long time.’
