Brief Comments on Tuesday's Elections

On Tuesday night, the Democratic Party won an unexpectedly complete victory in the slate of state and local elections. The race for Governor of Virginia, expected to be razor-close, was a comfortable ten percent victory for Democrat Ralph Northam, who was generally acknowledged to have been out-campaigned in the closing days.

There were a number of victories that packed an enormous symbolic wallop. A trans woman defeated the state legislator who sponsored the bathroom bill in Virginia, and a civil rights lawyer was elected District Attorney for Philadelphia, the fifth largest city by population in the country. Such results are a clear indication that the upsurge in local activism protesting the Trump Administration has real electoral potency.

The results from Tuesday have shaken Republicans and emboldened Democrats, who are now turning up the heat on the Republicans' tax cut bill which is still pending in the Congress. Both parties look to the 2018 midterm elections and see a potential blowout, unless there are drastic changes in the political environment in the next year.

State and local elections are particularly interesting in gauging the strength of political movements, because they are the races that require the least help from a national party apparatus to contest successfully. In some of the most impressive victories of the night, establishment backing came to the winning Democrat late or not at all. The victory, plainly, was less the victory of the Democratic Party than it was of the left-leaning grassroots.

Establishments by their very nature, even when they are the farther left of two political parties, are fundamentally conservative in outlook - not in the political sense, but in the sense of being set in their ways and resistant to change. Like all bureaucracies, they bring advantages of efficiency and coordination, but they also bring inefficiencies because the uniformity of thinking they encourage prevents them from taking full advantage of local situations as they arise.

If the Democrats would like to replicate Tuesday's success next year, the party establishment will need to enable the kinds of local efforts that provided this week's signature victories. What the Party should not do is think that they can ride the anti-Trump wave and co-opt it for their own purposes. The Republicans made that mistake when presented with a similar situation in 2009-2010. Their repeated refusal to adopt the grassroots instead of patronizing them lead to the utter disgust among their voters that gave us Donald Trump.

The Democrats will have to learn from that example. There is a tremendous amount of local level energy on the Left to be tapped, but in order to draw from it the Party will have to relinquish some control and allow activists to build a genuine grassroots movement. Few activists on the Left trust the Democratic Party right now, and the Democrats have so much to gain from association with them that making some bold first moves to rebuild trust would be a sound investment politically.