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'No One is Looking Forward to 2024.' WRONG [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-20
“Welcome to the election of dread.” So begins the Wall Street Journal article, No One Is Looking Forward to the 2024 Presidential Election:
If there’s one thing that voters of both parties—and independents—agree on, it’s that few are looking forward to the run-up to November 2024. The two leading candidates, Trump and President Biden, look to be heading for a repeat of 2020, and few see much to relish in that. The two men are universally known, robbing the electorate of the potential to fall in love with someone new. “We know based on past performance what you’re going to bring to the table. There is nothing more to learn,” said Patrick Gray, a Democrat in Bay City, Mich. “I’m tired of it already.” Within their own parties, Biden and Trump stoke plenty of anxiety to match whatever enthusiasm they can generate from the faithful. Polling suggests a substantial majority of Democrats don’t want Biden to run for office again. Trump remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, but many say they are open to someone new who doesn’t bring the former president’s combative divisiveness—or the distraction of a grueling court battle. And no one can claim with a straight face that Biden, at 80 years old—or Trump, 77—represents the youthful vigor or embodiment of America’s bright future that many have found appealing in past presidential candidates. Neither Biden nor Trump can even claim that a majority of Americans approve of his job performance in office, and so the potential rematch is shaping up to be a battle of who is less unpopular. If 2020 is any guide, and if the two ultimately top their tickets come Election Day, it will be a razor-thin contest: Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 in the states that decided the election was less than 77,000 votes across four states, although he won the popular vote by seven million.
If you read through all that and didn’t get a sense of foreboding and depression, WSJ didn’t succeed. For the Journal, it seems, only the Florida dictator can save us. Yep, that’s as ridiculous as it sounds. But this diary isn’t about Ron DeSantis. It’s about Democrats and why we can, and should, be looking forward to the 2024 campaign.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been canvassing in Central Florida since 2021 with an Issues Survey and Observation Forms where volunteers who are knocking on doors fill out with data designed to help Democrats win. It is not the only place; Hope Springs volunteers have knocked on doors in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico (special), North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and Virginia using the same conversational Deep Organizing approach. But i grew up in Central Florida, and lived there and Northern Virginia on and off for decades until i hooked up with the Obama Senate campaign. I watched Florida turn Red as a result of the Reagan Southern Strategy. Even so, i was struck by the deep resentment that the Disney area — a key swing area that is said to determine who wins in Florida — is now voicing against DeSantis. But, again, this diary isn’t about Ron DeSantis.
This diary is a reaction to reading the WSJ article, No One Is Looking Forward to the 2024 Presidential Election. As someone who has worked on campaigns and elections over a number of decades, i consume raw data about the topic from virtually any source i can. I won’t watch FoxNews or read the New York Sun or Post, or the Washington Times, just because there is too much propaganda to sift through a few points of data — that’s a waste of my time. But i do read WSJ articles online, even when their attempts to tilt the scales are transparent.
The WSJ concludes:
The danger for the ultimate nominees is that the sense of malaise that voters feel now could translate into a lack of enthusiasm at the polls in November 2024, when turnout could be a major factor in deciding the winner.
And it is this wishful thinking conclusion is what made my bullshit detector go off.
I absolutely agree that nominating Trump will leave that “sense of malaise” among Independents and even Lean GOP voters. I don’t question that one bit. And the WSJ is just one part of the DeSantis campaign’s attempt to peal away Trump voters and never-Trump voters into a competitive core in the Republican primaries. It may even be the key element, given that his contributors appear to be the WSJ set. In recognition that DeSantis needs to expand his base beyond the WSJ donor set, his campaign entities are determined to appeal to the GOP primary voter along the Obama 2008 primary campaign lines. “DeSantis group plans field program” according to the Washinton Post:
Activists at 27 universities will soon begin meeting twice a month to organize their peers under the banner of Students for DeSantis. Office space supporting the Florida governor’s presidential ambitions will open in each of the early-voting states. And names have already been gathered by clipboard in Iowa to launch a door-knocking army.
Sound familiar? Or this: “DeSantis allies set up a school to train a $100 million door-knocking army?” Instead of Camp Obama, they call it “Fort Benning,” where “every [paid] canvasser has to first go through this eight-day class at the office park.” Even the “battle plan” sounds familiar:
Ron DeSantis’s presidential run is preparing a $100 million voter-outreach push so big it plans to knock on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — and five times in the kickoff Iowa caucuses.
Let’s call it the “Plagiarist Campaign.” But where the WSJ is way off is its assessment of Democrats and the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.
As i noted above, Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors in Swing States collecting data, registering voters and correcting addresses in VAN since 2020. Over that time, we have knocked on 4,411,655 doors and had in depth conversations with 208,628 voters. We have had a few voters say they thought Biden was too old, usually in the vein of “I wish he was younger” or “I wish the Democratic nominee was younger,” but no one — NOT A SINGLE VOTER — we have talked to said they weren’t voting for Biden because of his age. We have heard more than one voter tell us at their door that they wished neither Biden nor Trump were running.
18,451 voters have told us that they would never vote for Trump or a candidate he endorsed under any conditions. 39,668 voters have told us they would never vote for a candidate, any candidate, who supported restrictions on their Reproductive Rights — all of them since word started to spread about the Casey ruling overturning Roe v Wade. And many of them told us they couldn’t wait to vote in 2024. You might think the WSJ article missed these very determined Democratic voters, but it wasn’t an oversight. They didn’t ask the right question, so they got the wrong answer. Funny how that works.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since March in a grassroots effort to prepare the 2024 Electoral Battleground in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are canvassing Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. Knocking on doors has repeatedly been found to be the most successful tactic to get voters to cast a ballot and that is the goal of what we do.
But there’s more to it than just the data. Donald Trump used the Obama campaign blueprint as well so the WSJ’s attempt to depress the Democratic vote is almost silly. Biden already beat a plagiarist. But it is critical for us to remember that Democrats, led by Biden, choose not to engage in direct volunteer to voter contact in 2020 because of Covid. It was the responsible thing to do, but we lost a year’s worth of critical data collection and interpersonal voter contact that year. Sure, we engaged in GOTV, to varying degrees in varied states. But we lot a key voter registration season. We lost a season of cleaning up VAN and our voter lists. We spent money we didn’t have to because of this just from our Direct Mail expenses.
And we won’t repeat 2020 this cycle. So Republicans lost to Biden with one hand tied behind his back. Imagine the results when Biden is unleashed! Not exactly what the WSJ and DeSantis donor imagine. Or hope for.
But Democrats already have key experience in winning behind an “uncharismatic” candidate. I’m not saying that Biden is especially uncharismatic, but no one would argue that Gov. Ralph Northam was a charismatic candidate when he ran the table for Democrats in Virginia in 2017. Northam was a unifier for Democrats in Virginia, an able negotiator, someone able to push through legislation. Sound familiar? There seems to be a theme in this diary. No Democrats didn’t fall in line with a charismatic candidate in Virginia in 2017, they fell in line hoping for legislative success, mobilized 19 different groups of voters to support the Democratic ticket — each for their own reasons. Northam was pretty much the middle-of-road candidate that all Democrats, and more than enough Independents, could support. Democratic activists didn’t unite behind a candidate so much as a bet on their own agendas which they wanted to enact through Democratic governance.
And it worked. Let’s call it grassroots enthusiasm. Not for a charismatic candidate but behind a policy agenda they believed in. Yes, We Did!
What Democrats did in 2017 was similar to what we did in 2020 — with one hand tied behind our backs! — and what we will do in 2024. What we found above, what is driving the voters we have talked to, in 2024 centers around two issues. From our own data collection, we have found Reproductive Rights and Donald Trump as the single most important drivers of how voters tell us they will vote in 2024. We talk to Democrats and Independents of Unaffiliated Voters, for the most part, although since our experience in the second Georgia Runoff we have begun including Republicans in “Mixed Households” where there is a Democratic Voter (generally women) in the house as well. Prior to the Runoff last year, we would signal for volunteers to speak only to the person on our Walk Lists where there was a Republican in the household. But among the 25,443 voters we have talked to this year, 481 have told us they were Republicans (or once were) when we asked them how they identified themselves politically.
We found a lot of Never Trumpers, especially among those who did not identify as Democrats. I can’t even remember seeing a voter who self-identified as a Democrat (Q13) use the term. “Never Trumper” seems to be the purview of Republicans or Republican-leaners. A few voters used the term who identified as “Independent,” which is a popular self-definition in these 12 Swing States. A definite majority of the voter who talk to Hope Springs from Field volunteers use this term to self-identify themselves politically.
I am going to conclude, because apparently i can talk about this all day (and you can see for yourself, if you are going to Netroots Nation next month), but i want to conclude with a very important point. There are lots of imitators of Barack Obama and his presidential campaigns. But it’s really hard to duplicate, and imitators rarely do. Ron DeSantis may devote more financial resources to knocking on doors than Obama and his staff could ever dream of, but what Barack did for us was enthuse his volunteers in a way i have never seen from paid canvassers. I wrote about this last week.
For a number of reasons, starting with the way that Donald Trump is about to cannibalize Ron DeSantis, i firmly believe that Joe Biden will beat whoever comes out of the Republican primaries because voters, volunteers, donors and Democratic activists believe in the possibility of this moment, this time, this political opportunity to right many wrongs. We can see it at the doors. We can feel it, hear it — we know it. The WSJ won’t admit it, but they are wrong. Democrats believe in possibility and Joe Biden is just the pathway to reaching these goals we share.
If you are able to support our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Thank you for your support. This work depends upon you!
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