The Associated Press has an article out on how “N.C. Democrats accentuate the positive” after their disappointing performance at the polls last year. An interesting quote:
Ken Lewis, a 2010 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, said a positive, persuasive message is needed to attract voters beyond the Democratic base.
“Progressives have to do a better job at articulating to the broad public why our policies help the things that they care about, which are creating more jobs, creating more opportunities and creating more security,” Lewis said. “We have grown too accustomed of talking to people who already agree with us.”
Well yes. But whether Democrats choose to follow such a tack is a different matter. There are two related issues:
1. Losing tends to make people angry. The lesson a percentage of Democratic activists will take from their poor performance last year isn’t that the message was somehow imperfect but rather that they simply weren’t expressing it forcefully enough, that somehow the electorate missed the point that “We lefties really hate Pat McCrory and Thom Tillis” because it wasn’t being screamed loudly enough. So, yes, the same thing as before please, but just with even more vitriol.
2. The party is badly divided in the state, and has no real leader. This creates a message vacuum on the left that many liberals, individually and collectively, are seeking to fill. Critically, some progressive groups may be more interested in generating attention for themselves than helping Democrats win statewide. And that begins with the Moral Monday movement.
