McKEESPORT, Pennsylvania — The Democrats‘ new national party chairman, Ken Martin, came to western Pennsylvania on Tuesday as part of a multistate tour in the Great Lakes Midwest in an effort to send a message to working-class voters that Democrats have lost in recent elections.
Martin chose McKeesport, the once-thriving working-class manufacturing city located in the heart of Mon Valley, to draw attention to a looming special election for a state House seat that was vacated by the sudden death of Democratic state Rep. Matt Gergely in January.
His message was that the path to a majority in the state House, as well as in Congress and possibly the White House, begins in places like McKeesport.
The March 25 race for the state House seat will be between Dan Goughnour, a local school board member and police officer, and Republican Charles Davis, a White Oak borough councilor.
In theory, the appearance had the potential to show that Democrats would put up a tough fight to win back the state House majority and potentially the White House. But the truth is Pennsylvania’s 35th House District is overwhelmingly filled with registered Democrats — 61.3% of them to be exact.
In November, Gergely won with 99% of the vote, and then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris won the district with 54% of the vote. The district has been dominated by Democrats since the late 1960s.
In short, coming here was a safe way to say “Hey we are fighting” in a place they will surely win.
Also, what stood out in McKeesport were the remnants of this working-class city, situated at the confluence of the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers, that attracted middle-class families in days past.
In 1940, the population was 55,000, in 1970 it was 37,000, and today it is 17,000. The mills are gone — so are the department stores and hotels. Many of those middle-class families left to find work elsewhere. Almost all were Democrats when the exodus started. But they began to leave their party not just because of the bad trade deals, automation, and regulations that took their jobs away but because Democrats failed to find a way to bring back jobs and hope here.
The Democrats who left McKeesport became part of the Republican coalition elsewhere as Republicans moved further and further left on social justice issues, regulations, climate change, and abortion. Those voters went from moving tentatively to the Republican Party to being all in by 2024.
Martin’s visit here came at the same time he released his memo titled “Democrats Will Fight Against Trump’s War on Working People” in which he detailed how the Democratic Party was going to win back the working class. The memo mentions Trump 47 times, Elon Musk 18 times, and Project 2025 15 times.
It was heavy on “bad Trump, bad Musk, and bad Project 2025” and less on any kind of message that tells working-class voters, “I see your pain, and here is how I am going to make your lives better.”
Twenty years ago, the Democrats were in much the same spot after a bruising collective loss of the presidency, the House, and the Senate. They seemed to be on the brink of implosion on messaging and cohesiveness.
Their first order of business was to place aggressive leaders at the top of their party infrastructure: Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee and Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Dean’s job was to rebuild the party and to make it competitive and he began with something many elites in their party criticized at that time: “values messaging” in the reddest of red states to go after the hearts and minds of rural Christian voters through farm radio — and it worked.
I wrote at the time, “There was no screaming, no partisan attacks; the tone was neither shrill nor harsh. Rather than use traditional political advertising, there were short radio ads, read by a local voice that people hear every day that were embedded into a radio station’s weather, sports, news and farm reports.”
That ploy worked because Emanuel had recruited center-right Democrats to run in center-right districts. Think Jason Altmire in Beaver County Pennsylvania and Patrick Murphy on the other end of the state in Bucks county.
As of yet, there seems to be no recognition that there needs to be a better plan other than a message of “Trump bad, Elon Musk bad.”
As one Democrat strategist told me “We are frozen. Just frozen.”
Add the visions of protesters doing a performative dance outside of the Kennedy Center against new leadership, senators singing bizarre protest songs, and large cities flooded with organized activists, and the Democrats do actually seem frozen in time, unable to move past Trump.
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The latest Quinnipiac Poll out Wednesday showed that Democrats themselves disapprove of congressional Democrats by 9 points — just two years ago Democrats approved of congressional Democrats by over 50 percentage points. This meant, quite clearly, that their own party was telling them they were running with the wrong message.
The disarray 20 years ago moved quickly into possible tangible wins because Emanuel and Dean faced hard truths. They might not personally have liked who they needed to recruit to win, but they knew they needed those kinds of candidates to win a majority.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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