Howard Dean: Dems' Mumbled Message Didn't Inspire
The former DNC chair says the Democrats' lack of a unified, inspiring message doomed the party Tuesday.
Former DNC head Howard Dean says the lack of a coherent message did the Democratic Party in Tuesday night.
As chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2006, Howard Dean put together an impressive record: The Democrats retook power in both the Senate and the House, and set the stage for President Barack Obama’s historic 2008 run for the White House.
Yet the former Vermont governor and one-time presidential front-runner says he consistently fell short on a crucial party goal, and that problem helped Republicans trample his party in Tuesday’s midterm elections, in which the GOP seized control of the Senate and solidified its House majority.
“The one thing I could never do is get Democrats to have a coherent message,” Dean says, noting that problem was on full display Tuesday as the returns came in. “It was a classic episode of what happens when everyone is going in different directions. We had to be unified. We had to move together. But it didn’t happen.”
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National exit polls show the overall 2014 midterm turnout barely broke 30 percent, and the electorate skewed older, white and male – voters more likely to turn to the GOP. By contrast, young people and people of color – the new Democratic base that swept Obama into office twice – made up the majority of nonvoters this cycle.
As a result, “This was a rout," Dean says. "The Democrats did a really crappy job on their message.”
Though analysts say young and minority voters tend to sit out midterm elections, Dean says discord on a unified 2014 theme – a chronic problem in his party – opened the gates for a GOP election-night stampede. Too many Democratic candidates chose to distance themselves from an unpopular president, play defense against Republican opponents and ignore their own party’s accomplishments, contributing to the low turnout among the so-called Obama coalition, he says.
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Dean points to the campaign of Alison Lundergan Grimes, a promising Democratic newcomer who was poised to knock off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. While Grimes was a good candidate, Dean says, she played into McConnell’s "bash Obama" strategy, even refusing to say if she voted for the president in a nondisclosure that made headlines in the campaign’s final weeks.
“You can’t inspire marginal voters by running away from somebody,” Dean says. “You have to inspire people – stand for something. We didn’t do that.”
By contrast, “The Republicans had a good, coherent message: ‘We’re not Barack Obama,’” Dean says. “It was just classic politics: What the Democrats did was respond to the other person’s message. And they just beat the hell out of us.”
