Abstract

Deciding What's Next

The article focuses on the outlook for the Democratic Party, in light of a Republican victory in the presidential election. After many years of watching the Democratic Party and its national candidates lose, organized labor, activist groups and wealthy progressives intervened in the 2004 campaign. Their goal was creating a "shadow party" that would be faster, smarter and more flexible than official Democrats could be on a landscape redefined by new campaign finance laws and White House political strategies. Groups such as America Coming Together (ACT), the Media Fund and MoveOnPAC succeeded, provided early advertising in battleground states, engaged in grassroots campaigns where the party was weak and drew millions of new and infrequent voters into the process. There is already a healthy discussion about the need to reach out to rural voters, whose overwhelming support for Bush and the Republicans offset gains in registration and turnout in urban areas of key battleground states. And, of course, there is a deeper discussion about whether 527 groups will remain satellites of the Democratic Party or seek to use their voter lists and other resources to influence the direction of the party in a more progressive direction. Mark Ritchie, national coordinator of the nonpartisan National Voice movement, says progressives must study the success of Florida and Ohio referendums to increase the minimum wage and consider using referendums and initiatives on economic issues to mobilize disenfranchised and disenchanted voters, just as conservatives do on social issues. Ritchie says. "We have to think more about how we say, 'You can make your life better by voting.' If we learn how to do that better, we'll see 2004 not as a year when a particular candidate lost but as a year when we all started a process of renewing and expanding our democracy."