Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Democrats, still reeling from last year’s wipeout, have been embroiled in a debate over how to fix what went wrong in 2016. Should they tack left or center? Woo white working-class voters with an ambitious economic agenda or double down on the base by blitzing Donald Trump on bigotry? Prioritize health care? Inequality? Oligarchy? Democracy?

The Doug Jones upset in deep-red Alabama may have just rendered these debates irrelevant.


The Senate’s newest member did not embrace single-payer health care, free college or a $15 minimum wage. He did not swerve right on abortion and guns. In fact, he didn’t have any signature policy proposals at all.

What Jones did was take off the shelf the most pallid Democratic talking points—“quality, affordable health care,” “college must be affordable,” “I believe in science,” “discrimination cannot be tolerated”—and campaigned with a pleasant, inoffensive demeanor.

He was boring. He was safe. He was Mr. Generic Democrat. And it worked.

That should make Democrats think twice about what they should be looking for in a 2020 presidential nominee.

Most of Democrats’ Wednesday-morning quarterbacking after last year’s election presumed that to maximize base turnout and impress swing voters, same-old, same-old wouldn’t do. One way or another, Democrats at least needed to be “bold.” But the downside risk of boldness is polarization; what fires up one group can easily anger another.

The decidedly not-bold Jones campaign pulled off a better trick: firing up the Democratic base while putting the Republican base to sleep. By being a Generic Democrat, Jones didn’t call much attention to himself and instead, let the harsh spotlight remain on Roy Moore’s pile of controversies.

Jones’ career milestone of successfully prosecuting two Ku Klux Klan members for the deadly 1963 Birmingham church bombing may have aided with critical African-American turnout. But his public positions on current civil rights issues were thin and did not go beyond party platform boilerplate. And a Washington Post sampling of black voters in Alabama found many showed up primarily to stop Moore, not reward Jones: “[They] did not feel inspired to show up for a candidate [in Jones] who they felt did not aggressively pursue their vote. They were moved to wait in line — some people for hours — with the goal of keeping Moore from winning.”

If Jones didn’t strain in his outreach to Alabama’s African-Americans, neither did he try to pull a “Sister Souljah,” publicly breaking with the left on an issue like criminal justice reform, to impress Alabama conservatives. If he dared to challenge party orthodoxy, the Democratic base might not have turned out in force. Conversely, if he had campaigned with more left-wing edge, he might have convinced several thousand additional Republicans that they should set aside their misgivings about their own nominee, and get out of the house to stop Jones. Jones stayed within the confines of genericness, and got the turnout mix he needed.

Various progressive groups that have pressed the Democratic Party to shift leftward, such as MoveOn, Indivisible and the Working Families Party, have taken some credit for pouring resources into Alabama and boosting base turnout (just as they did after the gubernatorial victory of Virginia’s low-key Ralph Northam). But that only proves that activists on the left are perfectly willing and able to get behind a Generic Democrat, and tacitly ally with moderates, to defeat a distasteful Republican. No boldness necessary.

Can the same strategy work in 2020? Polls already show that a Generic Democrat would beat Trump handily. Might as well give the people what they want.

Like Moore, Trump has a rabid base but not much else. He won last year without a popular-vote majority and his support has eroded ever since, with a national job approval rating mired in the 30s for most of 2017. This month’s Des Moines Register poll shows only 35 percent of Iowans remain on board the Trump train, an ominous sign for a president who squeaked into office by a mere 70,000 votes in certain key Electoral College states. To beat an incumbent that unpopular, most likely all you need is a candidate who can stay out of the way and out of the fray.

If Democratic primary voters become convinced that they should be looking for the next Jones, then the early front-runners—the pugnacious populist Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the garrulous and gaffe-prone former Vice President Joe Biden—could suffer a downgrade. Strong personalities like Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Terry McAuliffe of Virginia also may be deemed too risky, along with those who tend to provoke on social media, such as Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Ideological mavericks such as Governors Steve Bullock of Montana and John Hickenlooper of Colorado may not be worth the agita they would induce among the progressive base.

Whereas other possibilities, who have not yet received much buzz, might warrant fresh looks. Virginia senator and former vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, 2016’s “dad joke come to life,” would rocket to the top of the list. Or, if you want a Generic Dem with swing-state bona fides, check out Michigan Senator Gary Peters. He’s made no waves since coming to the Senate three years ago. Many in Washington probably couldn’t even pick him out of a lineup. But his own dork-dad demeanor (Peters’ signature ad featured his family mocking his frugality) was the secret to becoming the only non-incumbent Democrat to overcome an onslaught of Koch brothers money and win a Senate race in 2014.

While we’re at it, we might as well add our newest Generic Dem Doug Jones to the mix, as Slate’s Isaac Chotiner already has. Jones may have a better chance becoming president in 2020 than getting reelected in Alabama in 2020.

Those wanting a female nominee might skip past coastal Senators Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and consider unassuming swing-staters like Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. Hard-core economic populists don’t have to feel left out of the Generic Dem sweepstakes; Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley backed Sanders in 2016, but he could wrap much of Sanders’ agenda in a less revolutionary, and more vanilla package.

Want to get out of the Beltway and tap a governor? Consider Washington state’s Jay Inslee; he already seems to be adopting the Generic Dem strategy in his role as incoming chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Inslee tipped his strategy for the 2018 gubernatorial elections: “No Democrat running for governor anywhere has to say, ‘Did you notice that Donald Trump has caused nothing but division, hatred and chaos?’ You don't have to say that because he’s showing it himself … It’s not ideological. It’s just a rejection of chaos.”

Inslee’s “rejection of chaos” harkens back to 1920, when Warren G. Harding won the White House with the largest popular vote margin in history, thanks to the least inspiring campaign theme in history: “Back to Normal.”

At that time, America was in upheaval. Labor unrest. Racial unrest. Domestic terrorism coupled with eroding civil liberties. A foreign policy in disarray after the Senate’s rejection of the President Woodrow Wilson’s highest priority, the League of Nations. All this had decimated the political standing of Wilson and the Democrats.

Yet Republicans turned to Harding, who was summed up by one convention delegate as “the best of the second-raters.” Another party man said Harding represented, “normal things, normal thinking and normal legislation.” (His personal life was anything but normal, but that’s another story.)

Harding embraced his inner normalcy to the fullest, framing the campaign with the historically bland “Back to Normal” address. He calmed a nation’s nerves and set expectations low when he said, “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise … ”

In other words, Harding offered to be the opposite of Wilson—a remedy, not a replica. But he steered clear of policy details and danced around divisive subjects like race relations and the League of Nations. He was Mr. Generic Republican, and it served his campaign well, even if he turned out to be one of America’s worst presidents.

One hundred years after Harding’s landslide, it’s a safe bet that the backdrop of the presidential race will again be unnerving upheaval, and again, a nation will be grasping for normalcy. There’s plenty of time for Democrats to fight among themselves over the ideological direction of the party. But let’s not pretend that debate needs to be resolved in order to beat Trump. A Generic Democrat will do just fine.

