is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ

is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ

The expected 'blue wave' didn't materialize for the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections. Perhaps that's because while the Republicans mostly played successfully to their base, the Democrats ran screaming away from theirs.

Yes, the Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives — a legitimate victory for the party, but they (and the liberal-leaning media) had hoped for, and expected, much more. In the Senate, the party faced serious disappointment, losing three seats and allowing Republicans to expand their control.

When one digs a little deeper and tries to figure out why that huge ‘blue wave’ never broke, it becomes clear that there is a serious strategy problem that the party leadership seems utterly blind to.

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We are constantly reminded by the media that Republicans “play to their base,” telling them exactly what they want to hear. How often do we hear anything similar about Democrats? With the DNC establishment, elections become a kind of competition to see who can act least like a Democrat, often alienating the left-wing base, giving them little to get excited about.

Take Senators Joe Donnelly (Indiana) and Claire McCaskill (Missouri) — both incumbent Democrats who lost to Republican challengers on Tuesday night. If you didn’t know Donnelly was a Democrat, you would assume he was a Republican from the campaign ad in which he scaremongers about “socialists” and the “radical left,” professes support for ICE and Trump’s border wall, and quotes Ronald Reagan.

In other words, it’s a standard Republican campaign ad. Donnelly lost because progressive Democrats — and there are a lot of them (remember the Bernie Sanders juggernaut?) — don’t feel energized by wishy-washy Democrats-in- name-only (DINO).

Corporate Democrat strategy of running conservative candidates in Senate races turned out to be a disaster - again! They got routed by insulting their own base & depressing voter turnout. Donnelly lost by 15 more than polling indicated because he told his voters he hated them. — Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) November 7, 2018

SHOCKING-- Corporate Democrat, incumbent Sen. Joe Donnelly, loses in Indiana after turning his back on his base. Republicans play to their base, Democrats run from theirs. Fantastic strategy. #ElectionNight — Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) November 7, 2018

Pro-ICE, pro-Wall, and w a big ole Reagan name-check at end. The Resistance, Hoosier style https://t.co/u7QuPpiCpb — Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) October 16, 2018

Joe Donnelly runs like a Republican, gets destroyed. Sherrod Brown runs as a proud progressive in the state next door, and wins. Maybe there’s a lesson here. — David Sirota (@davidsirota) November 7, 2018

McCaskill also cast herself as a kind of ‘Republican-lite’ candidate, believing it would allow her to scrounge up moderate support. She promised voters she wasn't just one of those "crazy" left-wing Democrats and stood “100 percent” behind Trump on the issue of the migrant caravan. An undercover reporter for Project Veritas recorded one of her staffers admitting that she was indeed “distancing herself from the party” to win more votes but “people just can’t know” that. It didn’t work — and in fairness to McCaskill, who ran in a state Trump won by a significant margin, maybe nothing would have.

This phenomenon of Democrats trying to act as much like Republicans as possible in the mistaken belief that the ‘middle’ is where all the votes are is a huge part of the reason why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, and the party leadership doesn’t seem to have figured out yet that it is a bad strategy. If people want to vote for someone who sounds like a Republican, they’ll just vote for the Republican.

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Speaking of Clinton, she also potentially managed to do some damage in the midterms, despite not even being a candidate. In Florida, Democrat Andrew Gillum ran a fairly progressive campaign for governor and then decided to do himself absolutely no favors by campaigning with Clinton, despite the fact that her popularity is below the floor in Florida and at a record low across the country in general. It was an inexplicably stupid move for Gillum and did not go unnoticed. Then there’s Obama. He didn’t help either. In fact, most of the candidates he campaigned for lost, too.

READ MORE: Midterm madness shows US media more divisive than the American people

To be fair, Gillum ended up losing by only one percentage point. There are two ways to look at that. Republicans, the media and establishment Democrats are probably thinking that he should have toned down his already-mild progressivism. Another way to look at it, however, is that if a mildly progressive Democrat came within one point of beating an opponent with bigger name recognition in an increasingly red state, could a genuinely progressive candidate have won?

I have yet to meet a person who thought him campaigning with Hillary & DWS was a good idea https://t.co/Gl7H0NTm21 — Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) November 7, 2018

I just can't understand why Andrew Gillum chose to campaign with Hillary Clinton, whose popularity is in the 30s in Florida, especially when he ran such a populist primary campaign. #Election2018 — Emma Vigeland (@EmmaVigeland) November 7, 2018

Gillum should be a blue print for what NOT to do. Our revolution and Justice Democrats did great tonight. Trying to play to the center didn’t — GabeLightAnthem (@GabeLight) November 7, 2018

Lessons for 2020



Two Democratic newcomers to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, shocked the establishment by beating 10-term Democrat incumbents in their district primaries. The legions of activists that Bernie Sanders inspired across the country in 2016 would suggest that Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez’s victories are not simply some glitch in the system.

Pundits and party operatives will already be analyzing these election results with an eye on the 2020 presidential election campaign. But will they learn any lessons? Trump led a Republican revolt in 2016. If Democrats want to have any chance of doing the same and winning in 2020, they had better realize they won’t do it by offering a limp and cowardly candidate who runs a Clinton-style campaign.

READ MORE: No end to US warmongering & regime change foreign policy expected after midterms – Rick Sterling

If recent history is any indicator, however, the Democratic establishment will do its best to steamroll progressives and run as far to the right as possible without having to actually change the letter beside their names. Instead of opting for candidates who energize people on a human level, they keep throwing their weight behind the ones who are best at raising money from corporate donors, not exactly inspiring confidence in progressives. They would also do well to remember that a strategy of calling Trump a racist and misogynist while bleating non-stop about Russia doesn’t win elections; ideas and policies do.

Think about it: in the first midterm against the worst US president in history, @TheDemocrats lost 3 senate seats and only managed to take the House with the help of progressives they spent the last year shitting on. This is a failed party. They need to change quickly or die. — John "Sally's Secret Crush" Graziano (@jvgraz) November 7, 2018

The media, for its part, does a great job of helping corporate-funded Democrats with this by indulging them with disproportionate coverage of various Russia-related conspiracy theories, while constantly framing progressive newcomers as illegitimate and chastising them for ‘dividing’ the party or pushing policies that are too ‘radical’ for voters.

Big voices in the progressive movement, such as Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have already pushed some potential 2020 candidates to the left on various issues. The pressure is starting to work because the policies —like Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free college and criminal justice reform — are actually popular among Americans.

This cartoon of @Ocasio2018's first meeting with Schumer and Pelosi by Showtime is hilarious. pic.twitter.com/8utcVOQCT0 — Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) November 7, 2018

Progressives may not have won across the board on Tuesday, but momentum is building and these things don’t always happen overnight. Democrats managed to take back the House last night, but they might have done so despite the party strategy, not because of it.

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