BESURETODRINK YOUROVALTINE
The rebirth of the Democratic Party depends on reversing its current flows of money and messaging.
Thanksgiving may be more than a week away, but the holiday season is upon us, whether we like it or not. Walmart Black Friday deals are already live online. The trees and tinsel are already set up in Target and you will be lucky to escape the store without hearing George Michael condemn you for regifting his heart last Christmas. I’ve also seen multiple Christmas Movie Streaming Guides floating around social media, providing a dizzying roadmap to navigating all the fragmented media services you’d have to subscribe to if you want to watch all the holiday favorites we used to enjoy by just turning on the TV when we were kids. Thankfully I saw that A Christmas Story was not confined behind one of the tech industry’s revenue-generating paywalls, and will be playing on TNT Christmas Day.
Most of us have watched A Christmas Story so many times we can quote chapter and verse this classic tale of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker’s quest to have a Red Rider BB gun waiting for him under the Christmas tree. Over the years, one particular scene from A Christmas Story has felt more and more relevant to my experiences working in electoral politics for the Democratic Party. After drinking “gallons of Ovaltine” to get enough labels to qualify for an exclusive promotion, Ralphie eagerly awaits the arrival of a “Little Orphan Annie” secret decoder ring in the mail, a device enabling him to receive urgent messages from the heroes of his favorite radio show. Finally, one snowy afternoon, the ring arrives with a letter signed by Little Orphan Annie herself, declaring Ralph a “secret circle” member capable of deciphering the coded message that will be delivered at the end of the next radio show. With pencil in hand, Ralph takes down the encrypted message, his jittery fingers working the metallic wheels of the decoder until the top secret instructions reveal themselves: BESURETODRINK YOUROVALTINE. In bitter disappointment, Ralphie grumbles, “Be…sure…to…drink…your…Ovaltine. Ovaltine? A crummy commercial. Son of a bitch...”
With Ralphiesque idealism and enthusiasm, I returned to Western Pennsylvania in 2018 after sixteen years in the San Francisco Bay Area, excited to get involved in the local politics of a purple fault line between red and blue America. Unlike in the Bay Area where political activism rarely extended beyond monthly donations to Act Blue and sharing self-righteously liberal memes on social media, in Pennsylvania there was real work to do on the ground, there were hearts and minds to win. I naively believed I could help Democrats mobilize and strategize to gain ground, to push the purple boundary lines further away from the city centers and deeper into rural areas. I knocked on doors and attended fundraising events for Democratic candidates. I joined an effort to breathe life into our Township’s defunct Democratic Committee. I even ran for local office as a Democrat and won. This experience has reaffirmed my faith in the power of local democracy and the goodness of my neighbors. But zooming out beyond my Township’s borders, this experience has also shown me the perverse ways money and information flow within the Democratic Party.
In all my time serving on the local Democratic Committee, I have never seen the County, State or National Democratic Party send a penny down to support our organization or ask us to send information upward so those higher on the party food chain could better understand the concerns of our residents. No one in the Democratic Party wanted anything more than our money and our help knocking on doors while sticking to stiffly worded scripts crafted by someone in Philadelphia, DC, or Seattle. More time was spent drilling volunteers about how not to offend the liberal sensitivities of fellow volunteers than on how to connect to voters in struggling post-industrial communities. In the age of Trump, there was no time or tolerance for dissent, disagreement, or even discussion about which policies would give Democrats the greatest chance to win back working-class voters in Western Pennsylvania. Any critique of the Democratic National Committee or suggestion that the 81-year-old president might be doomed in the upcoming election would be met with side-eyed-glances and suspicions of potential MAGA sympathies. To be a good Democrat was to send money and stick to the script. Receiving funds to build your local party and having a say in messaging tailored to your neighbors’ concerns was not how the DNC machine operated. Like the secret message Ralphie received as a reward for drinking gallons of Ovaltine, the secret message I received after knocking on doors and donating to the Democratic Party was to knock on more doors and donate more money.
Admittedly, I have no direct knowledge of whether the Republican Party has a similar structure to the Democrats’ system of having messaging flow from the top down and money flow from the bottom up. Despite my frustrations with the Democratic Party, I am no swing voter. The only time I voted for a Republican was in 2003 when I thought it would be funny to have Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature on my University of California law school diploma. But there is enough anecdotal evidence to make me suspect that the Republicans’ electoral success over the past decade may be due to a different system from the Democrats’ money-flows-up, messaging-flows-down model. After Obama’s victory in 2008, conservatives flooded money down from the national to the state and municipal levels to mobilize local Tea Party cells and advance the REDMAP operation, a strategy to seize state legislatures with the explicit purpose of gerrymandering new district maps to be drawn after the 2010 census.
The Republican’s downward flow of resources built robust local networks more capable of sending information up to the national level. I’ve seen the Republican bottom-up messaging approach in the campaign staffing differences between Republicans and Democrats in state and national races. While Democratic campaigns are run by out-of-state twenty-somethings with poli-sci degrees from universities like Oberlin or Brown, Republicans are much more likely to have campaigns run by directors who grew up in the district yet may not have the high caliber academic credentials of their Democratic counterparts. The Democratic staffers are often installed by slick professional outfits like the Blue Leadership Collaborative and their fundraising efforts run by national consultancy groups like Blue Wave, organizations that bring top-down national messaging to local races along with all the out-of-touch social and cultural sentiments popular on elite college campuses. Meanwhile, the Republican staffers might be graduates of a local Christian Academy who barely left the area for college, local kids able to walk into a Lenten Fish Fry or Volunteer Fire Department Touch-a-Truck event and recognize their Little League Coach or their retired mailman. Having a finger on the pulse of the local community, the Republican staffers can gain valuable intel from their neighbors, pushing information up the chain to the national level.
Considering the greater cost-effectiveness of Trump’s presidential campaign compared to Kamala’s flush-with-cash operation and the greater accuracy of right-leaning pollsters in predicting the race’s outcome, Democrats need to rethink the way money and information flow within their party. Democrats should be retooling their strategy in the coming years to ensure more money flows downward to build local parties and more information flows upward from local parties to give the out-of-touch DNC leadership a better understanding of the people whose votes they intend to win.
In the dreary days following Trump’s victory, an eerie silence fell over Western Pennsylvania. For months, rarely a day went by without Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Tim Walz, or J.D. Vance appearing at a local Sheetz or Primanti Brothers Sandwich Shop. Now the national political luminaries were nowhere to be seen. My cellphone which had been buzzing on almost an hourly basis with donation requests from “Nancy Pelosi,” “Gwen Walz,” “George Clooney,” and “Robert Reich,” had returned to its quieter pre-campaign self. But last Thursday, while blowing leaves off my yard into a nearby ravine, I received a message from an old friend, the Harris Fight Fund. I barely read these messages during the heat of the campaign, knowing full well what they wanted. But after an unmitigated Democratic disaster, I decided to give this message a read. Maybe there would be a soul-searching reflection or lessons learned from a Kamala campaign that burned through a billion dollars in three months like some kind of political reboot of Brewster’s Millions. Maybe there would be some inspirational words to give Democrats the courage to fight on after electoral results that our leaders said would usher forth the Death of Democracy. Or maybe it would just be a simple, humble apology for losing the most recent “Most Important Election of Our Lifetime.” I unlocked my phone and read the first sentence of the email, “There has never been a more important moment to donate to the Harris Fight Fund than right now.” I closed the message and put the cell phone back in my pocket. Even the roar of the leaf blower couldn’t drown out the inner Ralphie Parker grumbling in my head. “A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!”