Democrats are at a major disadvantage, being up against 30 years of talk radio, 20 years of Fox News, the complete atrophy of their party in rural areas, gerrymandering, and a system weighted to favor rural areas. These disadvantages will not be overcome in one year.
Nonetheless, these would be my short term suggestions:
Make the best use of limited resources. Election counters will be the absolutely most important offices in the next election. Republicans are certainly focusing on election officials. We need to do the same. Recruit, recruit, recruit. Everywhere. If we can't defend anything else, defend that. We need to beat them over the head again and again by asking whether they will certify the result regardless of outcome. Maybe I am being hopelessly optimistic here, but I believe an open pledge to disregard election results is still a loser.
It's the economy, stupid. In the third quarter, growth slumped while inflation surged. Inflation is eroding people's paychecks. Biden's popularity slumped about the same time. Coincidence? I don't think so. So focus on clearing up bottlenecks and supply chain snags, let the Fed fight inflation, and push to open up the world economy by getting out vaccines, tests, and treatment to fight COVID.
Listen to Ziblatt. He gives two useful pieces of advice. His advice from How Democracies Die is to build the broadest possible coalition with as many swing voters as possible. How to do that? He gives a hint in his other work, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. In defining a strong center-right party, he says it should have strong enough ties to the voters to know what appeals to them, enough flexibility to adopt to what is a winning platform, and an institutional interest in the survival of democracy. The same applies no less to a strong center-left party. In other words, we need to be better attuned to what actual voters want and less to what party wonks want. (The wonks still have an important role in figuring out what is practical and how to implement it).
And yes, in case you don't get the hint, that does mean moderating our stance in order to get votes. It means not falling victim to what Ruy Teixeira calls the Fox News Fallacy.
This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it. That depends on the issue. If there is something to the issue and persuadable voters have real concerns, you will not allay those concerns by embracing the Fox News Fallacy. In fact, you'll probably intensify them by giving such voters the impression that Democrats simply don't care about their concerns and will do nothing to address them.
Teixeira offers crime, the border, and education as examples. Inflation is another.
I realize hardcore activists might protest here and complain that we are asking them to give up their last chance to pass their program. To which I say, save democracy, and there will be another chance. Let the Republicans destroy it and there will not. I recall a Republican making the same error during the Obama Administration, saying that usually he agreed with William F. Buckley that conservatives should pick the most conservative candidate electable, but this emergency was an exception. He argued that Democrats had completely run off the rails and the Republicans should therefore stick to the most conservative candidate and not worry about electability. Need I point out the error there? If you truly believe that the other party has run off the rails and poses an intolerable threat, the goal has to be to stop them immediately, at all cost, even the cost of some ideological purity. Well, the same applies to us, too. If you believe that Republicans have run completely off the rails and must be stopped at all costs (and I do), then all costs include ideological purity.*
Or look at it another way. Do we believe ourselves to be the party of oppressed Black and Latino populations? Then maybe we should listen to real, live oppressed Black and Latino populations and respond to what they actually want as opposed to what some white ivory tower theorist thinks they should want. As it happens, most Black and Latino voters are considerably more moderate that upscale white liberals. (This may be why many Latino and some Black voters are starting to defect to the Republicans). And the good news here is that maybe we don't have to choose between representing the wishes of Black and Latino population and reaching out to white swing voters in the suburbs. Maybe what the two groups want isn't so different after all.
What else can we do? We are at an immense disadvantage dealing with the Right Wing Noise Machine, its pervasiveness in rural areas, and its relentless message discipline. We are also at an immense disadvantage with large-scale Republican donors and their capacity to organize mass movements. So what can we do? Well, we can exercise more message discipline among Democrats giving interviews and be more proactive in getting our viewpoints out, but I don't think there is any hunger on our side for the sort of noise machine the right wing has. We can also seek to involve big donors more in party building.
But remember two words -- George Soros. To the extent that Democrats have a major donor, it is George Soros. Soros donates to liberal candidates, causes, and publications. He has a Political Action Committee. In that he is no different than countless conservative donors. I know of no evidence that he exercises anything close the the influence of, say, Charles Koch or other leading Republican donors. But the degree of Republican freakout that a Democrat dares play their money game is extraordinary.
I could make a few other suggestions that can only go so far in the short run, but may be useful in the medium run if our democracy survives.
Don't Rely on the Lincoln Project. Yes, after being targets of Republican nastiness all these years it is good to see somebody really nasty on our side for a change. But I see no evidence that it actually changes votes. The rage addicts have already made up their minds and are going to vote. The swing voters we are trying to reach are not rage addicts.
Do Rely on Person-to Person Work. That is how underdogs do it every time. After the 2020 election, moderate Democrats said our failures to expand were the result of moving too far to the left, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was the result of not doing enough personal outreach. I say both are right. AOC, by all accounts, is not just a leftwing ideologue, but also a first-rate old-style machine politician. We need to start rebuilding that old-style political machine Remember, if there is one thing that can blunt right-wing demonization, it is showing them that we are people too.
Don't Over Centralize. In 2018, Democrats won by the glories of message indiscipline. Each candidate had their own personally-crafted message, and the right wing noise machine didn't know how to counter all of them at once. Stacey Abrams undertook a major expansion of the Georgia Democratic Party, and it has paid off. Sure, Republicans hate her, but hardly on a par with their hatred for George Soros. Now imagine if there were 50 Stacey Abrams. Where would Republicans focus their hate?
Compete Everywhere. Because our system is inherently stacked to favor rural areas. If Democrats can't find some sort of rural outreach they are doomed.
*This is why some on the farther left resist the idea that Trump posed or poses a unique threat. They prefer to treat him as just another candidate so they don't have to sacrifice ideological purity to stop him.
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