The War College comments on Todd Epp's laments about the South Dakota Democratic Party. Here's some free advice, and you can take it for what it's worth. Last November, a week after the election, I was at a gathering at Dakota Wesleyan celebrating the life of George McGovern. It was in conjunction with this book, which really is a good book people, in spite of my involvement. Obviously this was a largely progressive Democratic crowd, including Sen. McGovern himself, and in the wake of the election they were not happy. My subject for the day and for the book was the 1972 presidential election (they want to do a book celebrating George McGovern and I get the 1972 election. Talk about silk purses!). In the Q&A period there were alot of questions about "what went wrong" in the week before. There were many explanations about the senatorial and presidential races, such as the Christian loonies, including Bishop Carlson, took over the state and country, John Kerry was a terrible candidate, John Thune is a dirty liar, the people of South Dakota are stupid, Jon Lauck is the devil, the Argus Leader sucks, there was voter fraud, Republicans are evil and dumb, blah blah blah. At a certain point I said something to the effect of, "The reason the Republicans won is they got more votes. The reason they got more votes might be because people find their ideas more attractive. It might not just be the packaging or the clever manipulation. Most people, even the non-stupid ones, might actually believe that the Republican party is better for the country. If the Democrats want to win elections, they had better get on with the work of convincing people their ideas are better instead of complaining about how unfair everything is. If you want to win elections, you must go to work." These words were then uttered by George McGovern: "I think Professor Schaff is exactly right." Yeah. I about fell off my chair too.
If Democrats want to win in South Dakota, some intrepid Democrat, or a bunch of them, had better get to doing what George McGovern did in the 1950s: build a damn party. Go around the state and convince people you are right. Let's look at some national numbers that I suspect roughly hold true for our state. In the 2004 election George Bush won weekly church attendees by 22 points. He won married people by 15 points, and married people with children by 19 points. Bush barely lost the women's vote (3 point loss) but won the married woman vote. Bush won the once tried-and-true Democratic Catholic vote by 5%, and by even more when you count just observant Catholics. These number were roughly the same in 2000 versus Gore. What does this mean? If one can generalize, religious married people with children vote overwhelmingly Republican while secular single people with no children vote Democratic (Kerry won the "never attend church" folks by 26% and unmarried people by 18%). If Democrats want to win elections, this must end. They must think very hard about why parents, and even more so religious parents, reject the Democratic party. I have a very unoriginal theory of elections. People vote their interests and people are pretty good at deciphering what those interests are. People generally know what they are doing when they are voting. So Democrats have to think about why families and religious people think that voting Democratic is against their interests, while voting Republican is in their interests. It isn't because these people are stupid, ignorant, greedy, irrational, under they sway of the pope or some crazed minister, full of hate, war happy, or what have you. If you can't appeal to married folk who are trying to raise a family, the problem is with you, not them. There are alot of parents who are worried about a vulgar culture. Telling them they are Nazis isn't going to win them over. There are alot of religious people out there whose who think that being a Christian (to cite the majority) doesn't just happen for an hour or so each Sunday. So they think about their faith when they think about their role as citizens. And if you call them fascists, they won't vote for you. There are a lot of decent people who are made uneasy by the left's cheerleading in favor of abortion, and calling them "theocrats" isn't gonna get you their votes. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a teacher has contempt for his students he cannot teach; if a political party has contempt for its opponent, it cannot win.
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