Dems have their own 'weird' problem

As Democrats continue their election post-mortems, they ought to do an autopsy on one of their favorite words of 2024: weird.

When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called Republicans "weird" as he auditioned to be Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, the word became a viral hit and a staple of the campaign. Voters, however, never seemed to buy it.

Maybe being weird is cool. People do love "Weird Al" Yankovic. And for some Texans, "Keep Austin Weird" is a way of life. But more likely, voters have a different definition of weird than the Democrats and pundits who used it.

When I RVed across the country last fall, I spoke with Chris Gibbs, a cattle, corn and soybean farmer who leads the Democratic organization in Shelby County, Ohio. Around there, he said, a Democrat is thought to be someone with "a nose ring and blue hair." He should know: He's a former Republican.

That perception, he said, has pushed local Democrats into hiding, too sheepish to publicly declare their support for the party. He started a "Citizen of the Month" campaign to bring them out of the woodwork.

He also led local party members through an exercise: identifying their values. Not the policies they support β€” "policy is dynamic," he said β€” but the values that define their identity. It was a recognition by Gibbs that voters make decisions based more on value perceptions than policy positions.

After arriving at a list of values (such as belief in equal rights, the rule of law, free speech and solution-focused government) and principles (including affordable health care, responsible gun ownership and a living wage), Gibbs printed it up and, for the first time in a decade, got the party a tent at the county fair. He arranged a prime spot: next to the 4-H Club, perfect for talking with parents β€” even if they were afraid to get caught chatting.

"People were trying to sneak into our tent," he told me. "They'd say, β€˜I didn't want to be seen, but I just want to come in and say: Good, thanks, bye.' And they'd run."

It's one of many ways he's trying to make the party more visible in the county, to make it safer for Democrats to come out of hiding β€” to normalize them.

Gibbs is the kind of Midwesterner that Democrats need to hear from as they attempt to stop the party from hemorrhaging voters, especially those who are not college graduates. Another is Robin Johnson, a political consultant from western Illinois who co-authored a 2018 report with then-Congresswoman Cheri Bustos about how the party could regain its footing in the Midwest. It was based on dozens of interviews with rural Democratic politicians, but garnered little interest among party leaders.

"The really frustrating thing," Johnson told me, "is a lot of the recommendations we made don't require much money: organizing back at the block level, the neighborhood level, and making the face of the party local people in the community," just as Gibbs is trying to do.

"When I got training in campaigns," Johnson said, "the old saying was, β€˜Yard signs don't vote.' They were minimized. But if you're in a heavy Republican rural area and somebody puts a Democratic yard sign in their yard, that gives license to say, β€˜Hey, it's OK, other people are doing it.'"

As I drove across the country, I saw few Democratic signs in rural areas β€” not because Democrats didn't live there, but because either the party hasn't organized them or they feel too lonely to step out. "The party," Johnson said, "continues to do a top-down approach, heavily focused on TV ads, which I just don't think are as effective as they used to be."

The party's failure to organize at the rural level, Johnson said, has contributed to its cultural disconnect. "At the doorstep," he said, "you not only find out what to say, but how regular people talk."

Green jobs? Build Back Better? "Nobody talks like that," Johnson said β€” not to mention other ivory-tower terms that voters hear from the Democratic side of the aisle, like justice-involved individuals, cisgender, Latinx and White privilege.

National Democrats tend to use language that makes them seem more concerned with Miss Manners than Joe Sixpack, out of fear that they might offend a constituency and be attacked as Neanderthals. But as Donald Trump has proved, campaigns are not cordiality contests.

Nevertheless, Johnson said, "There are university and big city people trying to advise rural candidates on what to say. And it's like, 'Are you kidding me?'" Making matters worse, he said, "they still also send in volunteers from cities down to rural areas to go knock doors, which is just a dumb idea."

I have to admit: When Democratic friends of mine from Manhattan would tell me they were spending the weekend door-knocking in Pennsylvania, I'd wonder if they would be doing more harm than good, by reinforcing perceptions of the party as urban outsiders.

By failing to mount an effective response to the GOP's efforts to "otherize" it as coastal, elite and out-of-touch on immigration, gender, crime, education and other issues, Democrats became more associated with unpopular social positions than popular economic ones. Among voters who named the economy as their top issue, an astounding 79% went for Trump.

There is no shortage of rural campaign veterans, like Gibbs and Johnson, who understand what it will take for the Democratic Party to reconnect with Trump voters.

Whether national leaders and activists will listen to them remains to be seen. But given November's losses and the shrinking size of the party, ignoring them would be, well, weird.

Previously:
• San Francisco gets tough to save liberalism
• Dems wanted another New Deal. They neglected the most important part

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Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of the new book, "Back Roads and and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy."