Southern Democrats: Are They Making Poor Political Decisions?

Bob Moser has a very interesting essay on what he sees as the poor political decisions made by southern Democratic senatorial candidates in 2014. Essentially, he sees Kay Hagan, Michelle Nunn, Mary Landrieu, and the like making a huge mistake by embracing old DLC-style distancing from President Obama. Rather, he argues that the better decision is to run as a liberal and motivate African-American, Latino, and youth voters to go to the polls this fall. He notes this is a plausible political strategy by citing how these states have rapidly growing minority populations that hate the Republicans.

I’m of two minds here. On one hand, given that this is a midterm election with a highly motivated and hateful set of older white Republican voters and given the historically low turnout rates for Democratic core demographics in the midterms, running away from Obama might make sense. On the other hand, it probably doesn’t since, with perhaps the exception of Landrieu because of her personal power in the Senate, that strategy doesn’t really give anyone a good reason to vote for you. Plus maybe it is possible, at least in Georgia which is now only 60% white and will probably become a majority-minority state by 2030, to run as a liberal, inspire voters, and win an election. I’m not inclined to say that political advisers are idiots, although they are scared of failure, so I would think that they feel this is not a successful strategy in 2014. But maybe they are wrong. And giving voters an actual reason to vote for you does seem wise.