BOONE COUNTY, West Virginia — Not many people in the national press were paying attention to the Democratic presidential primary results in West Virginia on May 8, 2012. Barack Obama was the incumbent president, and few outside local press noticed that Keith Russell Judd, a Texas convict sitting in a federal prison for extortion, had sent in the proper paperwork and paid the $2,500 filing fee necessary to be on the ballot.
Even had they paid attention, chances are no one expected him to have an impact. Yet he won a whopping 41% of the vote in West Virginia’s Democratic primary, earning 72,000 votes to Obama’s 106,000.
While Nelson did not win, his impact was lost because the Democrats did not recognize that in Obama’s reformation of the party, future candidates might not be as gifted or lucky as he was in winning.
Case in point: Here in Boone County (rather than statewide), Judd actually beat Obama in that primary. Why did that matter? Well a few months later, Obama would lose this county in the general election against Republican Mitt Romney, marking the first time since 1924 that a Democrat had not won Boone.
In places like that, voting against a party you have considered part of your lifelong identity is a pretty big deal.
This matters. While some will argue West Virginia was never going to vote for Obama because of racial reasons, what they miss is that it was a foreshadowing of why legacy Democrats — white, working class, with generationslong local attachments who work in industries that national Democratic politicians wanted to eliminate — were all about to hit the exit doors if the party didn’t stop edging them out.
Obama could afford to shed a portion of those voters that year; his focus on building the coalition of the ascendant young people, college-educated women, and minorities was enough for him.
The person it was not enough for was Hillary Clinton, who went for getting the same number of voters as Obama did in 2012, and she did, but not from the states where she needed them.
In short, Democrats and the press failed to calculate that the damage within the Democratic Party was not isolated to just West Virginia. When Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board four years earlier that “If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” and then Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton also pledged that “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” that message also turned off voters in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by 2016.
They knew it was only a matter of time before the Democrats came for their jobs in manufacturing, energy, and pipeline work.
Fast forward to today and what have the press, Democrats, or President Joe Biden learned from all of this? Not much. No one nailed that observation better than Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN), the Democratic congressman taking a quixotic run at an incumbent president, when CNN asked him why he was running.
Phillips answered that his run for his party’s nomination is in part because he believes his party has left behind too many people who would normally be with them. He said he found them waiting in line for former President Donald Trump: “Got to tell you, guys, I went to Donald Trump rally a couple nights ago, never been to one. I had an event across the street. I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours, and I thought, what the heck?”
Phillips added he learned that all people wanted was a leader who actually invites people to hear their message and not call them MAGA extremists or condemn them.
“Met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line, every single one of them, thoughtful, hospitable, friendly, all of them so frustrated that they feel nobody’s listening to them but Donald Trump,” he said. “A diverse crowd. People who had never been to a Trump event before.”
Phillips added his party colleagues are completely delusional if they don’t think they need these voters just because Biden won in 2020. And he’s not going to get them if he keeps holding angry podium events shouting “MAGA extremists” at voters who may have voted for both men in the past eight years and are up for grabs this year.
There are some lessons to glean for Democrats in the New Hampshire primary that are not as dramatic as an incarcerated man earning a 41% primary vote against an incumbent president. Even so, it is telling that Biden did lose approximately 35% of the votes in the primary race, with Phillips getting 20% of them, followed by a series of other lesser-than-less-known candidates earning the other 15%.
Granted, Biden chose to snub New Hampshire and Iowa and go straight to the first primary state he had won in 2020, so technically, he wasn’t even on the ballot, and people needed to make the effort to write him in. Still, other names written in include 4,695 Democrats who wrote in former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and 2,055 who wrote in Trump, according to the New Hampshire Secretary of State.
Democrats still have not addressed these warning signs since Clinton lost in a cycle to Trump that is very, very similar to the one in 2016.
In 2016, Trump won voters who were willing to be unfaithful to the Democratic Party (and the Republican establishment if they were Republicans) against Clinton; in 2020, there weren’t many unfaithful votes against Biden the first time because people were either for one or the other one. But this electorate, we’re back to where we were with Clinton, with many people who don’t like either one.
Even many of the most ardent Trump supporters will agree the former president has his own set of deep problems. However, some actually like him because of his problems, which are well known. And they don’t excuse Democrats choosing to pay attention to Biden’s problems, the dismissal of which by both press and Democrats is a fool’s errand.
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Making fun of these voters every time you write about them or talk about them on television isn’t helpful either.
Biden’s problems include inflation, the border crisis, the Middle East, and his advanced age. The one most ignored, though, is the sin Clinton committed and Biden is continuing: the utter dismissal of the lives, their interests, and the contributions to this country of the people who live in places like here in Boone County or in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, or Mahoning County, Ohio, or Kenosha County, Wisconsin or Macomb County, Michigan.