Why I left the Democratic Party

DEAN: The most important age group for us is people under 35. They elected Barack Obama in 2008. But now it's time to let them take over. And they're going to have to take over on their own terms. We have tons of talent in our party. We do not need to rely on my generation anymore. And these kids think differently. They're more respectful of each other. They're willing to listen to each other's ideas and work things out. They're entrepreneurial. They're more conservative than we are economically than the left wing of the Democratic Party. They're mostly libertarian.

I just think this is the future of America. They are diverse. They value immigration. They value different kinds of people. They believe that gay rights is the civil rights issue of their time. They care deeply about the environment. We need a real change in this country and the only way to do it is for us to get out.

Did anyone followup with these people? what's happened for them in the past four years?

. I would rather lose.

If they would do the same thing in Texas I would be deeply impressed.

https://www.centristproject.org/mission

A tiny group of political renegades is transforming one of the reddest states in the country through a surprising strategy: ignoring their own party.

But what’s been less noticed, even in Alaska, is the role played by millennials who, rather than spending years working their way up on the team, instead reinvented the playbook. Three men in particular—Kreiss-Tomkins, Forrest Dunbar and John-Henry Heckendorn—have pointed the way to reviving progressivism in the state by recruiting new, outsider candidates, teaching them how to win, and connecting them with fellow travelers. In bypassing traditional channels—which in Alaska, as everywhere else, tend to elevate predictable, uninspiring pols who have paid their dues—they’ve propelled a wave of untested candidates with little experience and even less party identity, but who believe in the economic populist agenda shared by a coalition of labor, environmentalists and the state’s large, politically engaged Alaska Native population.

Their emerging coalition has been a boon for the Democratic Party, of course, but what’s remarkable is how little of this transformation has depended on the party. To the extent that the Democratic Party has helped in its own revival—and in transforming Alaska from deep red to a blue-ish purple—it was in part by getting out of the way. As progressives across the country try to pry Republicans out of power, they have important lessons to learn from a state where they are wrongly thought to have no power at all.

Whenever I asked about the progressives’ winning streak, how they went from a 10-seat superminority in 2012 to a majority today, people pointed me to three men: Kreiss-Tomkins, Dunbar and a political consultant named John-Henry Heckendorn. According to the story I kept hearing, these three young progressives—at 33, Dunbar is five years older than the others—had found candidates who could win swing districts, coaxed them to run, and taught them how to win. All while persuading labor and Democratic Party elders to support their untested candidates, rather than more experienced pols who had paid their dues.

In a state where 26 percent of voters are registered Republicans and only 15 percent are Democrats, there were districts where a progressive could win, but not if he had a “D” next to his name. Hall got organized labor to work with Ship Creek. “We chose districts where people could run as an independent,” Hall says. “And then we were able to keep the Democrat out of the race. Because in a three-way race, the Republican wins.”

The progressives did manage to end the much-loathed tax credits for the oil industry, but even with the governor on their side, they couldn’t overcome Senate intransigence to create an income tax.

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But this is a one-year stopgap plan, which will do nothing to close the long-term structural deficit, which, unless oil prices zoom up again, isn’t going anywhere. If they raid the budget reserve for another year or two, it will be gone, at which point conservatives are likely to go after the annual oil dividend paid to residents; progressives will argue that a better path will include some kind of state taxing power, and for that, they’ll need to win even more seats—increasing their majority in the House, and eventually taking the Senate.


Dunbar, Heckendorn and Kreiss-Tomkins are cautiously optimistic.

Heckendorn is now running strategy for Governor Bill Walker, an independent who won after the Democratic candidate agreed to stand down and run as Walker’s lieutenant governor. (Because of his new job, Heckendorn refused to speak on the record.) One of Heckendorn’s last successes as a consultant before handing Ship Creek over to a lieutenant in January 2016 was to conceive of Measure 1, a referendum that passed in November 2016 and which automatically registers all Alaskans to vote when they submit their application for the oil dividend. Since everyone wants their oil dividend, this reform should get Alaska to near 100-percent voter registration in 2018—and the new voters are likely to be relatively poor, more heavily Democratic, and sympathetic to a progressive income tax. Meanwhile, Anchorage’s reputation as a diverse, progressive city, the oil recession, and the state’s coming marijuana economy—pot shops are slowly opening around the state, after a 2014 ballot measure legalized pot sales—are likely to skew the population more liberal.

But as Dunbar, Heckendorn and Kreiss-Tomkins see it, the changing demographics alone are not sufficient to win anything. They are just an opportunity, one Democrats will need the right candidates in order to capitalize on.

Howard Dean pursued an explicit "fifty-state strategy" as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, putting resources into building a Democratic Party presence even where Democrats had been thought unlikely to win federal positions, in hopes that getting Democrats elected to local and state positions, and increasing awareness of Democrats in previously conceded areas, would result in growing successes in future elections. Democrats who supported the strategy have said that abandoning red states as lost causes only allowed the Republican Party to grow even stronger in areas where it was unchallenged, resulting in lopsided losses for Democrats in even more races.[2]

During the 2008 United States presidential election, Barack Obama attempted a form of the fifty-state strategy to reach into deep red states to try to flip them. This was largely based on Obama's appeal during the primaries in very Republican states, like the Deep South, and the Great Plains states.[3] In September, Obama scaled back his fifty-state strategy, abandoning Alaska and North Dakota and reducing staff in Georgia and Montana. John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate made winning Alaska very unlikely for Obama, and she also had strong support in North Dakota.[4] Obama was ultimately able to win Virginia and Indiana, two states that had not voted Democratic since 1964, and North Carolina, last won by a Democrat in 1976. Additionally, the margins of victory in the four aforementioned states were considerably closer than they had been in 2004.