With One Press Conference Obama Put Democrats Back On The Path To Victory

With a single answer during a press conference, President Obama showed Democrats the path back to victory in 2018 and beyond.

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The President said:

How we organize politically, I think is something that we should spend some time thinking about. I believe that we have better ideas, but I also believe that good ideas don’t matter if people don’t hear them, and one of the issues that Democrats have to be clear on is that given the population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grassroots level.

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The challenge for a national party is how do you dig in there. How do you create those structures so that people have a sense of what it is that you stand for. And that increasingly is difficult to do just through a national press strategy. It’s increasingly difficult to do because of the splintering of the press.

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For Democrats who are feeling completely discouraged, I’ve been trying to remind them. Everybody remembers my Boston speech in 2004; they may not remember me showing up here in 2005 when John Kerry lost a close election, Tom Daschle the leader of the Senate had been beaten, Ken Salazar and I were the only two Democrats that won nationally. Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, and two years later Democrats were winning back Congress, and four years later I was President Of The United States. Things change pretty rapidly, but they don’t change inevitably. They change because you work for it. Nobody said democracy is supposed to be easy. It’s hard.

Obama’s comments were directed at the glaring weakness of the 2016 campaign, which was despite the fact that Democrats had more resources and star power surrogates, they lost because those resources were spent in a few places.

Obama was correct. Being the community organizer that he was once, the President understands that the path back to victory for the Democratic Party begins by rebuilding the grassroots and competing everywhere in every election. Democrats at the state and local levels in many parts of the country aren’t competitive at the state and local levels. Democrats need to rebuild at all levels of the party.

The President was also correct that our current electoral climate is very volatile. There have been wild shifts from election to election. Inconsistency is the only current consistency in our process. If Democrats learn the lessons from 2016 and put the work in, they’ll be back on top in no time.

Democrats needed some encouraging words after the election, but they got even more from Obama. President Obama also gave them a path to future victory.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association