quote:

Elissa Slotkin Is Sounding the Alarm. Will Democrats Listen?

She helped win Congress for the Democrats in 2018. Now she has a warning for her party.

quote:

The war for the White House in 2020 will come down to a series of smaller battles waged on unique fronts across the country, not simply at the statewide level but inside the towns, counties and congressional districts where the demographic trends are sharpest and the turnout margins are tightest. It is in these places—from the emerging sun-drenched barrios of Phoenix, to the historic and prosperous neighborhoods of northeastern Philadelphia, to the quaint, overlooked, suburban-meets-rural communities like Holly—that control of the White House, and likely the Senate and House of Representatives, will ultimately be decided.

Each of these hot spots will provide an answer—in some cases, multiple answers—to the essential questions of 2020: Will Black voters participate at higher levels than they did in 2016? Will the flight of college-educated women from the GOP accelerate? Will the Democratic Party bring any of its lost working-class whites back into the fold? Will young progressives stay at home to protest Joe Biden’s lukewarm liberalism? Will conservative seniors sour on Trump because of his response to Covid-19? And for that matter, what effect will the pandemic have on voter turnout across demographic lines?

These are the riddles each presidential campaign is gnawing on, relying on sophisticated voter outreach and data analytics programs to build models of an electorate they must persuade come November. But the truth is, the brightest minds inside these operations are often in the dark, usually for one reason: Their feet are not on the ground. Hillary Clinton’s failure to visit Wisconsin in 2016 and Mitt Romney’s absolute certainty that he would carry Ohio in 2012 are symptoms of the same illness, an approach to presidential year politics that is arrogant, top heavy and disconnected from average voters.

quote:

An endangered incumbent, representing a purple district in the most competitive region of one of America’s premier swing states, Slotkin is not an accomplished political player. She is still raw, still at times wobbly on her feet, still learning the secrets of her new craft. What sets the congresswoman apart is a skill set few in her field have—a talent for investigating, researching, crunching data and challenging conclusions and adapting to findings. She is, in short, a shrewd observer of the carnage unfolding in her backyard, if not yet the most lethal combatant. This serves Slotkin well. Rather than rely on outside assessments, she bases every maneuver, every tactical decision, on what she’s seeing and hearing for herself. That means dismissing advice from the national party. That means distancing herself from nascent ideological demands on the left. That means, in the summer of 2020, with a torrent of polling fueling a narrative that Trump has fallen way behind in his campaign for a second term, warning Democrats not to trust what they’re being told.