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Excerpt: The Common Path of Party Comebacks
In May 2009, Time Magazine ran a cover with a large elephant. Above the elephant were the words: “Endangered Species.”
This cover came six months after Senator Barack Obama crushed Senator John McCain to become President—part of an election cycle where Democrats won across the board, turning states from Florida to Ohio to Indiana blue (and not just for the White House, but for many other offices up and down the ballot)….
[Reminder: You can grab your copy of “Saving Democracy” at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or order at a library or independent book store near you.
And all paid subscribers to my Substack get free access to the book…To read the Introduction and Chapter 1, go to:
This is Chapter 3, which focuses on how parties out of power have always come back in recent decades…and how Democrats can do the same right now if they learn the lesson, focus, and get to work….
Endangered? Extinct?
The GOP was dead, the pundits announced. So much so, Time featured that clear demise on its cover—not as a question (“Endangered Species?”), but as an established fact.
So of course, when I was approached about running for State Auditor (from my perch as a County Commissioner) in Ohio, it was too enticing to say no. Obama and Ohio’s Democratic governor at the time, Ted Strickland, were soaring in Ohio polls, and the party of my opponent was an “endangered species.”
Just being on the Democratic statewide ticket would be like winning a lottery ticket. And if we won, we could finally end the scourge of gerrymandering. (The State Auditor was one of the five positions on the board that “drew” the legislative maps back then—the Governor and my victories would’ve secured ourselves the majority of that board).
Two years later...
...the GOP was not only not extinct, but stormed back to power. Everywhere.
In Ohio, Governor Strickland lost by 2 points. I lost by 5 points (even though I easily outraised my opponent and landed almost every newspaper endorsement). The GOP gained back the statehouse. And in 2011, they used their new power to gerrymander the hell out of the state for the next decade, while beginning years of fierce attacks on the voters who had put them on the brink of extinction in 2008.
Across the nation, the results were the same. From U.S. Senate seats to House seats to governorships to statehouses, the GOP swept into power in many places that Obama and Democrats had won just two years before. They too got to work on gerrymandering and voter suppression.
We are still living with the results of that 2010 comeback.
How did the GOP—declared as extinct—turn things around?
They went to the ground floor of American politics. And they did so knowing that that ground floor is the place where democracy is shaped.
As Democrats celebrated our newly won federal power after 2008, Republicans
