National Democrats look to Merkley's win for lessons

Kari Chisholm FacebookTwitterWebsite

In the aftermath of the big wipeout last Tuesday, Democrats are doing the ol' "soul-searching" and "post-mortem" thing. It's the long-running battle between the corporate-oriented moderates and the progressive populists.

Nevermind that it was mostly a function of being in the sixth year of a presidency, which always means defending the Senate seats that were won in a change election -- on top of which, it was a home game for Republicans. (If the 2012 election were held only in the 2014 Senate race states, Mitt Romney would be President.)

Nonetheless, as Democrats back in DC are trying to figure out the lessons learned, some are pointing to Senator Jeff Merkley's success as a model for how a progressive and populist campaign can actually connect with voters. From the NY Times:

There were a handful of bright spots in an otherwise dismal year for Democrats, and progressives are holding up as models the success of three Senate candidates who ran as populists: Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Senator-elect Gary Peters of Michigan.

Mr. Merkley won by 19 percentage points with a campaign centered on the loss of well-paying jobs, the spiraling cost of college tuition and his opposition to trade deals that he said send jobs overseas. While Democrats nationally were losing whites without a college degree by 30 percentage points, Mr. Merkley narrowly carried that bloc of voters.

“We didn’t lose them here in Oregon because we talked about what they care about,” Mr. Merkley said.

What do you think? Is Oregon an anomaly? Or should the rest of the country learn a lesson from what happened here?

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