My Papaw’s Democrats Dominated
From West Virginia to Tennessee and beyond. Majorities were abundant.
Every few years - throughout my entire adult life - I’ve watched the same cycle repeat. Democrats lose ground. The party panics. And like clockwork, the same chorus emerges: opinion writers at the New York Times, former senators, think tank executives, wealthy donors.
They all arrive with the same diagnosis and the same prescription: “Democrats have gone too far left, especially on economic issues.”
It’s deeply ironic. Of all the criticisms you might level at the Democratic Party, moving toward economic populism is not one you can actually make with a straight face. The party has remained steadfastly corporate - if anything, it’s become more so over my lifetime.
But what makes this moment so irritating is that it’s not new advice. This is the same playbook I’ve seen recycled over and over. The Third Way in the Clinton years. James Carville telling us to focus on the economy while signing NAFTA. The Heidi Heitkamps and Jon Testers who were supposed to show us the path forward. And now it’s Ezra Klein in the pages of the Times, holding up Joe Manchin as the model Democrat who could win in deep red states.
Let me tell you something Klein and the rest of this chorus don’t want to acknowledge: they’re not offering a new strategy. They’re screaming for more of what we just had. More of what led us to this authoritarian moment we’re living in. And I know they’re wrong because I can read a map, a calendar, and my own lived experience.
I’m from Tennessee. I watched what happened when Democrats abandoned us.
What Had Happened Was
West Virginia held a Democratic trifecta for 84 consecutive years - from 1930 to 2014. My home state of Tennessee had five Democratic House seats out of nine until 2010. These weren’t marginally competitive states. These were solidly blue, built on New Deal economics and strong unions.
Klein looks at this collapse and concludes Democrats need more Joe Manchins. But Manchin didn’t save West Virginia - he presided over its destruction. His winning margin collapsed from 24 points in 2012 to 3.3 points in 2018 before he quit rather than face voters in 2024. During his 14 years in the Senate, West Virginia went from Bush +6 to Trump +42 - the largest Republican margin in the entire country.
The rest of Klein’s “moderate overperformers”? Jon Tester lost Montana by 11 points in 2024. Claire McCaskill lost Missouri by 6 points in 2018. Heidi Heitkamp lost North Dakota by 11 points. Joe Donnelly lost Indiana by 10 points.
Every single example either lost badly or quit. The only one who came close was Sherrod Brown in Ohio - and he was the economic populist, not the moderate. Brown ran on pro-union, anti-corporate economics and lost by just 3.8 points while outperforming Kamala Harris. The progressive did better than all the moderates.
The Real Story: What Changed and Why
These states didn’t flip because Democrats talked about social issues. They flipped because of systematic economic abandonment by both parties.
We were already on a massive coward manufacturing trajectory but NAFTA was the nail in the coffin. Democrats and Clinton passed it in 1994. The results? West Virginia lost 41.5% of its manufacturing jobs. Tennessee’s textile mills closed and moved to Mexico. Now we import from China what we used to make ourselves - a catastrophic policy choice that made us dependent on a geopolitical rival while devastating American communities.
In West Virginia, union membership collapsed from nearly 500,000 United Mine Workers to fewer than 10,000 today. Coal mining jobs dropped from 130,000 to 12,000. 12,000 West Virginians work at Walmart, btw.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the answer to coal’s decline wasn’t more coal or Walmart jobs. The answer was making good on the promise of good jobs - building the future instead of clinging to the past. But we didn’t do that. We thought market magic would happen. We offered shitty low-wage service jobs and wondered why people went for Trumpism.
In Tennessee, I watched five Democratic House seats become one. Rural counties that voted for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton now go for Trump by 50-point margins. This happened during the era Klein wants us to return to - the era of moderate Democrats, Third Way centrism, and corporate-friendly economic policy.
Klein’s diagnosis is backwards. These voters don’t call Democrats “preachy” because of pronouns. They call us preachy because we lectured them about being on the right side of history while both parties shipped their jobs to China, bailed out banks while they lost their homes, and got rich in office while their wages stagnated.
The Oligarchy Reveals Itself
If you want to understand what the moderate establishment actually cares about, look at New York City right now.
The Democratic primary winner, Zohran Mamdani, got the most votes any candidate has ever received in a NYC Democratic primary. He’s backed by Governor Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (finally), and the vast majority of major unions.
His opponent is Andrew Cuomo - who resigned as governor after sexually harassing 11 women and is under federal investigation for covering up nursing home deaths. Cuomo lost the Democratic primary badly.
Who does the establishment back? Cuomo.
Michael Bloomberg dumped over $8 million into pro-Cuomo super PACs. Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, Dan Loeb - billionaires and hedge fund managers lined up. Bill Clinton endorsed him. James Clyburn praised his “character.”
And then Donald Trump and Elon Musk both endorsed Cuomo, with Trump saying plainly: “if it’s between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat.”
The same people lecturing progressives about electability are backing the Trump-endorsed candidate who resigned in disgrace over the progressive who won the Democratic primary decisively.
This isn’t about ideology or electability. This is the oligarchs closing ranks. When faced with a candidate who threatens their economic interests - who promises to actually make housing affordable and buses free and childcare accessible - the divisions between establishment Democrats, Republicans, and tech billionaires disappear. They unite to protect the extraction economy that’s made them wealthy.
An Inheritance Stolen
Between 1930 and 1975, America built deliberately. The New Deal, the Interstate Highway System, rural electrification, the GI Bill, the space program, Social Security, Medicare - these didn’t happen by accident or market forces. They were planned, funded, and executed by a government that understood its job was building capacity for everyone.
We inherited the world’s biggest economy, built by our grandparents’ generation. And then we fucked it up. For the past 50 years, we’ve let centibillionaires and trillion-dollar companies harvest what our forefathers built. We stopped being a country that builds and became a country that extracts.
And now the people telling us how to win are the same people who oversaw this destruction. They’re telling us the answer is more of what created the problem - more moderation, more corporate-friendly policy, more means-tested half-measures instead of transformation.
Take healthcare. We spend $5.25 trillion a year - more than double what other countries spend per capita. If market magic were going to solve this, that ought to be enough money. But we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, hospitals, or pharmaceuticals. We have supply deserts because the system optimizes for profit extraction, not capacity building.
The Build Back Better approach follows the same failed logic: pump cash into the system and expect the invisible hand to make it work. But between 1930 and 1975, when we needed hospitals, the government built them. When we needed doctors, we funded medical schools. We didn’t subsidize people to pay inflated prices to monopolies - we built public capacity.
When someone like Mamdani proposes that New York City should have free buses and affordable housing, Abigail Spanberger calls it “unrealistic.” In the richest city in the richest country in human history, basic public services are dismissed as fantasy. That’s what 50 years of extraction looks like - we’ve forgotten we used to build things.
The Power Question
Here’s what Klein completely misses: Sherrod Brown didn’t lose because economic populism doesn’t work. He lost because he was alone.
Voters looked at Brown and thought: even if I elect him, what can he actually do? He’ll get blocked by Manchin types, ignored by leadership, buried in corporate money. He’s one guy against the whole system.
MAGA is a team. Trump has 50+ congresspeople coordinating, governors backing him, judges ruling for him. When Trump says he’ll do something, voters see organized power capable of delivering.
One senator standing alone doesn’t look like power. It looks like someone who’ll try and fail.
This is why my cohort model isn’t about having “more things” like Klein suggests. It’s about visible, organized power - fifty candidates running together on a binding pledge, coordinating resources, primarying corporate Democrats, backing each other up. That looks like something powerful enough to overcome the system.
The Tea Party did this. They ran coordinated primary challenges and took over the Republican Party because voters saw organized power. Klein wants isolated moderates in red states and isolated progressives in blue states with no coordination, no shared strategy, no mechanism to overcome corporate Democrats blocking change.
What Voters Actually Want
Voters understand the system is rigged. They know both parties sold them out. They know their parents had better lives with less education. They know a single income used to support a family, buy a house, take vacations.
They’ve turned to Trump not because his solutions work, but because he at least acknowledges their rage. Our grandparents and great-grandparents inherited the world’s biggest economy and the elite took it and are renting it back to us. At the same time our own lives getting harder every year.
The moderate establishment looks at this moment and offers more of what created it. More pluralism. More internal disagreement. More of the same kind of visionless hopeless feckless Democrats. Politicians ready to damp hope and vision blocking transformation at every turn.
I’m suggest we offer what voters are actually asking for: a nation and an economy that work for them. One that creates and builds. One that doesn’t start wars. Doesn’t arm and back genocides. One that hears use.
To build that society we need people and political power capable of rebuilding what’s been systematically dismantled. America isn’t ready for hospice care. We can’t rely on market magic and means-tested subsidies. It’s time we build like our grandparents did.
The moderates had their chance. They lost everywhere. West Virginia, Tennessee, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana, Ohio - the graveyard is full of moderate Democrats who couldn’t overcome a toxic brand created by 50 years of both parties serving corporate interests.
Klein and co want to try the same thing again and expect different results. I’m saying it’s time to try something that hasn’t failed yet: coordinated economic populism backed by organized power willing to fight the oligarchy that’s strangling this country.
The chorus is loud right now, demanding we go back to what just failed. Time to stop listening and start building.
Corbin Trent
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The only thing worse than a country full of have nots is a country full of used to haves. Thank you for speaking directly to the extraction that’s at the heart of the problem. In my world, it hits from all sides. I’m a developer, what we call in VT a houser. The banks aren’t set up to favor middle market housing development. Investors therefore are sometimes hesitant unless you’re building luxury condos at scale for tourists. The electeds favor the non-profit housing developers, who use HUD funds and build at $600k per unit where I build at $80k. Or sometimes they don’t build at all though continue to spend funds. People who clearly have the income to buy can’t because saving for the down is impossible. And the citizens, simply angry at the carnage, vote no on everything including that which would solve their problems. Bad space to be in, but we have no other choice but to fight through it. Whether you in TN or us here in VT. Let’s save OUR country.
I am actually old enough to know that what you speak is true. I was born in 1955. For most of my youth my father worked to pay our house off and mom stayed at home and took care of us and the house; and they managed to fund two cars and put some back for my bother and my college education. Plus, they saved for that rainy day!!! This was all possible because of Democrat polices enacted like the GI bill and many more that actually helped the masses and not jist the few. I can remember the top tax bracket was 90%. My dad was not, of course, in that bracket; but he did pay close to 60% on his earnings and he never grumbled that "freeloaders" were taking "HIS" money. He realized that he had been blessed by so many things and the least he could do is pay it forward. Almost ALL of America believed in this at the time. However, and here lies the biggest problem; people of color were generally locked out of any kind of government or "social" assistance. Once they had fought for their equality and won; a lot of people who had been rather giving of their monies now decided that they weren't going to give one red cent of it if even a few pennies went to people they did not see as deserving; ie, white and Christian. We can, and MUST, change the trajectory we are on; it is unsustainable for the most of us; but we must also come to grips with the underlying problems within our social structure that has dried up the spigot of charity and denied us the ability do do really big things that would help the masses and not just the already wealthy. Until we come to terms with both our past and our present, we are doomed to a future of more of the same and the wealthy will get wealthier and most of the rest of us will be begging for a quick and painless death. We can change and it will take a "all hands on deck" mentality; but to do so, we will all have to include how we look at each other and maybe finally gain the equality we thought had been settled almost 60 years ago. Without that first, and major, step; nothing will ever change.