MSNBC Pundit Zerlina Maxwell admonishes the Democratic Party and the corporate mainstream media for positing the wrong question about who will bring victory to the party. She has been pushing the narrative for a long time and one hopes the party will take heed sooner than later.
Maxwell points out a flaw in the thinking of the Democratic Party relative to which groups they target aggressively. Doing this wrong could be fatal.
Zerlina Maxwell asks the correct question.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur pointed out that even with all the headwinds Donald Trump is facing with impeachment and more, he is doing fairly well in the battleground states. She asked Zerlina Maxwell if Democrats should be terrified of that reality. Maxwell responded that she was not scared but that some fear is a good thing. No one should think they have the win in the bag.
But Zerlina went much further with an important narrative.
“There is something happening right now not only in the media but also on the Democratic side where we are asking a question that is just completely based on the wrong premise,” Zerlina said. “And the premise is basically ‘How do we win back those voters who voted for Donald Trump who voted for Obama. How do we get them back? Right?’
Maxwell then pointed out the shortsightedness of that premise.
“That is a false premise,” Maxwell continued. “I am not saying that you are not going to try to get some of those voters back. But there was a seven percent drop off in black turn out from 2012 to 2016. Those people will vote for you. But you have to give them a reason. So the question is not do I want to vote for Trump or this Democrat. It is, do I want to vote or stay home.”
Many regularly voting Democrats tend to slam those who don’t vote. I have been known to do so many times as well. But on deeper thinking I realize that many times we just seek the vote of some for our self-interest denying support for policies these non-voters would want. Worse, too many times we ask them to vote even as we ask them to wait in perpetuity. When we understand these realities we will be better able to connect not only to the chronic non-voter but to the voter we lost.
We have some time to fix the problems. But if that time is spent trying to ‘manage’ this election away from the base, we will pay dearly at the polls.