A long road back for Democratic Party

AT the national level and in Oklahoma, the Democratic Party is looking for ways to recover from what for the former was a disastrous election year and for the latter has been a long, steady decline in popularity. Turnaround is possible for both, but is it likely?

There are some factors that suggest the answer is yes. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at about 40 percent, well below any president since such tracking began with Harry Truman in 1945. Trump’s executive order on immigration created a firestorm, and he lost his first big policy fight when he was unable to persuade enough GOP House members to approve an Obamacare replacement bill.

That defeat led Josh Kraushaar, political editor at the liberal National Journal, to say Republicans “look embarrassingly incapable of governing” and that Democrats have a good shot to retake the U.S. House in 2018. Kraushaar also noted that political engagement among Democrats “is surging,” due largely to animosity toward Trump.

That may be so, but the party’s apparatus is wheezing. The Democratic National Committee has asked all current staff members to submit resignation letters as part of Chairman Tom Perez’s retooling of the headquarters.

Perez is the third person in the past year to serve as DNC chairman. The party lost the presidential election with what it believed was a slam-dunk candidate, Hillary Clinton, after having to deal with allegations that it favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders during the primary.

Sanders pulled Clinton and the party further left during the campaign, and it didn’t work. Perez’s defeat of Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for the top DNC post has been painted as a Barack Obama-style Democrat defeating someone from the progressive wing, but the distinction isn’t all that great.

And, Trump’s victory was a clear rejection of Obama’s agenda, one Clinton promised to continue and even expand upon. Unless that changes, the national party could struggle to recover.

In Oklahoma, the challenge ahead is even greater. Republicans hold every congressional seat, every statewide office, and supermajority control of the House and Senate. In 2000, Democrats held 61 of 101 House seats; today, they hold 26. In the 48-member Senate, the Democratic caucus numbers just six.

Meantime, the Democratic Party makes up 39.4 percent of the electorate, the smallest proportion since the state Election Board began compiling registration data in 1960. Forty-six percent of registered voters are Republican, and 14.6 percent are independents. The latter two categories continue to grow.

Democrats will vote for their party chair in May. Three people, including the current chairman, plan to seek the job. “This is the year we turn conversations into action,” one candidate said recently.

We shall see. Republicans have implemented large and painful cuts to state agencies as a result of massive budget shortfalls, and their decisions have been questioned even by some within the GOP. This would seem to provide an opening to build momentum for the Democratic Party. Yet in the 2016 elections, Democrats lost ground in the Legislature.

A turnaround is possible, certainly — this is politics, after all — but it’s also apparent that whoever wins the party chairmanship in May faces a long and very difficult road back.