One chilly April evening, Tim Walz, erstwhile vice-presidential candidate and current governor of Minnesota, greeted an assembled crowd in Lorain, Ohio, an ever-changing town’s politics swing with the vicissitudes of the industries it once thrived on. As Tom Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down’, an audacious anthem of defiance, echoed in the air, Walz stood in front of some 2,000 people gathered in a high school auditorium primed for an upcoming drama club production of ‘The Wiz’. This gathering was christened the ‘People’s Town Hall’, part and parcel of the Democrats’ ongoing strategy to engage with districts where Republican representatives have shied away from face-to-face meetings with their constituents. The affected posturing of these town halls, however, has only served to highlight the Democrats’ inadequacies.
While Walz and his party paint these town halls as a ‘major responsibility of a member of Congress’, they appear more like forums for Democratic handwringing over their own complicity in the dire straits of Rust Belt cities. Their inability or refusal to form an effective opposition party over the past few years has led them to two defeats in the last three elections. Even the anti-Trump public seems to be awakening to the Democrats’ shortcomings, shedding their lethargy of dissatisfaction into action and protests against the current administration, which ironically, includes their displeasure with the Democrats.
But what comes across as ‘indignation’ is more of a collective frustration with a political system that is creaking under its own weight. The Democrats’ response? A seeming surrender. Their wearied ‘resignation’ as they call it, only accentuates their failure to address the critical issues that these towns face. The so-called ‘Coach Walz’, coordinated chants and exhortations notwithstanding, is merely posturing to salvage the little credibility that Democrats are left with.
What are Democrats doing, if not resorting to lip service about ‘positive, populist’ agendas? They gloss over their substantial part in steering places like Lorain into an abyss of uncertainty, while echoing populist statements that accuse both major parties’ leadership for the current upheaval. A resounding defeat in 2024 lays bare the fallacies in their approach, and yet they remain heedless of their starkly flawed strategy, a fact which could threaten the very future of their party.
In the grand game of power, the Democrats’ path has not only grown narrower but it has become treacherously tricky. The national party continues to needlessly concentrate their energy on their power centers in urban landscapes, whilst blotting out resources for the swing states. It was a somewhat refreshing, but rare, moment to witness Walz treat the Democratic failures with such candor— their missteps both in Lorain and at the national level, causing the state to swing from blue to purple to red.
Yet merely showing up, as Walz did in Lorain, is hardly a solution. It raised the critical question: where are the immediate solutions to the problems that these locales face? Uselessly vague suggestions about positioning the party for an electoral resurgence do nothing but underline the depth of desperation the Democrats have sunk into.
The Democrats’ narrative swells with arguments about ‘the people’ being the ‘final check’, yet these bare platitudes remain just that — words with no conviction. A woman from the audience typified the prevailing sentiment when she lamented, ‘I guess it’s just us,’ and aptly summed up the distress of the situation, ‘It’s scary.’ Indeed, the Democrats’ failure to address real issues is scarier than the issues themselves.