Failure of the Democratic Party

I've read a fair number of articles now about how the Democratic Party has failed with many different theories.  The one I haven't heard much is the failure to focus on local politics.  Personally that's my favorite theory.

Back in the early 2000s there was a quite a bit of writing concerning the Republican Party targeting local politics to build a political power base.  They were going after the state legislatures because in 2010 they wanted to be in charge of the redistricting of legislative districts.  They succeeded.  The Democratic Party did nothing.  As I mentioned there was a fair amount of political writing about this.  There's no way the Democratic Party leadership couldn't not have known it was happening, but they chose not to act at the local level.  The Democratic Party chose to focus on state wide and national politics because that's where the the court appointments were made.  The gave up retail politics in favor of wholesale politics and they are and have been paying the price for that decision.

In the most recent election the Democratic Party was convinced it would win.  Back in August and September Hillary Clinton started reducing resources going to her "firewall states" and started campaigning in traditional Republican states that weren't "swing states" but seemed to be soft based on polling.  I really have no clue what they were hearing at the local level, but I have seen a few articles where local level party volunteers were complaining of a lack of resources and that they weren't hearing from the national campaign or the national party.  I assume they were also not hearing much from their local state parties.  Hillary Clinton went on to lose those traditional Republican states and also to lose her "firewall states."  My supposition is that is she and the Democratic Party at both the state and national levels failed to listen to what the town and county party committees and chairs were hearing in their communities.

A few years ago I was a member of my local town committee in Massachusetts.  I even served for a year as chair of the town committee.  I attended the state convention a few times.  There was very limited coordination from the State Party Committee.  They had their own statistics and their own staff.  We had two elections in that time and very limited interaction with the State Party.  We were very much on our own.  Near as I can tell the State Democratic Party Committee in Massachusetts has no interest in the towns and cities and I haven't noticed if they have any sort of watch for rising local politicians who could be groomed to move forward.  I haven't seen much from them in our local races even for State Representative or State Senate.  I've long since given up on the town committee for many reasons, but chief among them is the lack of interest in the local level.  Maybe cities have a different experience.

I'm one person who was active in the Democratic Party and have since become inactive.  But I've seen enough and read enough that I hold strongly to my belief that the Democratic Party has surrendered local politics and until they refocus they'll continue to wander in the wilderness.