Can Democrats think strategically about Trump country?

It will mean finally letting go of neoliberalism

Conor Lamb supporters.
(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Democrat Conor Lamb seems to have eked out a narrow victory in the special election in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district — which President Trump won by 20 points in 2016. Far too much time, money, and attention has been lavished on this race — after all, this district is literally going to disappear when redistricting goes through before the 2018 midterms. But Lamb's victory is still a pretty impressive demonstration of just how much wind is at the Democrats' back. It also ought to serve as a reminder that if Democrats are going to win in places like western Pennsylvania, they have to formulate an ideological and political stance that reverses the last generation of weak and elitist neoliberal Democratic Party policy.

Hillary Clinton, in her trademark style featuring equal parts reasonable argument and astonishingly tone-deaf phrasing, recently all but admitted this fact. As my colleague Jeff Spross notes, as part of an explanation for why she lost the 2016 presidential election, she said: "I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward." Interpreting generously, one could read that as a tacit admission that the rest of the places that aren't on the GDP train really have been left behind, as President Trump constantly says, and that she and her party's failure to provide for those places is part of why she lost.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.