Scenes From the Democratic Commiseration Club

Why’d the Dems get a historic shellacking? The soon-to-be unemployed staffers of the 111th Congress have a few theories.

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennharper/43426112/">glennharper</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


“So you’ve come to walk through the wake, eh?” one Democratic House staffer quipped shortly after I walked into Molly Malone’s, an Irish pub near Capitol Hill. On Monday, the bar was thronged with soon-to-be-out-of-work staffers for the 60-odd Democratic House members wiped out in the midterms. They’d come together to commiserate, share job-seeking advice—and drown their collective sorrows in more than a few drinks.

Nearly all of the young, soon-departing staffers I spoke to had spent their entire professional lives working on Democratic campaigns or on the Hill. Many were bracing for an indeterminably long walk through the political wilderness. Their coping strategies fell into roughly three categories: venting, rationalizing away the Democrats’ losses, and survivalist-minded resignation.

Venting: There were garden-variety complaints about the conservative wave that had pushed the Democrats out of office (“anti-gay tea partiers—that’s why I’m here,” one woman seethed). But staffers seemed to reserve the most vitriol for the Republican upstarts who had unseated their bosses or pulled off significant upsets.

Take Rick Scott, for instance. “He’s a criminal—a criminal!” sputtered one staffer standing near the bar, raging against Florida’s governor-elect, whose former health care firm was forced to pay out the largest Medicare fraud settlement in US history. “He defrauded all these people of their money, and they turn around and vote for him anyway.” The staffer had spent nearly a month on the campaign trail to vouch for his boss, but voters’ faces just went blank when he tried to persuade them to keep an incumbent Democrat in office. A colleague of his nodded in sympathy, shaking his head at the absurdity of it all: “Obama wasn’t progressive enough—so I’m voting for the tea partiers!”

Rationalization: By far the most popular explanation for the Democrats’ historic losses was the struggling economy—that, at the end of the day, there really was nothing that the Democrats could have done to stem the Republican tide. One staffer predicted that there’d be nothing to stem the tide of anti-establishment voter anger “until the unemployment rate is below 6 percent”—and who knows how long that’ll be.

Another staffer broke it down more simply: “If you were a Democrat, you could have run against Satan and you would have lost.”

At least for this election cycle, the consensus was that little that could have been done to save the vast majority of defeated Dems. If losses had been at 30 or 40 seats, you might have seen some second-guessing about political strategy, one Midwestern campaign veteran explained to me. But given the magnitude of the losses, all the best messaging in the world wouldn’t have saved the party. Another staffer, dressed down in a flannel shirt and jeans, broke it down more simply: “If you were a Democrat, you could have run against Satan and you would have lost.”

Resignation: Sure, the outgoing staffers were struggling to sort through the rubble of the Democratic political wipeout, but their most immediate concerns were about, well, their own political futures. One Hill veteran estimated that “over 1500” Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill would soon be out of jobs as a result of the midterm losses, an estimate that included staff for House members and House committees that were being turned over to the new GOP majority. Everyone has since been scrambling to milk their contacts and blanket Washington with resumes. At Molly Malone’s, it quickly became apparent that a job with the Obama administration was among the most coveted positions for departing Hill staffers—the only real place where things were going to get done in the next two years, one staffer informed me. Think tanks, non-profit organizations, and, yes, lobbying firms were also runners-up.

But others seemed less panicked about the job hunt—and even about the prospect that years could pass before the Democrats managed, once again, to control all levers of power in Washington again. The staffer who greeted me when I arrived told me about an epiphany that he’d had at a recent wedding. There, a Democratic sympathizer had laid out a hypothesis: What if the Democrats only came into power every 10 years to clean up the mess that Republicans had left behind? Could he be OK with that? He ultimately concluded that the inevitable turning of the political tide—however long it might take—gave him some consolation.

As for his own future prospects, the staffer said that he might consider going back home to Chicago if he couldn’t find another job in politics. But, deep down, he wanted to do whatever it took to stick around Washington—even if it meant laying low and, say, serving drinks for the next two years. “I know a lot of bartenders,” he assured me.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate