By Lucius Gantt
The Democratic Party needs the Obamas!
The 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his wife Michelle, are the best messengers that the Democratic Party has to generate the necessary votes in the upcoming 2022 elections.
The Obamas may be formidable campaigners, but they may not be enough, and I’ll explain why.
Barack and Michelle will not run around the country willy nilly trying to help elect Democrats. The Obamas will go where the highly paid conservative Democratic consultants tell them, or order them, to go.
History suggests that the Democratic priority will try hardest to support white candidates seeking seats in the United States House of Representatives and Senate.
Most political professionals will tell you, “All politics are local.” If Democrats continue their carpetbagger strategy of sending 25-year-olds from Idaho to run campaigns in Georgia, Florida and Alabama the results will be the continued Republican control of state legislatures and local offices.
The Gantt Report has been saying for years that Democrats have inferior messaging, slow responses, bad political timing and disrespectful relations with their strongest voter base.
Don’t get me wrong, Democratic candidates are more attractive than their Republican opponents, but they continue to lose races because their consultants can’t turnout extraordinary numbers of voters, they won’t fight for votes in enemy territories (conservative cities and districts), and they refuse to increase diversity as America becomes more and more diverse. The recent idea of Democratic “loop politics”, where people in the loop will continue to collect massive salaries and contracts regardless if candidates win or lose, will probably never be abandoned.
Every day a poll comes out that says political races across the country are very close. Any rudimentary look at the political poll process will show most polls favor the political interests that finance the polls.
Two years ago, polls said Georgia was a red state and it would be impossible for any Democratic candidate to win a statewide race but voters in the Peach State defeated two Republican incumbents and elected two Democrats, one white and one Black.
Despite what pollsters say, Democrats can beat Republicans in Republican districts if they put a solid team together to fight the political fight.
Right now, Democrats are running a lot of ads, mostly about abortion bans but let me tell you what Republicans are doing.
Conservatives in the Republican right-wing base have been hired by the GOP and they are going door-to-door in targeted communities with targeted messages. Republicans are seeing GOP TV ads and getting visits by GOP campaign workers at the same time.
They are not knocking on doors to chuckle, grin and giggle, they are telling residents that Blacks, Jews and immigrants that vote for Democrats are out to replace them, they continue to say Donald Trump is President because the 2020 election was stolen and while telling lies, the GOP is helping voters with absentee ballots if they support Republicans.
In other words, the GOP is spending money with the GOP base and the party you love is not seriously spending with their base.
Republican voices say their party is more scientific, more technological and the GOP will hire anybody, of any race or color, which can help them win.
I say the party that works hardest and works smartest will be victorious on election day.
Barack and Michelle can do a much better job of messaging, but they are not experts in turning out gang members, crackheads, pick pockets, pimps, prostitutes, pirates and panhandlers like the GOP can turn out the truck vote, the military vote, the senior vote or the nationalist and supremacist votes.
One more thing, most women are pretty much united in their fight for the right to make choices about their health care.
However, they are not united about which individual candidates they will vote for.
Increased registration does not necessarily mean more women at the polls will translate into more Democrats being elected.
Lucius is a contributing columnist to NNPA newspapers around the nation, and the author of “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” available on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere.