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A small pathway was cut Tuesday evening.
It’s barely more than an overgrown, hard-to-spot trail at this point. It needs to be trampled down, walked continuously and then paved over.
It is the pathway back to relevancy for Alabama Democrats. It also is the pathway back for national Democrats.
It was forged in Tuscaloosa. In a council race for one of the city’s poorest districts. It is small. It is minor. It is easily dismissed and easily overlooked. But make no mistake, it is THE pathway.
Joe Eatmon unseated incumbent councilman Matthew Wilson. He was the only incumbent to lose.
And one of the reasons he lost was labor.
UAW union leaders and workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant located just outside of Tuscaloosa took exception to Wilson’s antics back during a union organizing effort at the plant. UAW leaders told Wilson that they’d work to defeat him, that they’d bring their workers to his district and go door to door to beat him for turning his back on the city’s working folks.
That’s exactly what they did.
White, black, young, old – they showed up to help Eatmon. He won handily, 582-407.
Now, to be certain, Eatmon was a good candidate and had positions and ideas outside of pro-labor that resonated with voters. He was not by any stretch a single-issue candidate and this race wasn’t a single-issue race. But there’s also no denying the role that labor – and the platform of supporting workers and advocating for the common man – played in Eatmon’s win.
Just like there’s simply no denying the impact and reception that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are seeing as they go around the country on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. Thousands are showing up for rallies, and they’re very quickly starting to cross political lines, racial lines and generation gaps.
Because … this is the way.
There is one group of people in this country who are continually abused, manipulated, shafted and hosed – working people. That demographic is the largest in the country and it includes basically everyone: Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, male, female, young, old, conservative, liberal and all of the I-don’t-care-about-politics folks.
That’s who’s showing up to those Sanders-AOC rallies. A bunch of pissed off working people who are watching the guy who promised to make eggs cheaper now tell them that they’re going to have to suck it up and deal with the economic pain of his idiotic policies, as he tries to convince them to buy an electric car from the world’s richest man.
The American people have just demonstrated to the world that the number one issue on their minds is money. Their money.
You screw around with their money, you lose. That simple.
It didn’t matter that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had properly navigated a global pandemic or that the guy opposing them was an insane felon with no real idea about how to make the economy better for anyone not worth a billion dollars. The crazy felon was president the last time the voters’ money was OK, and so, lesson learned.
That lesson also works at the local level, like it did in Tuscaloosa.
But you have to stick to the plan. You have to be disciplined and focused and well versed and purposeful. You have to cut through the noise and you have to be relentless. And you have to be simple.
Like a cut to overtime taxes. Or funding for childcare. Or incentives for training. Or tax breaks for small businesses.
Focus on the economic issues that matter most to the people who are most concerned about making ends meet each month. And point out the hypocrisy and unfairness of those on the right who continue to string them along with BS culture war stuff while they line the pockets of their wealthy donors and friends.
And if they like DOGE, give them real DOGE. Highlight the corporate loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy that result in a billionaire paying a lower rate than a secretary. You think it’s a problem that we’re paying millions to feed hungry kids in a foreign nation? How about giving BILLIONS in subsidies to wealthy oil companies?
We’ve already seen that the American public is strongly disenchanted with the Trump administration. Tuesday’s election results in Florida and Wisconsin painted a grim picture of a shifting national attitude. People are starting to understand, and understand quickly, that they were bamboozled by Trump and his fantastic promises to fix everything by … Sharpie, I guess.
The Republicans, with their cowardly acquiescence to Trump on pretty much everything, have left themselves responsible for screwing over workers at every level, immigrants, farmers, federal workers, construction workers, contractors, home builders, autoworkers, automakers, public school teachers and employees, lawyers, veterans and the elderly.
There’s one sure way to reach them all – through a labor-based approach that eschews the culture war and focuses on what voters keep telling you is most important to them.
The pathway is right in front of you. Take it.
