MACON,
Ga. — In Georgia, a Democratic lawmaker planning a run for governor
promises to confront President Trump and what she calls the “fascists”
surrounding him. In Maryland, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P. warns
national Democrats not to take African-Americans for granted. The mayor
of Tallahassee, Fla., goes even further, declaring that Democrats have
failed by fixating on centrist voters.
In states from Massachusetts to Florida, a phalanx of young black leaders in the Democratic Party
is striding into some of the biggest elections of 2018, staking early
claims on governorships and channeling the outcry of rank-and-file
Democrats who favor all-out battle with Mr. Trump and increasingly
question his legitimacy as president.
By
moving swiftly into the most contentious midterm races, these
candidates aim to cement their party in forceful opposition to Mr. Trump
and to align it unswervingly with minority communities and young
people. Rather than muting their differences with the Republican Party
in order to compete in states Mr. Trump won, like Georgia and Florida,
they aim to make those distinctions starker.
And,
these Democrats say, they are willing to defy the conventional
strategic thinking of the national party establishment, which has tended
to recruit moderate, white candidates for difficult races and largely
failed to help blacks advance to high office under President Barack
Obama.
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Stacey
Abrams, the Democratic leader in the Georgia House of Representatives
and a likely candidate for governor, said Democrats would win by
confronting a president who was viewed with fear and hostility by the
party’s base.
Rather
than pivoting to the center, Ms. Abrams, 43, said Democrats should
redouble their focus on registering and energizing blacks, Hispanics and
Asian-Americans, as well as young and low-income voters, who often
decline to participate in politics.
“There
is a hunger for representation,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview.
“There is a desire to make certain the state starts to serve everyone.”
At
a “Macon Resists” town hall event in central Georgia last month, Ms.
Abrams appealed to an auditorium of anxious Democrats with just that
approach. The state, she said, is speeding toward a political
crossroads, with Republicans “terrified of the evolving nature of our
state.”
“We
can either move forward or we can let the president, and those fascists
that surround him, pull us backwards,” she said. “I plan to go
forward.”
Ms.
Abrams, who filed paperwork this month to explore a run for governor,
spent much of the event explaining the wrangling of the Georgia
legislature in cool, pragmatic terms. But in the interview, she was
adamant that Democrats could not “fake a conservative bent” in order to
win the next election in her state, which voted for Mr. Trump by about
six percentage points.
“A Democrat wins an election in Georgia by speaking truth to power,” she said.
In
other states, black Democratic leaders have been just as pointed in
their calls for the party to try something new. Benjamin T. Jealous, a
former president of the N.A.A.C.P., is exploring a campaign for governor
of Maryland while warning the national party that minority voters could
stay home if they are not inspired. Andrew Gillum, the mayor of
Tallahassee and a declared candidate for governor of Florida, said
Democrats had repeatedly erred by failing to “lean into our base” and by
chasing votes nearer to the center instead.
These
candidates have brandished data indicating that black turnout slumped
in 2016, the first presidential election in a dozen years without Mr.
Obama on the ballot: The Census Bureau found that black turnout last year dropped sharply from 2012.
The
field of states where youthful black Democrats are competing in 2018 is
likely to expand: In Massachusetts, Setti Warren, the 46-year-old mayor
of Newton, is gearing up for a race against Gov. Charlie Baker, a
hugely popular Republican. African-American candidates are more
tentatively considering statewide races in Illinois, Nevada and Ohio.
And in Virginia’s off-year elections, Justin Fairfax, a 38-year-old
former prosecutor, is the favorite to become the Democratic nominee for
lieutenant governor.
A
handful of somewhat older black leaders may also test their odds in
2018: Carl Brewer, 60, a former mayor of Wichita, is running for
governor in deeply conservative Kansas, and in Maryland, Rushern Baker,
the 58-year-old Prince George’s County executive, may also seek the
Democratic nomination to challenge Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican with
strong poll ratings.
In
Florida, where Democrats have not won a governor’s race since 1994, Mr.
Gillum, 37, said it was time to discard a losing formula: The party has
typically nominated candidates for governor who are white, moderate and
from the Tampa area.
Mr.
Gillum, by contrast, has offered himself as a candidate of the left. A
firebrand on the stump, he has called insistently for a rollback of
Republican education policies and for aggressive action against climate
change. Since House Republicans passed a bill that would gut the
Affordable Care Act, Mr. Gillum has made protecting health care
regulations on the state level a centerpiece of his message.
“There’s
muscle memory that’s been built up over a long time about what the
candidate has to look like, sound like, where they have to come from,”
he said. “In our case, in Florida, it hasn’t worked.”
That
sense of frustration among black Democrats parallels, in some respects,
the exasperation Democrats in general have voiced after the 2016
election.
If
certain black candidates like Mr. Gillum and Ms. Abrams are urging an
untested path, they may find primary voters more receptive to the idea
after the failure of conventional Democratic strategies against Mr.
Trump. Mr. Gillum and Ms. Abrams have already attracted significant
interest from national liberal donors: Mr. Gillum’s first fund-raising
report showed contributions from members of the Soros family, and
several donors supportive of Ms. Abrams are expected to create a
multimillion-dollar committee to advocate her election, according to
people briefed on their plans.
The
determination to compete in 2018 may run deeper in the black community,
where the sense of political exclusion is even more acute. With the end
of the Obama administration, there are few black Democrats in senior
positions of power: just two black Democrats in the Senate and no black
governors of either party. A third black senator, Tim Scott of South
Carolina, is a Republican.
There
is limited optimism among African-American Democrats that national
party leaders will work aggressively to change that. Several of the most
promising black candidates or would-be candidates — including Mr.
Gillum, Ms. Abrams and Mr. Jealous — are likely to face contested
primaries against well-known, well-funded white opponents. And the
battle for control of the House and Senate is likely to be fought
largely in rural states with few minority voters, and in suburban congressional districts where right-of-center whites often cast the decisive votes.
Symone
D. Sanders, a spokeswoman for Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016
presidential campaign, said she was concerned that national Democrats
might reflexively favor white candidates in close races, rather than
trusting black candidates to win over swing voters.
“They
are not going to get there on their own, so they are going to need to
be pushed,” Ms. Sanders said of Democratic leaders in Washington. “We
need to have candid conversations about the lack of recruitment, the
lack of support, for candidates of color on the Democratic side.”
At
a recent fund-raising event in Baltimore, a lineup of black Democratic
officials and strategists lamented what they described as an attitude of
neglect toward black candidates in some quarters of the national party.
The gathering raised money for Collective PAC, a new political action
committee set up specifically to benefit black Democrats running for
office.
Speaking
at a brightly lit downtown cafe, Jeff Johnson, a Democratic strategist
and pundit, said the Democratic Party routinely told black candidates
and advocates, “We love you, but wait till next time.”
“I’m frankly tired of being told what to do by people who don’t know my community,” Mr. Johnson said.
Mr.
Jealous, who also addressed the Collective PAC event, said in an
interview that he hoped the next elections could echo the moment after
Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid in 1988, when Democrats rebounded from
defeat by electing the first black mayor of New York City, David N.
Dinkins, and the first black governor of Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder.
“Our
greatest opportunity is just to be who we are — to be unapologetically
who we are, to be clear about what we believe in,” Mr. Jealous said.
“And I believe we can build an even bigger, much more diverse
coalition.”
Yet
for black Democratic politicians and donors, that optimism exists
alongside a sharp feeling of concern about the 2018 elections, and a
pervasive awareness that the end of Mr. Obama’s presidency has left
their community’s political power at a low ebb.
As
Mr. Warren, the Newton mayor, dined in South Boston in late March with
supporters of a possible run for governor, one ally, Darryl Settles, a
real estate developer and restaurateur, said the sudden absence of black
Democratic leaders was especially conspicuous in Massachusetts, where
the state’s first black governor, Deval Patrick, left office in 2015.
Mr.
Settles, who lives in Newton, recalled that as recently as 2014 his
children had attended a school with portraits of Mr. Warren, Mr. Patrick
and Mr. Obama on the walls. A different set of portraits hangs there
now.
“If
we don’t support black candidates, then my son, who’s 11 years old, and
my daughter, who’s 12 years old, would never, ever think to be a public
servant,” Mr. Settles said, urging black Democrats to pursue high
office. “If they’ve got some swag, if they’ve got a skill set, it’s
their duty.”
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