What’s Left
Abraham Lincoln was a “life-long” member of the Whig Political Party. In 1848, he campaigned for his party’s Presidential candidate, General Zachary Taylor. The Democrat running against Taylor was General Lewis Cass, and Lincoln derided his candidacy.
“A fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has Gen. Jackson’s popularity been to you [Democrats]. You not only twice made President of him out of it, but you have had enough of the stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.”
This may not have been the first time Democrats were derided as “yellow dogs”, but it certainly wasn’t the last. The phrase came to mean anyone who voted a straight Democratic ticket, regardless of who was running for office. They became known as “Yellow Dog Democrats”. They’d choose a Yellow Dog rather than voting for a Republican.
The Whig Party broke apart in 1854 over slavery. Many of the Northern Whigs joined the new anti-slavery party, the Republican Party, including Lincoln.
Georgia’s Choice
Raphael Warnock won re-election to the US Senate in the Georgia runoff last week. What looked like a “squeaker” all evening turned out to be a relatively comfortable win, as Warnock defeated his Republican opponent Herschel Walker by almost 100,000 votes, a bit more than Warnock’s margin over Kelly Loefler in 2020. After four state-wide campaigns in two years and almost $400 million, Senator Warnock will finally get to serve a full six-year term.
Warnock is the pastor of the famous Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. As a Senator, he proved instrumental in passing several pieces of legislation, and was surprisingly bi-partisan. As he tells it, he’s the 18th most bipartisan out of the one hundred Senators.
His Republican opponent Herschel Walker was a tremendous athlete. His exploits on the football field in the early 1980’s for the University of Georgia are legendary. Walker then went onto a professional career, playing first in the USFL, then in the NFL for over a decade. After he retired from football, he took on mixed martial arts, and even earned a place on the US Olympic Bob-Sled team in the 1992.
Walker was an outstanding athlete, but a questionable candidate. He’d left Georgia decades ago to live in Texas, and only returned thirteen months before this election . Walker also has a history of mental illness and domestic violence. When the campaign first began, his staff did an “opposition research” of their own candidate. In a week, it was over five hundred pages long. They were NOT allowed to talk to Walker’s former girlfriends. It turned out that he had several illegitimate children, some he acknowledged, and some were “discovered” during the course of the campaign.
And Walker had a difficult time articulating his views about the issues of the day. It made it easy for Democrats to ridicule him in ads on television and social media.
Party over Candidate
But the Georgia election was more about who supported which political party, rather than the individual candidates. The nation agreed: more money was spent in Georgia in the past two years than by any nationwide Presidential campaign up through 2012. There were not enough “Yellow Dog” Republicans to pull Walker over the top, even in a state where the Republican Governor won by almost 200,000 votes. Walker was that bad of a candidate – which raises the question: what were the over 1.7 million voters (out of 3.8 million) thinking when they marked “Walker” for their Senator?
Ohio is much the same way. In the 2022 election, the Democrat Tim Ryan was the “model” candidate in the nation. The Republican candidate, JD Vance was nowhere near as “bad” Walker, but was noted as one of the laziest Republican candidates in the country. Yet Vance still won, by over 150,000 votes (out of almost 4 million). The “quality” of the candidate didn’t matter here in Ohio, Republicans voted for their “Yellow Dog”.
Ohio’s Failing
What’s the difference between Georgia and Ohio? Certainly a lazy Vance was better than Walker talking about werewolves and vampires. But there is a more important consideration. The Democrats of Georgia, led by Stacy Abrams, have a voter turnout that is second to none. The Democratic Party of Georgia still can’t break the Republican grip on state offices, but they are closing the gap, in spite of the Republican legislature’s attempts to suppress Democratic voters. (Need proof of that – the Republicans tried to stop Saturday voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, citing a Georgia law that bans voting the day after a holiday. The holiday wasn’t Thursday’s Thanksgiving. It was Friday’s Robert E. Lee’s birthday).
Here in Ohio, the Democratic Party is, “…(O)ut-gunned, out-manned, out-numbered and out-planned,” (thanks “Hamilton”, I saw the Cleveland production last week – still awesome!!!). We are lacking infrastructure, financing, and most important, candidates. Tim Ryan was great, and Sherrod Brown is the exception that proves the point. But in general, we haven’t run a serious ticket for statewide office in a decade (A well-funded Nan Whaley might have made a difference).
Where is our Ohio’s “Stacy Abrams”? Who will lead the Democrats, almost two million of us, out of the wilderness of gerrymandered impotence? Ohio Dems will all vote for a Yellow Dog over a Republican, but we’ve got to get beyond the kennel to win.
