Dear Democratic Party,

Let’s face it: you guys got crushed in November during the 2014 mid-term elections. It was practically a slaughtering of blue states all across the country in what was already expected to be a Republican Party victory. Your battleground states where elections were predicted to be particularly strained by a partisan divide fell into the hands of Republican electorates, handing 7 new seats to the Republicans in the Senate. In addition, Republicans strengthened their grip on the House by attaining 11 seats, while Democrats lost a total of 7. In general, your key voters just didn’t show up to the polls. In fact, nobody really did: many report that the voter turnout was well below 38%. Either way, voters in America (the ones that showed up, anyways) voted overwhelmingly to add Republican seats in Congress. The election was a rejection of your entire party.

Now that the elections are over, it’s time to re-group. We should analyze the event: look over what didn’t work, what to do differently, and an actual progressive plan for the future. Essentially, what can you, the Democratic Party, take from the 2014 mid-term elections? How can you use this election to better the future of your party? To make things easy, I have 3 specific pieces of advice to touch on. Here they are:

1.      DO NOT abandon your credibility
2.      Run your campaign on something
3.      Have a plan for the future

It’s all simple, it’s all easy to follow, and I think you should listen. Here we go:

Number one: DO NOT abandon your credibility

What was most baffling about this past election is how your party practically abandoned the credibility it had built up over the past six years. Dozens of GOP candidates running this year ran their campaigns on an aggressive anti-left narrative: they relentlessly attacked the President and Democratic policy during their campaigns. They said that America’s economy is in the toilet; slip ups like Benghazi, the IRS targeting of conservatives, and the infamous White House fence jumper put the Obama administration at too many fouls; essentially, the Republican Party illustrated them as a total failure. However, we’re not in as bad of shape as some think we are. Things like our economic growth, improvement of foreign relationships and handling of national crisis are historically impressive. Do you remember when Obama first took a seat in the Oval Office? It was a total nightmare. Rewind to January 20th, 2009:

The unemployment rate then was around 7.6 percent (BLS 2009), a conservative figure without the amount of people not looking for work. We’d just slashed some 598,000 jobs the month before. Manufacturing had plummeted; the housing industry was on fire (and not in a good way); factories were closing across America, and the stock market had completely retreated; foreign policy appeared to be at the point of no return, and with our country still uncomfortably active in the Middle East, we weren’t exactly on good terms with… Well... anybody. President Obama inherited a mess, and he and your party were elected on the basis that you were going to turn everything inside out and fix it.

Fast forward: it’s now December of 2014, and compared to where we stood before the Democratic Party took office, we’re in fair shape. Have we fully recovered? Of course not. However, let’s take a look at the progress that’s been made:

To start off, our unemployment rate, is around 5.8% according to the Borough Labor of Statistics. Along with that, our workforce participation rate is at its highest since 1978: a whopping 62.8%. In terms of jobs, we’ve recently rehabilitated all of the lost jobs from the Recession. In fact, Forbes reports that under President Obama’s leadership, we’ve beat the conservatively-celebrated Reagan in expansion by a few years. Reagan didn’t achieve such a low unemployment rate until a full year later than Obama’s current term, and our job growth and GDP expansion outmatches his record. To top it off, we’ve sliced our federal deficit from 1.4 trillion in 2009 to less than 500 billion due to more exports and large cuts in spending according to the US Treasury. So, in other words, our economy seems to be making a slow and steady U-turn, rather than taking a drive of a cliff and into an ocean of Economic Depression.

Above all, America is not the constant crisis the Republicans running this year made it out to be. Yet, you practically abandoned your principles and information, and even purposely distanced yourselves from the President during the election to turn out more votes!Instead of remaining assertive, you reverted to utter passivity and let all of the attacks and billion dollar campaigns blow right past you. Use the facts to back up your campaign, to back up your party, and stand by the policies that are actually improving our economy, policy and relations instead of backing away from them. Don’t be afraid be assertive, and inform voters of your accomplishments.  In consideration of the accomplishments your party has enabled, this leads me to the second piece of advice:

Number two: Run your campaign on something

If there’s one thing the Republican Party did well this election, it was a providing a consistent platform for their takeover. Like I said, nationwide the GOP practically ran their campaigns on the basis that President Obama’s policies have tarnished the country. Even though these accusations have a substantial amount of conflicting evidence against them, it doesn’t matter; the Republican Party successfully convinced voters to elect them on this basis.

Namely, the Republican Party had something. They had something under them to revert to, something to sell, something to deliver, and that was their criticism against the President and Democratic Party. On the contrary, you had----well, nothing.You never found a platform, and therefore had nothing to offer during the elections. For example:

The predecessor to Mark Begich, newly elected Senator Dan Sullivan, ran a spineless campaign. Sullivan beat Begich by convincing voters that his opponent was infected with Washington politics and didn’t value or understand the issues Alaskans cared about. Instead of defending his standing on perhaps his spot on the one of the most powerful boards in the Senate, Mark’s campaign defense relied on how much worse off Alaska would be with Dan Sullivan. Mark abandoned his credibility and never ran his campaign on anything reliable, allowing Dan to surpass him in the election.

We could go on with examples. Democrats all over the US neglected to ground themselves as effective candidates! It’s one of the major reasons you got your butts handed to you this election. Here’s the point: in the 2016 election, build your platform before attempting a race without any plan, any consistency, or any confidence. Remember, you have this massive pile of credibility to eject from: use it! That was Begich’s mistake: completely abandoning all of his built up credibility that he should have been using during his campaign. In the next election, find that platform so that you can set yourself up for success. Without it, there’s no way voters are going to be able to cast a genuine ballot for you, marginalizing your Party’s chance at rehabilitating itself.

The third and final piece of advice is short and sweet: have a plan for the future. This election, you lost one of the main attributes of your party: a motive for progress. Something the Republican Party doesn’t have right now is a game plan. So what, they’ve got majority in the House and Senate. Now what? They haven’t projected a plan for the country, and they’re going to be scrambling to find one. You had that prospect entering the 2010 mid-terms: an idea, something to push forward, an engine. Depending on how the next 2 years go, think about what you’re going to offer to the country in terms of policies, reform, and compromise. Consider solidifying your stances on topics like immigration reform, resource extraction, income inequality and climate change so that the American people know what they’re voting for when they turn in their ballots. Think about how you’re going to going to run to improve the condition of the US, how you’re going to do it if you sweep back the House and Senate in 2016, and how you’re going to keep it all afloat if you succeed. Do what you guys were elected into Congress and the White House to do 6 years ago: look forward.

There it is: the three things you, the Democratic Party, need to do to regain your previous glory: you need to assert their credibility, ground yourself in their campaigns, and plan ahead. You used to be effective, back when you were able to utilize the mess we were in after Bush left office to show American voters where the party wanted to go from: you established their credibility by showing voters that the country was in trouble; found a platform to run on based on their credibility; and projected a long term plan to overhaul the status quo. That’s the strategy that allowed for you to get elected, and that’s the same strategy you’ll need to do it again.

Thank you.