Tied to the Whipping Post

It seems urgent to figure out what to do in our politics going forward. I’d like to begin my work just after the New Year’s holiday. Disengaging from politics is not a useful option. I plan to stay with the fight and so should more of us.

It’s been almost seven weeks since the Nov. 5 election in which Iowa Democrats fared poorly. Donald Trump won the top of the ticket race against Kamala Harris, and Republicans added to their majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Republicans retained all four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mariannette Miller-Meeks winning in the first district by 799 votes. I’ve been reading, listening, and thinking about my experience and the best I can describe Democrats current situation is we are tied to the whipping post and everyone is whaling on us.

I get it. We get it. We lost the election and as we recover from the losses, we see the state party as a visible whipping boy. The week before Christmas I drove past the office on Fleur Drive in Des Moines and even I cringed at how little the building changed since I last paid a visit. Democrats won’t win elections by repeating the same strategies and tactics we used in 2024. It seems appropriate to have a discussion about whether to blow up the Iowa Democratic Party and start over.

I like the song Whippin’ Post, which I heard the Allman Brothers Band play on Feb. 19, 1972 at the University of Iowa Field House.

Sometimes I feel, sometimes I feel,
Like I’ve been tied to the whippin’ post.
Tied to the whippin’ post, tied to the whippin’ post.
Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.

I haven’t felt like I’m dying since the election. I attribute that to being an experienced septuagenarian with little to lose. We have the wrong expectation if we think the state party will dig us out of the hole we’ve gotten into. It is useless to whale on the state party and expect running the chair out of town on the rail will fix the problems. Further, it is plain wrong to expect the state party to lead us out of the darkness. We must find our own way.

There is a different usage for whipping post besides the place we can tie folks who don’t live up to our expectations and flog them.

John C. Leggett and Suzanne Malm described “Whipping Post” as a metaphor for a romantic relationship in which the participants masochistically stay in though it has gone bad. This definition invokes the mutuality between the leadership and members of the Iowa Democratic Party. It is aptly applied to today’s politics. We must free ourselves from the relationship and break up.

Endemic to the current party structure is a misdiagnosis of key issues in a campaign. More than anything, politics has gotten local. In Big Grove Precinct, where I live, the electorate is divided. Trump won here in 2024. During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won over Joe Biden 671 votes to 637. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton 575 votes to 529. Barack Obama won here in both 2008 and 2012. My precinct has a divided electorate and has recently been won by both Democrats and Republicans. While new people moving to our area lean Republican, the key issue is how does an organizer build a Democratic majority at the polls, recruiting votes regardless of party? We didn’t address that in 2024. It was hard to get anyone to do normal grassroots work in my area. Both these things need our urgent attention.

Others have recently written about the First Congressional District Convention on May 5, in North Liberty. The description I wrote soon afterward hits a key point:

A speaker at the convention looked around the room and suggested the dominance of white-skinned, grey-haired delegates is the problem with the party. Whatever. Had rain not been forecast during the convention hours, I would rather have been working in our yard. The trouble, as I experienced recruiting a replacement for my position on the county central committee, is literally no one is willing to do the work to provide steady volunteer work for local Democrats. That’s a much different problem than skin tone and hair color among people willing to show up on a spring Saturday.

It also indicates that whoever is party chair will have minimal influence on how campaigns are organized. It is up to us to self-organize.

No matter how many teams of canvassers are deployed by Democratic organizations, Democrats will be frustrated. I suggest something else is at work. What drives people not to care about our governance? Where did the breakdown of top-down methods used in the past by Democrats occur? Answers to these and other questions seem more important than keeping the Iowa Democratic Party (or ourselves) tied to the whipping post.