Last week’s government shutdown and the women’s marches throughout the nation have set the stage for the 2018 showdown between Democrats and Republicans for the soul of Democracy. These mid-term elections may eclipse 1992 as the year of the political woman when more women were elected to the U.S. House and Senate than at any time in American political history unless Democrats blink on the opportunity. On a recent Time Magazine cover, The Avengers, women who are running for office - U.S. House and Senate, state legislative, county, school board, and mayoral races and fighting for racial, economic, and social equality - have been profiled. These females were inspired by the 2017 Women’s March which was a response to “… the bitter defeat of the first major female presidential candidate at the hands of a self-described pussy grabber,” and they launched an even larger protest on January 20th of this year, the anniversary of Donald J. Trump’s election as president. Since 2017, four times as many Democratic women have filed to run for office as have Republican women.

They are the point of the spear for 2018 as they were for Patty Schachtner, a Democrat in St. Croix County, who upset Rep. Adam Jarchow for the open seat in Wisconsin’s rural 34th District that Trump carried by 17 points in 2016 and that had been in Republican hands for 17 years. It is a shot across the bow for the state’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker who is up for re-election in November and who is also an enthusiastic Trump supporter. As noted in earlier columns, this victory may be a precursor of an impending blue wave (or not). But the larger issue is: can Democrats focus like a laser beam on the issues of greatest appeal to voters in every region and at every level in America?

While pursuing a degree in health behavior, I learned from field experience that change strategies that piggybacked existing concerns and views in communities were most successful and enduring. The Democratic Party’s leadership, to date, has tried to dictate perspectives on issues for the party faithful rather than to listen and respond to their most pressing interests. Trump’s political genius was to appeal to the vile, moderate, and elite elements of the Republican Party to squeeze out narrow victories in traditional Democratic-voting states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (by a combined 68,000 votes) to win the Presidency. Democrats have generally overlooked their mistakes in allowing this to occur.

However, last Friday’s government shutdown was an indication that Democratic party leaders and strategists had finally heeded the messages being sent by their core supporters: African American and Hispanic women; increasing numbers of white women; millennials; LGBTs; Native Americans in red states (North Dakota and Montana) won by Democratic Senators; and many Asian ethnic groups that had rewarded this attentiveness in Wisconsin, Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia, in succession, with extraordinarily high percentages of their votes and turnout. Those present at the Women’s March, including tens of thousands of men, and numerous other members of the Democratic base were in sync with the shutdown as they have tired of Democratic leaders and strategists who have continuously allowed Trump to “pimp them out” and then to go out and brag about it.

If they had stood fast in opposing Trump and the Republicans on immigration, Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and other policies that their main supporters favor, they would almost assuredly prevail in the 2018 midterms. Trump adroitly beckoned Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the Senate’s Minority Leader, to the White House to supposedly agree to a deal on these matters, patted him on the head like a child, and then quickly retracted the compact they had negotiated after Schumer left. Democrats are once again positioning themselves to snatch defeat in the 2018 mid-terms from the jaws of victory as they did in 2016.

In spite of this double cross, Trump and the Republicans were able to hoodwink the Democrats into supplying the votes to reopen the government until February 8th by having Senate’s Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) provide them a meaningless, carefully worded promise on DACA and immigration policy and giving a wink and a nod to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to pass the bill in the House to ensure Democratic capitulation. Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) resolved that “Democrats are good at articulating values but weak at defending them. Democrats caved.” Immediately after the Democratic surrender, a fundraising email was sent under Trump’s name reiterating that point and promising a “… deal on immigration only if it was good for the country,” which is reminiscent of language he used in his betrayal of Sen. Schumer last week on the DACA agreement which led to the shutdown in the first place. Using this slick approach, Trump was able to peel off thirty-three Democratic Senators to join Republicans in closing the deal, causing turmoil among Democrats. The sixteen Democrats who voted nay included five who are vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination: Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Bernie Sanders (D-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA),who did so to solicit support from the Democrat’s progressive base.

And during the halt of government operations, Trump’s Presidential Committee (PAC) released an ad demonizing undocumented immigrants as murderers (and Democrats as being complicit) that was more racist than the infamous Willie Horton commercials aired by the George H.W. Bush campaign during his successful 1988 bid for President. Nonetheless, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) led three-quarters of her caucus to vote against this pact, demonstrating that she has more cojones than her Senate counterpart, Sen. Schumer. When the Democrats are likely re-stabbed in the back on February 8th by Trump, McConnell, and Ryan, their key enthusiasts as noted above will be disheartened, as many already are, and splinter off as they did in 2016 unless Senate Democrats get some backbone and are willing to finally get it on.

What the Democrats have to recognize is that the “Women are Coming” for their rightful places in local, county, state, and national offices! Being more than fifty percent of the electorate, they no longer wish to be politically patronized and/or misguided by their male peers, which was part of the problem that Hillary Clinton faced in being led by Robby Mook and John Podesta to not campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin and to “mis-campaign” in Pennsylvania. She followed their leads because she, like many women historically, had been socialized into believing that men know best about politics, which resulted in women being officially denied the right to vote for 132 years until they launched the suffrage protests in the nineteenth century which led to their being granted the franchise in 1920. Prior to that time, they were mostly reduced to functioning like the maids in the “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Now American women are rebelling against this status and taking charge of their political lives.

With the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is being led by two males as well as males dominating leadership posts in the U.S. House and Senate, it is time for them to listen, learn, and take direction from a contemporary racial and gender diverse generation of female leaders. The continuing attacks on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who led Democrats out of the wilderness in 2008, especially by Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH), who has no other plan than to peel off Trump voters, is ridiculous on its face. Ryan naively believes he can concentrate his efforts on recruiting Trump voters and take his Democratic constituency for granted because they have nowhere else to go - a mistake that has generated low Democratic turnout when it has been implemented. Democrats can only seize the momentum if their male leaders follow current female organizers who have their ear to the ground and who have responded to the yearnings of rank-and-file Democrats looking for a new direction for themselves and the Party.

Male Democratic bosses getting past their arrogance and chauvinism will determine whether Democrats or Republicans will prevail in the 2018 midterms. In the meantime, Trump and his Republican posse are sticking to their venomous and diabolical guns - anti women, anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti-LGBT, anti-public education and teachers, and anti-children - that has served them well so far. Their view is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Hence, Democrats need to break Trump’s political back during the midterms.

If the Democrats do not stand up on February 8th after Trump and Leader McConnell are likely to bend them to their will once again, they may lose the fervor of the Democrats’ progressive wing which could tank their prospects for taking over the House or Senate in the 2018 mid-terms.

Finally, the slow roll toward Apartheid and the Democratic Party’s’ political and strategic incompetence are the elephants in the room. First, Trump has seized upon white nationalism, homophobia, racial gerrymandering, racism, and anti-immigrant backlash to bring the long smoldering anxieties of a mostly white third of the electorate to center stage. Trump has allied himself with the most noxious representatives of these societal outlooks: David Duke, Judge Roy Moore, Richard Spencer, Congressmen Steve King (D-IA), Mark Meadows (R-NC), etc. whose views he has directly and subtly endorsed in executive orders, speeches, and tweets, drafted by himself and his former and present white nationalist advisors, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, respectively. They believe that by firing up their rabid, xenophobic followers, they can maintain and expand their power since they rightly (so far) determined that a sizeable percentage of the remaining citizenry would not publicly object, and that many would cast their vote for Trump and his cronies as they did in 2016.

Second, the Democrats disregarded impartial research, The One Percent (2017) by Gordon Laffer; Democracy In Chains (2017) by Nancy MacLean; Dark Money (2016) by Jane Mayer (along with a series of articles in the New Yorker over the last decade); Sons of Wichita (2014) by Daniel Shulman; Big Money (2014) by Kenneth P. Vogel, and a host of other articles and blogs that have articulated the actions, funders, and outcomes of the aforementioned perspectives. Trump is attempting to codify these viewpoints into existing political institutions. After initial victories, he has been lately beaten back in Wisconsin, Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia as the silent majority is beginning to demonstrate that Trump’s version of American is not one they embrace and that it does not wish to become pre-1990 South Africa. Yet Democrats abandoned their values and stood on the sidelines pointing their fingers at Trump, as a racist, misogynist, and elite white nationalist, to no avail. They neglected to organize against him until Democratic (and some Republican) women and their progressive and moderate partners started doing so on their own.

The battle lines have been drawn. The only remaining question is whether the males who dominate national Democratic governance have the political guts and cojones to engage in the political war for the soul of democracy. It’s time!