Opinion Why isn’t Trumpism hurting the GOP? Some Democrats see vexing answers.
Yet the ongoing MAGA threat to U.S. democracy, including from Donald Trump himself, isn’t harming Republican chances of winning the House and very plausibly the Senate. Some think Democratic warnings are backfiring: Former Obama strategist David Axelrod suggested vulnerable Democrats don’t want the unpopular Biden to elevate himself in the election’s home stretch.
Why hasn’t the threat to democracy extracted a heavier price from Republicans? Is it true that vulnerable Democrats don’t want Biden to prominently address the topic? If so, should he have stood down, since Democrats themselves think protecting democracy above all requires keeping MAGA Republicans out of power? Could a more forceful case have made this a bigger voting issue?
I raised these questions with a number of senior Democratic strategists and pollsters working on tough House and Senate races. The answers that emerged are complicated, nuanced — and ultimately vexing.
First, it’s critical to note that messages about the threat to democracy mean different things to different voter groups, which means they help Democrats in some ways but not in others.
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake has found this mixed picture in extensive work with focus groups. Elevating threats to democracy, political violence and the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Lake tells me, “helps mobilize the Democratic base,” and, importantly, this kicked in at a key moment, when anger over the demise of abortion rights was “receding” in late summer.
This is not a small matter. Threats-to-democracy talk also galvanizes volunteers, who are critical amid soaring polarization and races decided on the margins, says Ezra Levin, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible.
That’s because a Biden speech about democracy is heard by countless volunteers as a call to action. “By firing them up, he increases the numbers of doors knocked, texts sent and calls made,” Levin told me, which may “amp up turnout in the final days.”
But Lake’s focus groups also find something troubling for Democrats. Swing voters aren’t moved by these topics, Lake says, because they see both parties in a similar light: They think both manipulate democracy to their advantage, and they see the 2020 urban unrest amid police protests as akin to Jan. 6.
“I think both parties do this — I think both sides do this,” Lake quotes many voters as saying. This is particularly pronounced among White swing voters, she says, though some college-educated White swing voters are more troubled by GOP conduct.
Because democracy talk galvanizes the Democratic base while washing out among swing voters, Lake sees it as a net positive. But her focus groups discern another reason swing voters aren’t that worked up: They don’t believe our institutions are under serious strain.
“One thing that diminishes the impact of some of the crises we’re facing is that Americans have historically had tremendous faith in our institutions,” Lake tells me, noting that Americans learn from fourth grade onward to be “institutional optimists.”
If so, perhaps voters don’t connect this moment to America’s long history of democratic backsliding into authoritarian rule and political violence in places like the Jim Crow South, as Jamelle Bouie urges people to do in the New York Times.
Indeed, in focus groups, voters treat GOP talk about overturning elections dismissively, as “behaving like children,” says Lake. While they believe Trump poses a continuing threat, they don’t realize there are “a thousand Trumps on the ballot.”
Making this worse, several strategists told me, is the weight of the economy on people’s lives, which causes voters to be more influenced by immediate conditions, which they blame on the guy in charge.
In short — despite scores of Republicans running for positions of control over election machinery while implicitly vowing to treat election losses as illegitimate, amid new portents of political violence and instability — these voters often don’t see such conduct as an actionable threat.
Democrats, of course, could have made a much more robust effort to warn voters of the threat of “semi-fascism,” as Biden called it.
The argument for this is as follows: Republicans lay down a loud and steady drumbeat about how terrifying the opposition is. But Republicans seize opportunities wherever possible to make noise about the supposed danger Democrats pose, even when it’s imaginary. The noise itself is the point. It sends a message: Something is deeply wrong with the opposition and you should feel disturbed, disoriented and frightened about it.
As Brian Beutler argues, Democrats could theoretically do more to draw national media attention to specific acts of “semi-fascism”: efforts to seize control of voting processes, threats toward election workers, the latest outbreak of Trump lawlessness. The idea here is that even if swing voters aren’t motivated by threats to democracy now, a sustained effort could shift attitudes over time.
But several Democratic strategists noted deep structural factors that work against this happening.
For instance, the national press sometimes covers democracy talk as a sign that Democrats aren’t focused on what voters “really” care about: inflation and the economy. This is hard to dislodge, because news organizations want to tout their own polls saying voters don’t see threats to democracy as important. When the media repeats this, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s worsened by the massive GOP media apparatus, which communicates with the base 24/7, even as Democrats have nothing comparable on their side, strategists noted. And it’s challenging to make abstractions about democracy urgent in voters’ daily lives.
Still, if Democrats do lose the House and the Senate, we’ll look back at the option Democrats didn’t fully try — a more concerted effort to highlight the dangers of MAGA — as the path not taken.
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