Since the disastrous 2016 election, one of the fundamental debates on the Democratic-progressive side has been over whether the future path to victory will involve winning over Trump voters, or energizing its own base in sufficient numbers to win. One of The Hot Screen’s guiding beliefs is that a progressive movement that appeals to far more than a narrow majority of the American population is within reach, as long as we’re bold enough to articulate and fight for a real vision of economic and social justice. While we’ve been persuaded that white supremacism and racial resentment play a larger role in the Trumpist and far-right political movement than we believed (or wanted to believe), we remain convinced that a key aspect of draining the power and influence of these resentments is to ensure that the economy serves all Americans, not just the wealthiest; that economic insecurity is an accelerant to racial scapegoating, and economic security a suppressant.
That said, how we approach the debate over appealing to Trump voters versus energizing Democratic voters is crucial to building this new majority movement. The results of the Virginia election earlier this month point towards the power of an energized, more traditional Democratic electorate; likewise, the sustained feminist backlash against Harvey Weinstein and other male predators suggests political repercussions for the Republican party come 2018 and 2020, though it’s clear that both parties may be roiled in ways we can’t predict. In other words, recent events are providing evidence that, as one might expect, an energized Democratic base is showing great electoral strength.
But The Hot Screen has been intrigued as well by several recent pieces of reporting that suggest ways in which progressives can, if not defuse the Trump base completely, then begin to peel away crucial votes from what is a large minority of the U.S. voting population. First, Ezra Klein of Vox makes the case that, although our current political situation has drawn comparisons with eras as dramatic as the pre-Civil War era and early Nazi Germany, we might be better served looking to the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency. As Klein describes, the Democrats generally looked at the 2004 election as a crossroads for the country, and George W.’s defeat of John Kerry led to familiar soul-searching about whether the Democrats had lost touch with the American people. Yet by 2006, in the face of President Bush’s increasingly undeniable incompetence in matters of both war and peace (the never-ending Iraq War, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), Democrats re-took Congress, and in 2008, of course, the presidency. Klein doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of which electoral coalitions rose and fell to make this possible, but his basic points seem a solid orienting principle — the failures of the governing party do eventually translate into electoral losses, and shifts in the balance of power can happen faster than we think.
Klein’s fellow Voxer, Matthew Yglesias, has written what feels to me like a companion piece to Klein’s essay, in which he explores the mechanics of how Democrats might begin to peel away people who voted for Trump in the last election. Focusing on to the victory of a ballot initiative that expands Medicaid in the state of Maine — a state that Hillary Clinton won only narrowly — he sees evidence that it’s possible to win over small but electorally significant chunks of the Trump coalition. Yglesias points to the vulnerability inherent in Trump’s 2016 electoral appeal, which combined rancid white nationalism with vows to protect Americans’ entitlement programs like Social Security. As has become glaringly obvious by now, Trump has doubled down on culture war, while going all in with the economic agenda of the 1%, through his support for Obamacare repeal, the GOP’s truly noxious leave-no-millionaire-behind tax plan, or his own budget’s call for severe cuts to Social Security. As Yglesias puts it:
No matter what Democrats say or do, small towns that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 are almost certain to support him again in 2020 and to support GOP candidates in 2018. But pulling 5 or 10 percent of them away would deal a devastating blow to the GOP’s overall electoral fortunes.
And while Ralph Northan’s Virginia victory powered mostly by white college graduates was impressive, to make significant midterm inroads, Democrats will need to win in places where the white population tilts more working class. The Maine referendum seems to point the way to do it: remind people that Democrats like the same safety net programs they do, and that Trump has broken his promises to protect them.
To return for a moment to the debate we started with: it’s one thing to speculate that it’s possible to peel away Trump voters with populist appeals, it’s another thing to find evidence that this is possible and that Donald Trump’s betrayals of his voters will inflict electoral damage on both him and the GOP at large in future elections.
Former 2012 Obama presidential campaign manager Jim Messina offers another take on winning over Trump voters. In a piece titled “Trump’s Tweets Are Hurting Him with the Voters He Needs Most,” Messina relates insights he’s gained from running focus groups involving Obama voters who either turned to Trump or at least did not vote for Hillary Clinton. In April, a group of such voters from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania indicated that though they were aware of Donald Trump’s racism and misogyny, they believed the president was working on improving the economy — results that have actually been reflected in national polls that show Trump’s handling of the economy receiving approval on the order of 25% higher than his overall job rating. At the same time, the focus group voiced concern about Trump’s constant Twitter battles, and how they worried he was not focused on helping the economy.
This much is suggestive of a way to woo this particular subset of Trump voters — but it gets even better. Messina’s firm went on to try out four different criticisms of Trump’s handling of the economy. The one that linked his tweeting with lack of success in bringing jobs back to the U.S. decreased the former Obama voters’ approval of Trump’s handling of the economy by 21 points. Just as potently, linking Trump’s huge tax cuts for the rich and program cuts for the middle class dropped his approval on the economy by 24 points with this group. Messina also notes another intriguing fact: when they approached those voters again six weeks later, those who’d received the message linking Trump’s tweeting to his lack of progress on the economy had a much worse view of Trump than the other respondents.
Messina concludes that Democrats should “relentlessly” link Trump’s universe of Twitter comments to his economic failures. It is hard to find fault with this common-sense assessment; in fact, it gratifyingly accords with The Hot Screen’s rule (not always followed) to never attack Trump without including an economic criticism. In a way, Messina’s focus on Trump’s tweets is a kind of ju-jitsu method of using Trump’s domination of the media against him. That Trump tweets about non-economic matters is not proof that he’s not working on the economy — but the obvious energy he puts into the world of Twitter, coupled with people’s own lived experience of a lackluster economy, turn his tweets into a persuasive symbol and crucial piece of evidence that he’s not looking out for average Americans. Highlighting his tweets as a phenomena in themselves, rather than engaging with their substance, is also a clean way to sidestep the distracting function the tweets seem pretty obviously meant to serve.
The grounds for optimism in the articles I’ve highlighted share a rational approach to politics: people are persuadable by facts; every reaction sparks a counter-reaction; all Americans share a common commitment to democracy. But because our political crisis is ultimately about so much more than simply citizens’ rational appraisal of their circumstances, I want to end with an article by Michael Kruse that revisits Trump voters in Johnstown, PA with whom the author spoke during the 2016 campaign. The point it drives home is that there is a certain segment of the population that seems no longer persuadable to vote for someone other than Trump; that certain voters have moved from making their support of Trump contingent on his betterment of their lives to offering him their approval no matter what happens. As Kruse memorably puts it:
Johnstown voters do not intend to hold the president accountable for the nonnegotiable pledges he made to them. It’s not that the people who made Trump president have generously moved the goalposts for him. It’s that they have eliminated the goalposts altogether [. . .] His supporters here, it turns out, are energized by his bombast and his animus more than any actual accomplishments. For them, it’s evidently not what he’s doing so much as it is the people he’s fighting.
Convinced that Trump is working hard to protect the little guy, the supporters interviewed here appear mired in a toxic combination of hopelessness, resentment, racism, and economic insecurity grounded in the real-world conditions of their city and region. Mills and mines that were the backbone of the economy have closed over the last few decades, with no new engine of prosperity to take their place. The population of Johnstown has declined precipitously, and drug overdoses are at an epidemic level. It is impossible not to feel pity and a kindred hopelessness reading about their lives, even as their open expressions of racism invite contempt. It is a tragic situation that also begs this basic question: what sort of people are we, that we would allow such economic and social devastation in this country we hold in common?
Now, in ways that few believed possible, we are paying the price for our neglect and our consent to the economic dislocations of the last few decades. Embittered losers of our inequality-generating system, such as the interviewees of Johnstown, give Trump and the GOP the unwavering support they need, not only to continue the evisceration of the American economy but to pull the country into an authoritarianism that has become the right-wing’s solution to containing the social instability of rampant inequality. Either we figure out how to bring real hope to such people’s lives, or we make sure that we never again lose a presidential election to fellow citizens whose only source of satisfaction seems to be to bring the whole American house burning down, so that we are all left in the same scorched place. This is the nightmare we need to face up to, and it is one that needs to be fought not only with the practical tools of electioneering, but with a poise of compassion for our fellow citizens and a willingness to open our eyes to an economic system that is clearly manufacturing the conditions for an American fascism, just as much as it’s pumping unfathomable wealth into the pockets of our social betters, our corporate overlords, and their associated 1% ilk.
