Reporting from The New York Times about Democratic Party pressure on the Biden campaign to expand the 2020 electoral map helps highlight some of the key potentials and dangers of our political moment. With polls showing Joe Biden leading Trump in swing states, and suggesting tight contests in long-time GOP strongholds like Texas and Georgia, some Democratic officials are encouraging Biden to make a play for states that Democrats have not won for a generation.
Of course, it’s not just polls, but also the energy of the Democratic base and the possibility of persuading independent voters, that’s spurred this effort to re-think the path to the presidency. And this, in turn, is inseparable from Donald Trump’s catastrophic, white supremacist, and increasingly authoritarian presidency, which has filled millions of Americans with a sense of existential urgency.
Beyond the simple logic of pressing the party’s political advantage for its own sake, some strategists are pointing specifically to the need to discredit Trump and Trumpist politics as a prime reason for the Democrats to go big in 2020. The Times piece doesn’t delve into the nature of what these Republican politics are, but naming them shows the degree to which the Democrats’ partisan quest for victory is at this point inseparable from defending the fundamentals of American democracy. The Trumpist politics they need to discredit are white supremacism and authoritarianism; and they need a national repudiation not only for the sake of the party, which cannot prosper in a world where voter suppression, foreign election interference, and violence against citizens are the order of the day, but for the larger good of American democracy.
From this perspective, the Biden campaign’s reluctance thus far to fully embrace a broadened campaign strikes me as potentially self-defeating. While there are strong and understandable reasons to play it safe in the name of winning the White House — the upset of 2016, partisan polarization that suggests Trump can rely on a strong base of voters no matter what he does, the need to spend limited financial resources wisely — this risks missing a historic opportunity. This election is as much a referendum on American democracy as on American support for the Democratic Party’s agenda and opposition to Trumpism — but to the degree the Democrats can strengthen the case that they are now effectively the sole vessel for promoting democracy, they also strengthen the case for why they, as a party, should be trusted with power.
A broad campaign that targets states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio would signal to Americans that the Democratic Party is confident in its claims to power at this crossroads in our history; and this vote of confidence is in turn a vote of confidence in the American people, which can help catalyze the result that not only Democrats, but the nation as a whole, requires — an utter rout of the Republican Party in 2020 and beyond. This argument for the “go big” approach is only strengthened when you consider the coattails effect of a successful presidential candidate; close Senate races in Georgia, Iowa, and elsewhere could more surely end up as Democratic victories if Biden makes a real play for those states.
Beyond this, if there is any lesson of political strategy that we have learned over these past four years, it is that the best defense against Donald Trump is a good offense. Our broken media environment, in combination with the president’s manic capacity to generate fresh outrages on a daily basis, means that he has kept the political initiative far too often during his term of office. Conversely, the Democrats have been either reluctant or unable to counter his strategy by going on offense against him, and in support of fundamental national values. When Trump is forced to be reactive, and feels his position weakening, he tends to lash out, to act even more impulsively than normal, to alienate.
The concept that a Trump on defense is a Trump who turns off voters becomes even more important in the face of what appears to be Trump’s massive loss of voter support in the face of his gross incompetence in handling the coronavirus pandemic and the George Floyd social justice protests. Starkest for me are the findings that seniors now support Biden over Trump, a turn-around of a key GOP demographic that does not bode well for the larger Republican Party in November. If this is not what collapsing support looks like, then I don’t know what does. Given the escalating death toll from the coronavirus, and the president’s decision to further amplify his white supremacist rhetoric and policies, it seems the Biden campaign is in danger of misreading the degree to which Trump’s support will somehow rebound.
The Times article notes some Democrats worry about over-confidence in the calls to expand their presidential efforts, but this sounds more like lack of confidence to me. It’s not just that Democrats should be feeling a righteous, fully-earned fury about removing this corrupt president and party from office. Politicians and voters should also be thinking more about how November will very much be a faith election. Not faith in the religious sense, but faith in the democratic sense that is always an unsung but crucial part of our nation and government. Faith that our neighbors are not monsters who wish to see our country turned into an apartheid state. Faith that our fellow citizens don’t want their children to grow up in a country where the government thinks everyone should fend for themselves in a pandemic. Faith that they don’t want political disputes to be settled by vigilante violence and the deployment of armed forces on our streets.
Of course you need to keep making the case for why democracy, racial equality, and free and fair elections are worth defending, as their defense can never again be taken for granted; but you also have to have faith that enough of your fellow citizens will accept these premises. Our faith has been badly tested by the election of Trump, and by how quickly huge portions of the electorate and political system supported him and have hewed themselves closely to his un-American politics; but our faith should be somewhat restored by the mass resistance that has continued and escalated throughout this rancid presidency. If you think that what this president and the GOP are doing is crazy and outrageous, have faith that you are not alone, that even previous supporters are seeing through the propaganda to the horrid reality of their misrule. The Democrats need their presidential campaign to compete as widely as possible to send this overwhelming message: democracy cedes no territory to the proto-fascists, the white supremacists, the defenders of the Confederacy. Democracy is no longer on defense. Democracy is at war with its enemies, and will sweep them away through the means of its choosing: the relentless and methodical pursuit of democratic politics, the only form of politics we consider legitimate in this country. Elections, open debate, the inclusion of all in our decision-making. Our ideals made material are the weapons that will help stop Trumpism and bury it.