Something between panic and ennui (pannui?) appears to have the Democratic Party in its grip at the prospect of the November midterms. The party generally seems to have accepted the conventional wisdom that it will lose control of at least the House, and possibly the Senate, and that this outcome is more or less set in stone. But while there are real headwinds for the Democrats — the highest inflation in 40 years, a lingering pandemic, a frightening geopolitical situation, and the general tendency of voters to punish the president’s party — it makes no sense for Democrats to underestimate their own agency, to essentially psych themselves out about their own purported powerlessness. If you act like losers, you’re far more likely to lose — particularly in politics, where perception and confidence are such large factors. On top of this, there’s some real-world evidence that the Democrats aren’t even as badly favored as they seem to think; as E.J. Dionne points out, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that registered voters preferred Democrats to Republicans 46% to 45% — not enough to overcome structural advantage that favor the GOP, but hardly definitive evidence of a hopeless blowout situation.
The sense of fatalism is mirrored in the Democrats’ misguided election strategies, which are aimed squarely at emphasizing the party’s failures and weaknesses. For instance, it makes little sense for Democrats to insist on running a campaign that over-emphasizes their legislative accomplishments — not when so much of the news coverage over the past year has been dominated by the Democrats’ inability to pass major legislation, and when the reality is that such accomplishments have been thin since the laudable American Rescue Plan. You or I may follow politics closely enough to know that their agenda has been stymied largely by one or two conservative/corporate senators (Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema), but the average voter just sees a lack of results, and blames it on the party as a whole.
In a similar vein, Democratic promises to pass more legislation prior to the election as a way of rallying base and swing voters — for instance, by enacting bits and pieces of the original Build Back Better package — are likely to fail, for the same reasons they failed before: they have no Republican support, and a single recalcitrant Democratic senator can bring any legislation to a halt. In fact, the incentives for Republicans to support bipartisan bills are even lower than before, as the party clearly sees a path to victory that capitalizes off Democratic unpopularity and stoking cultural outrage (more on that shortly), rather than passage of actual legislation.
For related reasons, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense for Democrats to overplay current economic challenges beyond their control — both in the sense of things they really can’t do much about, like stressed supply chains, and in the sense of things they might be able to do if they had an actual governing majority. Yes, Democrats shouldn’t seem indifferent to voters’ sense of economic malaise — which, after all, is based in disquieting realities — but they also don’t want to be tarred as being the cause.
In other words, the Democrats need to change the conversation as much as possible — and that road leads straight through identifying the GOP as the prime obstacle to the United States addressing the many challenges that beset us, from an economy that works for everyone to actually doing something about climate change. Luckily for the Democrats (though unluckily for the good of the country), the Republican Party provides more than enough material to give such a strategy a fighting chance.
Across the nation, the GOP is working to attack public education, the rights of sexual and racial minorities, and free and fair elections, with the short-term goal of victory in the midterms and the longer-term objective of enforcing a white supremacist, Christian dominance over American society. Dismissing GOP efforts to ban references to racism from history classes and demonize young trans people as enemies of society aren’t just ways to energize Republican base voters, but are the sharps points of a political movement that aims for no less than to strip power from the diverse American majority in favor of white conservatives (a case that writers like Ron Brownstein and Thomas Zimmer have been making). Democrats have long been reluctant to engage in what they perceive as “mere” culture war fights, but it’s long past time we realized that the idea of “culture war” itself is a deeply misleading term that ought to be retired once and for all. The ends of so-called culture war fights, like attacks on how the history of race in America is taught, have EVERYTHING to do with gaining power for white conservatives and denying power to those perceived as conservatism’s enemies — aka the majority of the American populace.
And as critics of the Democrats’ dismissive stance have observed, one of the huge ironies here is that Republicans are increasingly picking fights on so-called cultural issues where their positions are deeply unpopular. For instance, polls around the banning of books from schools and libraries show broad public opposition to Republican efforts. Likewise, Americans give overwhelming support to teaching an accurate version of American history that gives proper emphasis to the role of racism in shaping our past and present. And on the issue that is roiling politics this week and likely for some time to come, GOP opposition to abortion doesn’t have anything close to majority support in this country.
At this point, though, the Republicans themselves have basically indicated that they intend to make the midterms about what they perceive as winning cultural fights as much as, or even more than, the state of the economy and the Democrats’ allegedly catastrophic stewardship thereof. But what if the Republicans are actually dead wrong about the effectiveness of their appeals? First, Democrats have not actually engaged in a full-on pushback against things like the anti-critical race theory crusade, which is fairly easily exposed as a racist enterprise to deny the reality of white supremacism and the actuality of the African-American experience. And when we do see Democrats join the fight, such as when Michigan state representative Mallory McMorrow gave a speech denouncing a Republic opponent for claiming she supported pedophilia, it’s amazing to see how quickly and easily GOP talking points can be exposed as the frauds that they are.
Indeed, the Republicans’ turn from demonization of trans children to a suggestion that anyone who supports trans rights is by definition a pedophile or pedophile sympathizer constitutes a rabid, rapid descent into an us-versus-them extremism that, if properly exposed, can alienate far more people than it energizes. Overall, the GOP’s belief that it can use such issues to rally its base to the polls is premised on avoiding a backlash to such extreme and immoral positions — a backlash that it is well within the power of Democrats to encourage, if they were to simply make the effort.
But the point is not merely to respond piecemeal to Republican extremism on individual issues — such as agreeing to make the midterms a referendum on whether trans women should be able to compete in high school sports. Rather, the proper approach would be to attack these various strands and present them to the public for what they are — a right-wing counter-revolution against the last half century of progress towards racial, sexual, and gender progress, all in the name of securing political and economic power for conservative white Americans at the expense of everyone else.
What’s increasingly frustrating to me is that, whether they now choose to recognize it or not, the Democrats have actually already been engaged in these so-called cultural fights, and the larger political struggle they underlie, for many years. The reason that this far-right counter-revolution is upon us is that there really has been a shift towards more power — both culturally and politically — for women, racial and sexual minorities, as well as non-Christians. And the political vehicle for these transformations has been the Democratic Party.
But now, the Democrats’ very success has brought us to a point where conservative white Americans feel sufficiently threatened that the GOP is not only willing to unleash the most hateful and extreme rhetoric to energize this base, but is overtly suggesting that non-Christian, non-white Americans aren’t even real Americans at all https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/21/republicans-biden-trump-election-democracy. It is all the more shocking, then, for Democrats not to recognize that this current backlash is actually a sign of their own party’s success, and that the way forward is to confront it directly, not cower before the lie that all this hatred represents the true spirit of a more authentic America.
So why not call the GOP’s bluff, and make the midterms about the larger choice of what sort of country we all want to live in: one where a narrow group of Americans are allowed to manipulate the political system for their own selfish ends at the expense of the majority, or one where everyone is treated equally — whether black or white, gay or straight, Christian or atheist — and where we’re all working for the common purpose of a greater United States that lifts up everyone?
This doesn’t mean that the Democrats can simply pretend that Americans’ economic concerns don’t exist — but it does provide a powerful path to re-contextualizing those concerns. First, this would allow the Democrats to remind Americans that there are other important considerations in life apart from whether inflation is high — not a game changer, maybe, but certainly a powerful antidote to the dominant “it’s the economy, stupid” perspective echoed by the GOP and the media. More importantly, it would help shift the debate over how to resolve our current economic challenges by reminding voters of the GOP’s complete and utter lack of a plan to actually help Americans, apart from the tired hat trick of cutting taxes for the rich; as Jennifer Rubin puts it, “And why is it that the most ambitious Republicans are spending more time battling nonexistent critical race theory in schools than on health care or inflation?” This is a question that every Democrat on the campaign trail should be asking. They must make explicit the deranged motivations and goals of the white supremacist, authoritarian GOP, and how divisive strategies also work to distract attention from actual economic concerns that affect everyone. After all, if the Democrats don’t make this case, who will?
Ultimately, though, the Democrats should make every effort to shine a spotlight on the GOP’s war on American society and democracy because it’s the right thing to do. Particularly when we consider the Republicans’ in-the-plain-light-of-day efforts to subvert future elections, whether by gerrymandering, vote suppression, or corruptions of non-partisan voting processes, the party’s war on America is too dangerous to ignore. Not a day should go by without a prominent Democratic reminding voters that the last Republican president attempted a coup to stay in office — and that his false claims of a stolen election have now been adopted as a rallying cry by his party, as justification for ongoing maneuvers meant to ensure mere majority rule never again stops the GOP from holding power. If Democrats cannot make preservation of our democracy into an urgent and motivating issue, it’s not a problem with the issue — it’s a problem with the Democrats, and those who can’t convey such an obvious and urgent message need to make way for those who can.
As I’ll never tire of saying, the events surrounding January 6 in particular provide a nearly-inexhaustible ready-made case for why Republicans should never be allowed back into national power. A growing body of evidence shows that currently-serving members of the House were deeply involved in the coup effort, talking casually of imposing martial law and having the military oversee a re-do election to assure Trump of victory. Beyond this, Democrats should make sure that all GOP efforts to undermine free and fair elections are tainted by the violence and fundamental immorality of that day, dedicated as they are to the same ends.
Will any of this make a difference in the midterms? Of course it’s impossible to say. But even if the Democrats are bound to lose in November, it’s so much better to lose in a way that sets them up for future success, by using the next six months to tell the story of a backwards-looking, power-mad GOP obsessed with stunting the country’s future in the name of re-instituting the worse elements of our past. To lose in a way that gets the Democratic base fired up and ready to resist the depredations of a Republican Congress, and sets the party up for redemption in 2024, as a victorious GOP would surely show its true radicalism in the intervening years and sows the ground for its comeuppance.