After an agonizing year in which high inflation, stalled legislation, and self-inflicted pessimism seemed to combine into an inevitable wipeout for Democrats in the 2022 midterms, the political tide seems to have turned over the last couple months. It’s not only progressives who are seeing solid evidence that the long-anticipated Republican wave for November has been caught in an undertow, even if the odds are still in the GOP’s favor to take at least the House of Representatives. Smart observers point to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and better-late-than-never actual progress on the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda synergizing into more than the sum of their parts; not only have the stakes of November been made crystal clear by the far-right justices’ overturning of Roe v. Wade, but the Democratic Party is showing that it can be make real, if delayed and imperfect, progress even with a gossamer-thin majority.
An equally influential factor, though, is that the ongoing reality of Republican radicalization — evident not only in the Dobbs ruling, but in the myriad GOP assaults on voting, the rule of law, and essential rights — is exerting a quite logical and irresistible influence on the mindset of Democratic elected officials and Democratic and independent voters. For example, Dobbs didn’t just happen in a vacuum, without repercussions. Immediately, multiple Republican states took the opportunity to enact laws that instituted the de facto abortion bans permitted by the Court’s judgment. The threat wasn’t just theoretical; rather, Republicans at the state level quickly began actually building the misogynistic world that the ruling permitted. Democrats really never even had a chance to talk about the theoretical harms of the ruling, because the GOP skipped right ahead to making those harms part of the fabric of daily life for millions of American women. Even if you didn’t live in a state where GOP legislatures passed such laws, you certainly heard about it in the news. And of course, this didn’t just happen in one outlying state, but in states all around the country, including highly-populated ones like Texas. To top it off, Republican senators and representatives in Washington have begun making noise about passing restrictions, effectively nationalizing what they long claimed was a state issue and reinforcing the new reality that abortion will be front and center in the congressional midterms.
So Republican offensives against our basic rights are now present in the everyday lived realities of million of Democratic voters. This undermines the preference and premise of overly-cautious Democratic leaders, who would prefer to make the midterms primarily about “kitchen table,” economic issues. This isn’t to say that Democratic voters don’t have economic concerns, too — with inflation at a 40-year high and the threat of recession in the air, Democratic politicians have an urgent need to demonstrate that they have a path forward on the economy. But the Republicans themselves are helping ensure that questions of constitutional freedoms, and the larger national conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, also have a seat at the proverbial kitchen table.
The Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent points to the recent win of Democrat Pat Ryan in a special congressional election in New York State as evidence that voters are concerned about the GOP’s assault on their rights and democracy more generally. In an interview with Ryan, the newly-elected representative told Sargent that the number one question from voters he talked to involved a woman’s right to choose. Significantly, Ryan also told Sargent that “the ‘visceral’ reaction of voters isn’t just about abortion. While [Ryan] said inflation and economic pain continue to weigh heavily, he also encountered voter angst about gun violence, ongoing threats to democracy, and the insurrection attempt incited by Donald Trump.”
Again, I think we need to take stock of how logical, and I would argue, inevitable, such voter priorities might be. Even people who are hardly news junkies are hearing about abortion rights being lost, hearing about Republican authoritarianism (via the January 6 hearings), hearing about mass shootings enabled by Republican enthusiasm for limitless gun rights, and hearing about the continued lawlessness of Donald Trump, who as the de facto leader of the Republican Party casts a significant influence on voters’ ideas of the GOP. (I mentioned the idea of synergy earlier, and I would speculate here that the synergy between the resumed January 6 hearings in September and continued revelations of Trumpian lawlessness that continues through the present day may well add up to more than the sum of their parts in public consciousness. Not only will this keep the threat of Trump front and center, it will remind voters of how the GOP as a whole has willfully tied itself to this criminal and want-to-be despot.)
Faced with such extraordinary evidence of a GOP gone off the rails of mainstream American politics, it’s logical that people would want the GOP’s opponents to demonstrate that they offer a real contrasting choice in the upcoming election. Significantly, in his piece about Ryan, Sargent notes a recent NBC News poll of registered voters that shows “threat to democracy” ranking as high as cost of living and the economy as the most important issue facing the United States. With the cautionary note that we don’t want to make too much of a single poll, such a finding makes sense in our current political situation. Not only is the Republican drive towards authoritarianism resulting in measurable, easily viewed restrictions to basic constitutional rights, but the Democratic Party has also helped highlight this GOP lawlessness via the January 6 hearings earlier in the summer.
Being surprised by a shift in voter sentiment that reflects fears about the fate of democracy means being surprised that millions of Americans are actually patriotic citizens who believe the rhetoric and ideals that all of us have heard throughout our lives. If there is one cardinal sin the Democrats have committed over the recent past, it’s underestimating the commitment of Democratic voters, as well as the American majority, to a national ideal of actual freedom and equality that’s deeply at odds with the constrained GOP vision of a country dominated by white, Christian Americans. Again, this is not to say that defense of democracy is the only issue Democratic voters are concerned with — but it is to say that the vast majority of them are smart enough to understand that everything they might want their government to accomplish, from the economy to the environment to health care — will come to naught if our basic political freedoms and rights are not protected. Most people instinctively see the connection between being able to vote for state legislators, and whether their state legislature passes laws protecting or banning abortion. This is just democracy 1A.
Which brings me back to a point that you have heard from me again and again over the last several years: The Democratic Party must make clear to the public that it’s the sole major party in the U.S. committed to democracy and the broad set of freedoms backed by an overwhelming majority of Americans, and be unafraid to name the GOP as the party of racism, revolt, and misogny. Certainly after the attempted coup by Donald Trump and the GOP’s subsequent continuation of his insurrection up through the present day — this time enabled less by marauding Proud Boys and more by voter suppression, gerrymandering, and a corrupt Supreme Court — the national interest and Democrats’ partisan interests are closely aligned.
I would argue that the recent sea change in support for Democrats is a strong endorsement of the idea that the way forward through our current crisis of democracy is to emphasize the conflict between a democratically-minded Democratic Party and an increasingly fascistic GOP, and to make clear that in this conflict, the Democratic Party embodies the values and aspirations of a decisive American majority. I think we are seeing this in how the post-Dobbs abortion fight is playing out, where arguably the single greatest threat to Democratic prospects in November would be for the party not to commit wholeheartedly to restoring abortion rights should they be returned to power in November. There is no bipartisan solution possible on abortion rights; rather, the path forward involves beating the GOP as thoroughly as possible and using that victory to reinstate rights that the radical Republicans on the Supreme Court took away in a fit of religious fury and contempt for America’s women.
President Biden’s executive order on college debt offers a less dramatic but similar lesson on the importance of drawing a clear contrast with the GOP, even if it means courting conflict with the Republicans. While Biden’s decision was far from the wholesale cancellation of college loans that many advocates had pressed for, it clearly constitutes a blow in favor of many Americans not generally prioritized by the federal government. For instance, the $20,000 debt relief for Pell grant recipients ensures that lower-income and minority Americans get substantial relief from exploitative loans, and the cap on payments at 5% of income helps balance out the fact that many millions of Americans will still carry tens of thousands of dollars in college debt even after this order.
But to hear the Republicans describe it, the president’s decision was actually a handout to Yale and Harvard law and medical school graduates, practically designed as a poke in the eye of working class people who never went to college in the first place. The success of this line of attack, though, depends on literally millions and millions of Americans actually ignoring their own lived experience of having their debt burdens relieved — including those of working-class people whose technical degree debts have also been lightened or discharged by the president’s action. Perhaps it’s less dramatic than the fight for abortion rights, but the GOP has equally placed itself at odds with the reality of American majority opinion and lived experience, this time in favor of a Scrooge-like mentality that insists that countless Americans who sought higher educations are actually ne’er-do-well spendthrifts who should count themselves lucky that we don’t have debtors’ prisons in this country.
Putting aside the basic justness of freeing people from loans that straitened their life prospects, it’s hard to see the Republicans as the political winners in this matter, which required that Biden draw a clear contrast between Democratic Party values and those of the GOP. Yes, the decision created conflict and an impression that Biden was working against his bipartisan bona fides; but the conflict actually created the outcome of demonstrating GOP weakness and immorality, as well as the impression that Biden acted out of a pro-worker, pro-freedom basis supported by an American majority (even if Americans who did not receive debt relief might still be conflicted about the appropriateness of the decision). Sure, many people may not agree with Biden’s decision; but the Republican response has exposed the GOP once again as the party of plutocrats and big banks against the American majority. The conflict was worth it!
I don’t doubt that the strains of caution and a wish to maintain bipartisan appeals among the Democratic leadership will continue to make themselves heard, as the party debates the best strategy leading into the midterms. But reality itself — including the GOP’s unmistakable turn to authoritarianism and its implementation of radical abortion restrictions that shred long-established rights — will continue to push the Democrats to make their contrasting views clear, even as voters bear witness to GOP radicalization and demand that the Democrats protect their threatened rights by protecting American democracy. This is a tremendous tailwind for Democrats heading into November, and they need to fight their lingering instincts towards conciliation, and instead get to work on transforming that tailwind into a fearsome transcontinental jet stream.