This depressing New Yorker piece by Peter Slevin is very worrying. He writes Republicans demonized Democratic candidates in 2020. It worked, and their narrative remains largely intact:
Whatever their emerging record, Democrats must also overcome a fearsome wall of mistrust, and a broad willingness among Republicans to believe the worst about them. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iowa, where Republicans rolled to one victory after another last November, powered by support for Trump and disdain for the Democrats. Trump beat Biden there by eight points, a dozen years after the Obama-Biden ticket carried the state by nine. Senator Joni Ernst, once considered vulnerable, was outpolled by Trump, but still collected fifty-two per cent of the vote to defeat her Democratic challenger, Theresa Greenfield. Democrats lost six state House seats and two congressional seats, including one by an excruciating six votes out of nearly three hundred and ninety-four thousand cast. (The Democrat, Rita Hart, is continuing to contest the results.) The other seat belonged to Abby Finkenauer, an energetic first-term Democrat, who was blindsided by her defeat.
Republicans drove turnout to unexpected levels by crafting a blunt-force narrative anchored in puffery and lies when it came to Trump and caricature when it came to Democrats. The message was repetitive, it was relentless, it was thin on facts and policy detail, and it worked, especially in rural counties, where Trump and the G.O.P. won by significant margins. The fundamental attack was straightforward: Democrats were socialists at heart, and would raise taxes, expand government, and extinguish individual freedom. Biden, meanwhile, was portrayed as corrupt and, at age seventy-seven, as barely able to complete a coherent sentence. The twin attacks coalesced during the summer of 2020. As David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican strategist, explained, they went something like this: “Well, he’s obviously older, he’s getting more frail, which means he’s not strong enough to fight inside his own coalition against the more extreme voices.” Republican leaders and pundits amplified the message, and it powered candidates up and down the ticket. “No memos,” Kochel said. “You just picked it up every day from what the President and his people were saying.”
Chad Ingels is a Republican farmer from Fayette County, in Eastern Iowa, where he raises corn, soybeans, and hogs, on a farm that has been in his family for nearly a hundred years. He ran for the state legislature last year, travelling the district and knocking on doors, as he campaigned for a House seat that no member of the G.O.P. had won in more than a decade. It took him a while to get over the initial nervousness of trying “to sell yourself to someone who doesn’t want you on their doorstep.” When he did, he quickly discovered that voters cared most about one detail in his biography, and it was not his position on school funding or water quality, two of his fields of expertise. Rather, they wanted to know his party affiliation. He told them he was a Republican. “Almost universally, they said, ‘Good, you have my vote,’ ” he recalled.
Rick Hofmeyer saw the G.O.P. messaging take hold. He is the chairman of the Fayette County Republicans, and his roots in the Party run deep. “I have voted for Democrats, but not too many,” he told me, when we met at his home, in the town of Fayette, where he lives with his dog, Duchess. He came late to his support of Trump, in 2016, after his preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, lost the Republican nomination. Since then, Trump has grown on him, and the Democrats have continually turned him off. He watched as Republican strength grew throughout the fall. “A good share of it was concern over how things were going in the cities,” he said. “When we sit out here in our nice, quiet homes and we see rioters breaking glass and setting up their own independent countries, that is just not us.” He heard frustration, in his conversations with other voters, that Democratic candidates “were not complaining about it, or doing anything about it; that they were starting to be run by the far left.” Biden did criticize violent demonstrators, repeatedly. But the message vanished beneath an avalanche of eye-catching news coverage, conservative commentary, negative advertising, and Trumpian smears. Among a critical mass of Iowa voters, the conviction grew that Biden and the Democrats could not be trusted.
This past winter, I made two trips to Eastern Iowa and called around the state, speaking with strategists, candidates, party activists, and regular voters. I wanted to understand why things had gone so smoothly for the Republicans and so badly for the Democrats—and what it might tell us about the midterm elections and, perhaps, the prospects of the Biden Administration. A central lesson is that facts matter little when the opposition chooses demonization over debate and pivotal groups of voters stick to what they think they know.
He points out that Democrats very consciously set out of recruit local candidates who were “a good fit” for their states and had certain identifiers that made voters comfortable. It didn’t work. Elections are nationalized and a majority of the state are hooked on right wing media and Donald Trump. Here he discusses the Joni Ernst race. She lied about her opponent, of course. But this was the key:
During the campaign, however, Ernst successfully tied herself to Trump, joining him onstage in Iowa to declare, “I love you. God bless you. Four more years!” Running behind in many polls, she also badly misrepresented Greenfield’s positions. After Greenfield said that the United States should address “systemic racism throughout all of our systems,” including health care, housing, education, and policing, Ernst falsely told supporters, according to the Iowa Starting Line, “that every single sheriff’s deputy, sheriff, every police officer, every trooper out there, she’s calling them racist.” In one Ernst advertisement, a law officer wearing a bulletproof vest says to the camera, “Being a cop these days is hard enough, so it doesn’t help when liberals like Theresa Greenfield call us ‘racist.’ ” Ernst tweeted, “This is the type of talk you’d expect to hear from Portland or San Francisco, not someone who wants to represent Iowa.” Defending against such inflammatory attacks proved to be the Democrats’ biggest struggle. Kochel said Democrats often left themselves vulnerable to attack. In his view, some candidates, wary of alienating their base, fudged their positions on the Green New Deal and police funding, giving Republicans an opening. “It’s just getting harder and harder to frame yourself outside of these labels,” he said, “and Republicans did a better job of doing that.”
The master label-maker was Trump. His followers knew that his opponents were “Sleepy Joe” Biden and “Phony” Kamala Harris, whom he called a “monster” and a “communist.” Two days before the election, he brought his show to Dubuque. To the cheers of the crowd, many wearing winter gloves and red maga hats, he reinforced the themes that his campaign team had been pounding for months. “Joe Biden is a corrupt politician, and we know that,” he claimed, and said, of Biden’s mental faculties, “He’s shot.” Yet, he implied that Biden was also a powerful menace. Biden’s approach to covid-19, Trump said, “will turn America into a prison state, locking you down, while letting the far-left rioters roam free to loot and burn.” He said falsely that Biden, whose Catholicism is central to his political and personal identity, wants to “abolish religious liberty and they want to ban God from the public square.” He misrepresented Biden’s approach to taxes and ethanol, two topics dear to Iowa voters, and said falsely that Biden wants to give “free health care” to undocumented immigrants. Biden’s victory would lead to “a socialist country,” Trump said. “And America will never be a socialist country.”
For years, Trump’s aides described his rallies as little more than performance art that entertained his fans and satisfied his ego. But, even if one takes their declarations at face value, millions of his supporters didn’t have the same impression. In my conversations with dozens of Trump voters last year, most recently in Iowa and Wisconsin, their explanations echoed the rhetoric of Trump and his campaign messengers. I met Kimberly Pont, the vice-chair of the Fayette County G.O.P., at a Mexican restaurant in the small city of Oelwein, and asked her what drove local residents to vote Republican. She said, “People could see the news. They could watch for themselves what was going on, when you have a party that’s not going to denounce rioting.”
Pont believes covid-19 death figures are inflated, mail-in voting is dangerous, Biden is a “figurehead,” and Harris is unqualified. “I’m terrified,” she told me. “She is the most left-leaning of all the senators.” When I caught up with Pont this month, she told me that the failure by the courts to identify widespread election fraud left her “disappointed and disillusioned.”
This article is alarming. These people are living in an alternate universe. And there is no end in sight.
Democracy Corps did some focus groups that back this up:
Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party continues to shape America’s politics, even as the Democrats have taken control of the federal government and Congress. When polls accurately reflect the proportion of the white working class voters and their support for Trump in 2020, Democrats have only a 2-point lead in party identification and 43 percent still approve of his behavior — unchanged after the insurrection. Fully 58 percent are Trump Loyalists who strongly approve of Trump and another 12 percent Trump-aligned who “somewhat approve” of him but are very conservative or Evangelical
Trump’s base is angry about government restrictions on their freedom and believe they are fighting to save the “American way of life” from cancel culture and Black Lives Matter’s violent attacks on police and white people.
We conducted focus groups in March with Trump Loyalists in Georgia and Wisconsin and Trump-aligned, non-Trump conservatives and moderates in suburban and rural Georgia, Ohio, and Wisconsin. It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out.
And here are the conclusions that emerged from this new research:
The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics;
Trump’s base saw Biden, as a white man, as not threatening, controlled by others, unlike Obama who represented everything Tea Party-Republicans were determined to fight;
Even Trump’s base is curious about the extent to which they benefit from the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and Biden’s signature program, compared to Obamacare that they viewed as a new entitlement for Blacks and immigrants that must be stopped;
The Trump loyalists and the Trump aligned are animated about government taking away their freedom and a cancel culture that leaves no place for white Americans and the fear they’re losing “their” country to non-whites;
They were angered most of all by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa that were responsible for a full year of violence in Democratic cities that put white people on the defensive – and was ignored by the media;
The Trump loyalists and those who are aligned rooted for the anti-lockdown protestors in Michigan and saw the violence and disruption of the legislature as justified. Some pulled back when the guns threatened innocent civilians, and more when their methods seemed to be losing support for the Trump movement;
A handful of the Trump loyalists supported the January 6th insurrectionists, but most quickly concluded it was really Antifa or an inside job to make Trump supporters look bad. They normalized the insurrection, suggesting it was no different than the violence carried out by BLM and Antifa;
They worry now that it is the government that has taken the initiative on the use of force, increasing their sense of powerlessness;
The non-Trump conservatives and moderates bloc is marginally smaller but vocal in opposition to Trump’s direction and animated by his alienation of non-Republicans, the extremism, the 2nd Amendment and guns, and role of government and more.
We ignore this at our peril. It’s true that delivering material improvement in people’s lives may maintain a majority since there are a lot of Independents in this country who are not aligned with this Trump faction, even some who generally have voted Republican in the past. And the 30% of Republicans who aren’t Trump enthusiasts are a meaningful, if small, minority. But if this 70% of Republicans continue to be infected with phony conspiracies, disinformation and hatred for their perceived enemies, this isn’t going to end well.
When I saw this yesterday, I said to myself: the new civil war has already begun.
