Democrats need to make the Republican threat real and personal
Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman ask whether Democrats are hitting their target. Republicans threaten election subversion in state after state, but Democratic pollster David Binder’s recent focus groups in Georgia and Michigan suggest voters are not getting the message (Washington Post):
“When we talk about the ‘big lie’ and Trump, it looks to them like you’re looking backwards and getting partisan,” Binder told us. “They want a secretary of state to say, ‘I am going to make sure that everyone has the right to vote in a nonpartisan way.’ ”
Importantly, the focus groups show strong voter support for removing measures that make it harder to vote. Yet, at the same time, they show that these swing voters don’t tend to see voter suppression as an effort to “subvert democracy.”
Democrats need to address the threats as attempts to sabotage future elections, not the last one.
In truth, the backward-looking and forward-looking arguments are two sides of the same coin: When a GOP candidate announces his conviction that Trump won in 2020, that’s strong evidence that they will try to steal the 2024 election for him (or another GOP loser). But it can be hard to prove this, because the rhetoric of even the most deranged election saboteurs is clothed in high-minded claims about “transparency” and “integrity.”
Nevertheless, if voters are more interested in the future than the past, then they are focusing in the right direction. Many Trump loyalists seeking positions of control over election positions — especially governor and secretary of state — accept the presumption that only Republican victories are legitimate, and if voters decide to elect Democrats then they must simply be overruled.
Which is something all voters should be worried about. And if they aren’t, Democrats have a duty to make sure they understand the true stakes we face. In future elections.
Perhaps one reason Democrats are failing at communicating this threat to democracy is something Republicans know about their voters. Abstractions do not connect. Republicans make issues personal. They mean to get people’s backs up, make them feel personally injured. Democracy-shmocracy, what does Republicans turning the U-S-of-A into a one-party state mean for me?
Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking “their country” back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.
One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?
Make the Republican plot to reduce the by-God United States of America to a Potemkin village of a once-great country personal. Personalizing what voters will lose is the key both to connecting the threat to voters’ lives and to energizing pissing them off enough to get their butts to the polls in an off-year.
If American democracy is in crisis, you’d think Democrats would campaign like it. Running on mundane “bread-and-butter issues” drained of emotion cannot possibly convey the seriousness of the threat to thjeir lives.
With the U.S. a one-party state, Republicans will steal (“sunset”) your Social Security. They will strip your Medicare, your Medicaid. They will close your neighborhood public school. They will force your daughter to give birth to her rapist’s baby.
That shit is as real as it gets.
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