Republicans are playing defense. Keep them there.
Thanks to Donald Trump’s caches of stolen classified documents, his role in planning a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Federalist Supreme Court justices’ decision to rescind 50 years of women’s reproductive rights, Trump quislings’ efforts to keep American women barefoot and pregnant with their rapists’ children, and their efforts to thwart voters’ will in the name of election integrity, “threats to democracy” has overtaken inflation as a key concern for 2022 voters.
Democrats are leaning into all that, writes E.J. Dionne:
This week, President Biden is signaling that the Democrats’ strategy for this fall’s elections is moving sharply toward the attack. With a speech Tuesday about law enforcement and public safety, he challenged Republicans on ground the GOP thought it owned. And in a prime-time address Thursday, he plans to bring the survival of democracy itself to the center of the 2022 campaign.
“Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the sixth,” Biden told the rally in Pennsylvania. “For God’s sake, whose side are you on?” Biden shouted.
Dionnes emphasizes how the role of the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s stolen documents has cut the knees out from under Trump’s cult … er, party.
Trump’s lawless possession of those documents, along with his party’s efforts to minimize it, is making a hash of the GOP’s law-and-order slogans. And the former president’s omnipresence in the news has short-circuited Republican hopes of making Biden’s unpopularity the centerpiece of the 2022 midterm campaign. That will become even harder if Biden’s ratings stay on the upswing.
For the faithful, Trump is still Dear Leader. But for many other Republicans he has become an albatross. Republican candidates are scrubbing their websites of prior anti-abortion rhetoric as well as references to Trump.
Dionne notes that going hard at Republican perfidy won’t sit well with Democratic Party strategists whose strategy is always to play it safe and stick to bread-and-butter issues.
Of course, economics always matter in elections. But partly because of the flow of news, the topic of democracy is now in the ascendancy, bolstered by a recent NBC News poll showing “threats to democracy” surpassing inflation as the top 2022 issue. An analysis conducted by Hart Research at my request found that 42 percent of voters supporting Democratic congressional candidates listed threats to democracy as one of their top two issues, compared with only 20 percent of those backing Republicans.
Biden has clearly moved in this direction himself. “The president truly sees this as an inflection point and feels that, as the leader of the country, he needs to clearly articulate the nature of the threat to democracy, especially increased threats of violence for political purposes,” one adviser told me. “This is a time when the dominant wing of the Republican Party refuses to commit to free and fair elections, and refuses to commit to respecting them in the future.”
This was supposed to be a year of Republican triumph, as off-year elections often are for the party not in the White House. Republicans hammered away at inflation concerns until the televised Jan. 6 hearings refocused attention on Trump. And Trump, a junkie for publicity who could not bear not being the center of attention, insisted on injecting himself between Republicans and their attempt to make 2022 a referendum on President Joe Biden. Instead, Trump may make Republicans’ 2022 more like 2018.
With more Jan. 6 hearings coming in September, and with national security documents Trump stole displayed on front pages and TV sets across the globe, Trump is now the center of attention again. Republicans are knocked back on their heels. Biden, if not Democratic consultants, means to keep them there.
Keep punching and work the eye, Joe.
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