Democrats’ new direction?
“There has to be a dream. We have to stand for a thing,” messaging consultant Anat Shenker Osorio tells students. That seems to have filtered up to top Democrats more accustomed to “being too reactive and too defensive when confronting Republican attacks,” writes Christian Paz at Vox.
If President Joe Biden is, as he appears, already campaigning for a second term, it “is likely to be less oppositional and more optimistic, with less focus on highlighting how bad the other side is, and more attention on imagining how much more Democrats can accomplish with four more years in power,” Paz writes (although the White House declined comment).
Negativity is out of fashion:
That’s not necessarily how Democrats have run their campaigns in the Trump era and even into Biden’s presidency. Since the 2016 election, much of Democrats’ political strategy has been to run vocally and clearly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republican campaigns. This approach fueled much of the closing message of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and boosted the 2018 blue wave and 2020 Biden victory, when Biden cast the election as a battle between him and Trump’s “season of darkness in America.” That kind of message also helped Democrats defy the odds during the 2022 midterms.
But 2024 offers Biden a different opportunity, as an incumbent, to make a proactive case for the government’s role as a force for good, and a hopeful vision for improving the middle and working classes. “In the [2022] midterms, there was a split in thinking about how Democrats should campaign. Democrats — congressional Democrats — in general have a hard time talking about their accomplishments in a cohesive way,” Rodell Mollineau, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me. “Biden’s stubbornness and his realization that, ‘Hey, we got a lot of stuff done, and we shouldn’t hide it,’ was helpful in the midterms and shows his political instincts.”
Incumbency has its advantages. And an improving economy may soften some opposition on the center-right by 2024 as the pandemic’s effects fade.
It also helps that Republicans have chosen a doom-and-gloom political message, exemplified through Arkansas Gov. (and former Trump spokesperson) Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s State of the Union rebuttal. Choosing to hype up talk of gender pronouns, critical race theory, and Latinx is a calculated tactic among leading Republican presidential candidates like Trump and Ron DeSantis, who have engaged in a once-fringe but now normalized cultural crusade that most Americans might not understand.
I covered some of that in Code Talkers on Friday.
That doesn’t mean Democrats need to cede the ground on social issues. Progressives, like Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to former presidential candidate Julián Castro, told me there’s a way to take on the culture war fights while still drawing up an optimistic vision for America. “We can tout our achievements,” Hackett said, “while still reminding voters that there’s so much more we can do if Republicans weren’t standing in the way.” Democratic messaging in culture war battles can protect vulnerable communities, Hackett said, and give Democrats “an opportunity for some mockery” of Republicans. That levity, Hackett said, can help Democrats hold on to parts of their base, like young voters, infrequent voters, and nonvoters.
Roger that, suggests Stuart Stevens, who believes Republicans have jumped the shark with their culture war fixation. If Biden’s widely praised State of the Union Address this week was a foretaste, mockery by the left will be met on the right by quadupling down on crazy. Normies won’t take well to it and haven’t. “Three thread lines comprise most Republican cultural wars: race, sex, and education,” Stevens writes. “All three are losers for Republicans.”
Still, writes Dan Pfeiffer, “There is no math that supports a governing coalition that is entirely dependent on college-educated voters.”
Paz concludes:
Making smarter economic appeals will be crucial to rebuilding the Obama-era coalition of college-educated voters, Black and Latino voters, and working-class voters without college degrees. “We saw the beginnings of that in the speech,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder of the progressive group Way to Win, said. “To have a story that goes up against those culture war attacks, it has to be a story of economic renewal that addresses and celebrates diversity, and that talks about the role of government in including everyone.”
Biden-style populism rather than the grievance populism of MAGA Republicans could crack that code. In his SOTU, Biden declared Democrats are indeed “for a thing.” In fact, for government fixing a list of complaints that nag average Americans of all political leanings, from tax cheats to junk fees to paid family medical leave and affordable childcare. It’s hard not to be for those.
And Republicans? What are they for that a majority of Americans want?
“Let’s finish the job,” Biden repeated. He’s off to a good start. Let’s hope Democrats don’t screw it up.