Begins with securing freedoms now under attack
President Joe Biden released his opening reelection ad early this morning. First word: Freedom.
That’s an excellent start. Personal freedom is a sacred value Democrats must hammer and reclaim from a movement bent on unmaking America. MAGA extremists’ twisted idea of freedom is standing athwart history, yelling “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” Without the “stop.”
“We are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said four years ago. “And we still are.” Our freedoms are under attack from the right (if you haven’t noticed).
Elections are about choices, not poll numbers. So amid Politico’s recent pronouncement that President Biden’s poll numbers are “grim” and NBC’s reminder that Biden is still more popular than Donald Trump, remember that election outcomes hinge on turnout. Voters need a reason to.
Michael Tomasky believes Biden has to go for broke. “What can he and the Democrats do to energize people about the 2024 election?” (The New Republic):
Biden should do something bigger and bolder. He and the Democratic candidates for Senate and House should run a unified campaign. They should say to America: Elect us—give us the White House, 52 Senate seats, and a House majority—and we’ll reform the filibuster and by Memorial Day 2025, we’ll pass a platter of bills all aimed at helping the middle class and fulfilling the Biden motto that the economy grows from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.
That’s an interesting campaign. That’s a campaign about the future. It implicitly acknowledges that things aren’t great right now, but it does so obliquely enough that it doesn’t sound like an admission of any kind of failure. It says, “We’ve done some good; now, we want to do better. But you have to give us the run of the place.”
Except, Tomasky offers a platter of bills rather than an aspirational vision forAmerica. Biden did not defeat the Republican incumbent in 2020 on policies.
Democrats should run a campaign about the future, a future worth creating. But elections are not a contest of policies, or even personalities, but about values and identity.
Tomasky insists his checklist of bills “says about as clearly as a political party can say to working people that we are on your side, something Democrats haven’t been doing very well for a long time.”
Agreed. But Democrats’ reflexive mistake is assuming voters will infer from their platform that Democrats are on their side and share their values. No. Democrats need to look voters in the eyes and say so. Directly. That’s the cake. The rest is icing.
Here’s where Tomasky and I agree:
I fear that Democrats lack the gumption to carry out a big, unified plan. It’s different, and people—especially politicians—tend to be scared of different.
Lefties are supposedly people who embrace novelty, change, innovation. Except when it comes to campaigns, they are conservatives. Same old, same old.
That’s not going to cut it in the age of Trumpism. What Tomasky offers is a bigger and bolder version of same-old.
I’m a mechanics and logistics guy. I’ll be pitching a novel approach to voter turnout to North Carolina Democrats. Tens of thousands of additional votes for Democrats could turn on it in November 2024. That’s if they can think outside the box in this latest “most important election of our lifetime.”
Update: Thought this might be pertinent: