Saving the country from Donald Trump is the most important job the Democratic Party has ever had. Without that nothing else will matter. They (we) came through in 2018 to take the House and end the trifecta. In 2020 we kicked him out of the White House. In 2022 we stopped the Red Wave. The Party hung together throughout all the chaos and attempted destruction. I couldn’t be more surprised.
And now it is more united than I’ve ever seen it to put an end to his reign in the GOP once and for all. The Democrats shouldn’t have to do it. The Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to purge him themselves. But that’s how it is, and it means that the GOP itself is infected and will have to be dealt with over time. But job one is to stop Trump. What’s shocking is that it’s so hard to do because so many of our fellow Americans worship the man.
Brian Beutler has a nice analysis of the situation on the morning after night one of the DNC:
Early in Donald Trump’s presidency—perhaps as early as one day after his inauguration, when millions of protesters flooded streets around the world—it became clear that the anti-Trump opposition was the largest and most powerful coalition in American politics.
Anyone without a factional ax to grind should’ve been able to see it, too. We’d had enough time even by then to examine the results of the election. We understood the basic nature and advantages of Trump’s minoritarian coalition; we knew he’d assembled an electoral college majority while losing the popular vote after a campaign marked by criminal sabotage of his opponent and myriad institutional failures in his favor. We knew Trump wasn’t just unpopular, but that almost everyone who disapproved of him strongly disapproved of him.
Hillary Clinton probably would’ve won despite her baggage and missteps, and the unique obstacles she faced, if the anti-Trump majority hadn’t been too complacent about his chances of winning. But it was simple to see, even back then, that Democrats lost a winnable race. Anyone who “wins” a two-person race with 46 percent of the vote is no colossus. The anti-Trump opposition was big and broad enough to beat him time and again if it could be assembled. Clinton just happened to be the wrong leader to assemble it.
We watched this theory bear out repeatedly over the next six years as the anti-Trump coalition aligned in 2018, 2020, and 2022 to defeat Trump and his biggest enablers: MAGA candidates and swing-state Republicans alike. It was such a dependable formula that it almost lulled Democrats back into a false sense of inevitability.
The waning days of Joe Biden’s aborted re-election campaign were a reminder that, while big enough to defeat Trump in election after election, the anti-Trump coalition still has to be held together and mobilized. A Democratic Party that didn’t seem mission driven to beat Trump could shatter the resistance, allowing Trump to sneak into power once again.
Kamala Harris, or whoever had succeeded Biden atop the Democratic ticket, could’ve squandered this energy just the same. A leader with too much baggage, or too mired in factional infighting, might be losing just as Clinton lost, and as Biden was on track to lose.
Instead, Harris is rebuilding the Democratic Party purposefully to hold that winning coalition together. She’s doing an exceptionally good job.
She’s great and so is Walz. Joe Biden is a good man who did the right thing for the country. The elected officials past and present are all there, doing what’s necessary. But I think the resistance, aka the anti-Trump coalition, should get a pat on the back as well.
There are many ways this coalition could have shattered but even through the dark days of worrying about Biden’s public performance and the doldrums, it really didn’t. Most people said they would vote for anyone over Donald Trump. Now they don’t have to — they can vote enthusiastically for a ticket they believe will beat him once and for all. As Beutler says, it was “purpose built” to do that.