If they are smart enough to run with it
I wish I knew why the Democrats are acting like they just lost in a huge landslide so they must find ways to appeal to the huge majority of MAGA acolytes or stay out in the cold for a generation. It just ain’t true.
However, one of the real lessons of the election, indeed the last several elections probably going back to Occupy Wall Street, is that the country is in a populist phase and it’s up for grabs which party will be able to meet the moment. The Democrats passed big pieces of legislation aimed at working people while Trump and the Republicans have used typical right wing xenophobic and “anti-elite” populist sentiments neither of which has brought either party a real majority.
However, if you want real populism, the GOP has given the Democrats an opening they couldn’t have dreamed of. Josh Marshall wrote about it today:
I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
The most important thing to remember about polls is that the opinions captured in them are often less important than the salience of those numbers. Maybe Donald Trump likes linguini and 90% of Americans are against it. But who cares? No one’s going to make their vote on that basis. Salience is critical. On its own I’m not sure surrounding yourself with billionaire friends is a major voting issue. But it’s unlikely to stay on its own since we’re about to see huge shifts in fiscal policy which favor billionaires at the expense of everyone else. The biggest point is that Democrats need to make it salient. But these numbers show there’s very fertile ground for doing so.
He goes on to point out that this means the Democrats don’t have to get into the argument about whether or not a New York City family making $500,000 a year is “really rich.” Yes, they are by the standards of the rest of the country. But in relation to these insanely wealthy billionaires, they’re as poor as the rest of us, which is important politically since that is a group that the Democrats need to win elections.
And the vast majority of these billionaires are now slavering over the opportunity to serve Donald Trump and the Republicans.
By the way, DOGE is extremely unpopular while the core Democratic policy agenda is not:
A few other data points. 29% support “DOGE”; 39% oppose it. A fairly large 20% don’t know and 12% don’t have a clear opinion. Rather strikingly, when asked which things the government isn’t spending enough money on social security (67%) and education (65%) ranked highest, with assistance to the poor (62%) and Medicare (61%) just slightly behind. Notably, just slightly further behind are Medicaid (55%) and Border Security at (51%)
They have handed the Democrats a perfect opening but they need to go through it and they need to do it quickly. They can tie everything Trump is doing to it — every single decision he’s making is really in service of his rich pals. He’s actually saying it. Here he is in the last couple of weeks lamenting the hell people in Beverly Hills are supposedly enduring at multiple appearances:
By the way, he sold his house in Beverly Hills in 2019 while he was president — to an Indonesian billionaire business partner.
He sounds a lot more out of touch than he used to with this embrace of the Billionaire Boys Club. The Dems have to stop being afraid of them and take it to the people. Remember, most of these guys are just delayed adolescent nerds. It shouldn’t be that hard to get them to go back to what they’re good at and stay out of partisan politics. It really isn’t their thing.