Democrats Won't Win With Just Good Policy
A recent poll from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee proves that supporting popular proposals isn't enough to beat the right.
If Democrats have made anything clear in the past few years, it’s that they don’t want to talk about Donald Trump anymore. Whether it was Nancy Pelosi urging President Biden to skip the presidential debates or Biden himself stating, “I’m tired of talking about Trump,” Democrats have apparently concluded that the path to victory involves steering clear of the 45th president.
So when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gathered last week with some of the most vulnerable House Democrats to discuss the 2022 midterm elections, it is not hard to predict what the takeaway was. At the meeting, the DCCC reportedly issued “a blunt warning” based on new polling showing that Democrats are in dire trouble—but there are apparently no plans to shift course and take the fight directly to the far-right.
The poll’s conclusions were hardly surprising to anyone who has paid attention to American politics for the past decade. Voters, the poll showed, overwhelmingly support President Biden’s agenda, from his Covid-19 relief bill to his proposed infrastructure investments. And voters do not like the far-right:
Fifty-seven percent of battleground voters said they have serious doubts about GOP lawmakers after hearing that those members “helped spread Trump's lie about the election,” and 56 percent of voters said they had serious doubts after hearing that Republicans in Congress are “spreading lies about the COVID vaccine.”
All good news so far, right? The problem—which is, in the view of House Democrats, immensely puzzling—is that voters do not give Democrats good scores on the economy, despite loving everything they propose. The poll showed that just 42% of voters trust Democrats on the economy, and that overall, Democrats are on the verge of getting creamed in swing districts. The goal, according to congressional Democrats, “is making sure they get the credit” for the policies their voters love. In order to get there, Democrats need “to better explain what Democrats have been doing to help the Covid-ravaged economy.”
That the organization tasked with electing Democrats to Congress just came to terms with the fact that its good politics to take credit for popular things ought to be cause for concern. Of course, Republicans figured this out a long time ago, going so far as to take credit for proposals they voted against. But there’s something deeper going on here, too. The reflex of Democrats to diagnose every problem as a policy-messaging issue is deep-rooted, and hard to square with the political reality. Indeed, if we’ve learned anything from the overwhelming success of Republicans over the past decade, it’s that saying you support popular things is only one small part of the political equation. As Brian Beutler writes in his newsletter:
[E]lection after election has come and gone, and few if any have turned on the substantive policies that came into existence over the preceding two years, or that the candidates in those elections promised to support going forward. More often they turned on whose passions had been stirred the most. So ask yourself, which is the more galvanizing appeal: 1. The other side (sotto voce: which stole the last election and murdered the hero who could have stopped them) seeks to control your lives, and the life of the American mind, or 2. We passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with those people!
This isn’t to say substantive policies can’t translate to political victories. Of course they can. But a strategy that treats the means and ends of politics as the same thing—which fails to recognize that doing good things for your voters is distinct from appealing to people’s sense of what is good and important—is destined to fail. It is tempting to fit politics into a neat template where good policy equals victory at the polls and everything else is noise. But it’s just not reality.
And that is exactly what the takeaway from the DCCC’s poll should be. To anyone who is not already convinced that talking about Trump is bad politics—that any subject other than policy is a mere distraction—the conclusion is obvious: voters, of course, want good policy, but they also feel an imminent threat from the far-right radicals who not only stand in the way of good policy but also endanger our democracy (and public health). That these complex and potentially divergent desires can lead to inconsistent and complicated results in a poll is an entirely predictable result. If Republicans believe what they’re being told—that Democrats want to take away your guns, install socialism and abolish the police—what does it matter that Biden proposed one bill that you like? And if a Democrat is, rightfully, concerned about the destruction of our democracy and anti-vax conspiracy theories that endanger public health, good luck appealing to them with a pitch about rebuilding bridges.
Yes, voters want good policy. But especially amidst a pandemic and a political crisis fueled by a burgeoning fascist movement on the right, they want someone to fight for their values even more.
Armed with this insight, the path to victory should be clear: Democrats would ditch any efforts at bipartisanship, nuke the filibuster, and pass a ton of hugely popular bills on party lines. Meanwhile, they would ramp up the January 6th commission and fill the airwaves with ads tying Republicans to Covid-19 conspiracy theories and Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
But that is, in many ways, the opposite of what Democrats are doing. As Trump has quietly tightened his grip on the Republican Party (prediction markets now have him as the clear frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination), Democrats have spent nearly all of their energy pursuing a bipartisan infrastructure bill. In other words, as Democrats privately struggle over why they don’t get credit for their popular proposals, they are simultaneously doing everything in their power to share credit with Republicans for their popular proposals. And while the January 6th commission held a riveting first hearing that garnered significant media attention, it took forever to happen, and there appears to be no broader effort to translate the commission into an electoral strategy.
Without a course correction, Democrats appear poised to repeat the same strategy in 2022 that has consistently failed them, with tragic consequences. The history books are filled with Democratic candidates who perfectly fit the DCCC’s mold of a successful swing candidate—politically centrist, obsessed with bipartisanship and squarely focused on policy-oriented messaging—but flopped miserably. Whether it was Phil Bredesen’s support for Brett Kavanaugh or Claire McCaskill’s critique of “crazy Democrats,” the establishment strategy of carefully tailoring each candidate’s messaging to detailed, state-by-state issue polling has failed time and time again. Meanwhile, candidates who broke with the playbook and leaned directly in to the thorniest political brawls, such as Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia, are responsible for some of the Democrats’ greatest achievements in recent years.
What was the ultimate takeaway at the DCCC meeting? “Run as ‘Biden Democrats.’” It’s hard to criticize that approach, because it’s not quite clear what it means. If it refers to the Biden who spent months prosecuting the case against Trump and generating anti-Trump turnout, I’m all in. But if it refers to the Biden who is tired of talking about Trump and the violent, anti-democratic, anti-vax movement he has fueled, well, don’t say you weren’t warned.