There's Democrats, and Then There's Democracy
I meant to get a post out yesterday about the conversation I had with Grafton Tanner that posted last week, but every day is a decade, so I’ll do that tomorrow/ten years from now.
Today I am side-eyeing the news.
I got an email from Navigator Research this morning with a set of do’s and don’t’s for messaging about the OMB’s order to stop funding grants and loans.
Here’s the basics of their advice:
When communicating on the Administration’s actions, it’s critically important that messengers clearly outline the human impacts of their latest move to enrich billionaires. Focus on the true victims of this decision - people who depend on programs - not on the process of “spending freezes/pauses.” This isn’t a “spending freeze,” this is a “cut to programs that people depend on.” Do not let this be a conversation about spending – make this about programs and their impact on real people.
Then they lay out a few examples, like…
“Don’t call the cuts a “spending pause” or “freeze”… These are permanent spending cuts until proven otherwise.”
John Fetterman posted this on Bluesky (a screengrab from the other place):
And here’s what AOC said there (no I won’t link to X).1
By the time I am writing this — around 4pm eastern — it’s clear that most Democratic members of Congress got the memo from Navigator, because most of them are posting something like this:
It’s a start.
But as has been reported, it took Democrats a week to condemn the January 6 pardons, so I am going to remain skeptical they can keep up this level of masculine energy, Mark.
And one of the reasons for my concern is that even Navigator — who put out entirely common sense communications advice about an utterly, catastrophically cruel order from the Trump administration to strip health care and food and support from millions of taxpayers mostly for the vengeance of it, but also to pay for a tax cut for people who need one the least — had to first establish that these cuts were unpopular. They wrote:
Earlier this month, Navigator took a first look at potential cuts that were under consideration by the Trump administration. Across the board, cuts to these programs are incredibly unpopular. 81% of Americans oppose cuts to Medicaid, 72% oppose cuts to SNAP, 71% oppose cuts to Head Start and childcare funding, and 69% oppose cutting housing assistance.
Because it’s not enough that those cuts are wrong, or that they are against the law, or that they are part of an unconstitutional overthrow of Congress by the executive branch. It’s not enough that they’re cruel. It’s not enough that the order from the OMB says unhinged things like this:
Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities […] ending “wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.
(emphasis entirely mine)
And then this, the order itself:
“In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.
(emphasis theirs)
But then also this:
Additionally, agencies must, for each Federal financial assistance program: (i) assign responsibility and oversight to a senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administration priorities…
They are so addled by culture wars they invented, they believe evil lurks behind every school lunch and doctor’s appointment. But it’s not just cruel and crazy, it’s also meant to intimidate the civil service. As authoritarian — including the Communists! — regimes often do, they want a party minder to spy on the career agency experts who are just trying to do what Congress asked them to do, and report back to the party boss who has been disloyal and who has been a good little sycophant.
So for today, the Democrats have a message, and they are on it. But some Democrats, including some who might want to President some day soon, keep doing things like this.
I wonder what it will take for Democratic party “elites” to stop reaching out in a spirit of bipartisanship, to stop offering to support MAGA nominees, to stop making excuses for Nazi salutes, and to stop — for the sake of my own sanity, please — saying “kitchen table issues”? Will this be the week? Maybe?
I think the answer is going to be: it depends.
Get caught trying
Chris Hayes has an explanation for why the MAGA Republicans behave the way they do, and why the Democrats behave the way they do. MAGAs have internalized something one of my questionable ex-boyfriends used to say: “Only no press is bad press.” Dems prefer to only try to get attention when they did something good, otherwise, for them, bad press is far, far worse than no press at all.
So their central image concern is: Did the negative attention aimed at the President get the kind of traction we hoped for, or did people ignore us? And if it got attention, who are they more mad at — him or us?
And that makes me think back to two months ago, when this happened:
After the election, after the Biden campaign went on Pod Save America to do whatever that was supposed to be, I wrote what follows to a small group I’m part of. The finger-pointing and self-flagellation that Democrats are now known for was in full swing. Was there any chance a Democrat could win, or was the campaign unwinnable? Who was to blame? How did the pollsters let us down again?
Here’s what I wrote:
I was at the AAPC election post-mortem event in DC last week…
According to Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, in internal polling, Trump’s numbers never moved. After the shooting? Nothing. After the “cats and the dogs and the pets”? Nothing. After Harris? Nothing. His numbers were what they were and nothing was moving that. So it was for the Democrats to outperform him. And if you think they did a bad job spending a billion dollars or didn’t go on enough podcasts, I would offer this unsatisfying take: given the kind of campaign they committed to running, in the time they had to run it, with the rules they decided to obey, they outperformed global anti-incumbency trends by A LOT. It wasn’t enough, but they could have done much, much worse.
So we need to understand the anti-incumbency biases before we can decide what the campaign should have been.
I have listened to every episode of The Bulwark’s Focus Group podcast, I’ve read the synopses of public Democratic pollster focus groups, and now I’ve interviewed many of the folks who work in strategy and polling in and around Democratic party politics.
I’ve also been in fieldwork over the last 5 years talking to people about housing, healthcare, consumer goods, higher education, and the criminal justice system for private-sector clients. The so-called “economic headwinds” aren’t just about whatever you think the economy is. It’s bigger than the jobs report or the GDP or the NASDAQ.
The global anti-incumbency trend was the real headwind, and that is a result of Covid, and inflation, and war.
In Covid, people in democracies learned their governments were, in general, not prepared, and some were downright reckless.
Inflation was another problem electorates expected their governments to be able to “solve” — but they seemed incapable, unwilling, or in denial about it. They certainly never learned how to communicate about it.
During Covid, the US government provided assistance and relief to many people — and then suddenly, they didn’t. For 50 years, American women had the right to (on paper anyway) bodily autonomy — and then all of a sudden, they didn’t. The American dream has been getting farther and farther away for more and more people. And now we’re in a world at war, a world where everything can be rug-pulled, including freedom.
Anti-incumbency isn’t only about inflation; it’s about a sense of decline, or backsliding, or at least of sliding into something people don’t recognize and don’t want and, in some cases, are absolutely terrified about.
The other thing I can tell you is most voters have unrealistic expectations about what a president or a vice president can do. So, anti-incumbency is far more pronounced at the national than state or local levels. But even there, a lot of people said their biggest beef with Sherrod Brown, for example, was that he’d been there too long. They just wanted a change. And Moreno was backed by crypto money, so everybody in Ohio knew his name and they knew it wasn’t “Sherrod Brown”.
I believe that there were things on the margins, maybe, that could have closed a state or two for Harris. But it wasn’t about the money, or the anti-trans ads, or how many podcast appearances she made.
The biggest problem polling has is that it is trying to measure a sample that doesn’t exist yet. The electorate is who votes in the election. They were modeling their best guess, and they all got close. The election was close on the national level. But the electorate wasn’t who they expected it to be. Too many Democrats sat it out. Late-breaking voters weren’t breaking for Harris in the right ratios, in the right places. The people who were motivated to vote? They were the ones who wanted to throw the bastards out — so they voted as much against an unpopular incumbent party as for their opposition.2
This election was about how helpless, fearful, fragile, people feel. About how abandoned and condescended-to people across demographic groups feel. And I wish it weren’t so, but the extant Democratic party and its consultants — they do not have what it takes to address that.
Mike Podhorzer told me this little gem: The Democrats lost this year because they won in 2020, and they’ll win in 2028 because they lost in 2024. This is the world we’ll live in until someone gets the guts to really reimagine the whole project.
As for whether the Harris campaign staffers showed enough contrition, I don’t care. I don’t need an apology from these people. They did what they thought was right based on out-of-date priors and too much ‘playing by the rules’. They weren’t just running against headwinds, they were on a collision course with a brick wall, and they didn’t have the juice to break through.
Don’t yuck the voters’ yum.
We’re somehow in a political landscape where Democrats are still struggling to grasp what they should have always known. People want change. People like politicians who talk like normal people do. People like politicians who are willing not to just get in a fight, but to pick a fight on behalf of the voters. People like politicians who can speak and act with moral clarity.
And yes — that absolutely leads them to vote for people with authoritarian populist agendas or tendencies.3 But not because only authoritarians talk like normal people and are willing to fight and possess moral clarity. Voters are sorting their choices based on, in a sense, aesthetics before substance — which is a real bummer for the technocratic straight-A students who tend to run for office as Dems. Democrats want to believe that “voters are smarter than that.” But voters are humans. They notice what they notice — if there’s something to notice. Once they’ve noticed, if they like what they see, they’ll get to know more. That’s how attraction works.
The reality is simple, but hard to execute if you’re not built for it: You can in fact use these aesthetics and have substance… and deliver democratic outcomes.
But too many of our Democratic representatives and consultants and pundits are not built for it. So we need to think about what it takes for Democrats to perform better, so that democracy can perform better.
Up next on Cross Tabs Podcast
Tomorrow’s episode is about the way people are feeling about democracy in democracies, with my guests Richard Wike and Pat Moynihan from the Pew Research Center. Here’s a great piece of research on how people still like the idea of democracy, but are dissatisfied with the way its working. Good pre-read before the show drops.
Hang in there.
Hilariously, this is the Grok AI fact check on that, so I GUESS IT MUST BE TRUE.
The split ticket voting analysis is going to be a treasure trove. Here’s one from
’s Echelon Insights: https://echeloninsights.com/split-ticket-atlas-2024/I’ve had this particular bug up my ass all morning after Jon Stewart’s monologue on The Daily Show. In a lot of ways, fascism can’t exist without democracy. If you don’t have a democracy and your leader is fascist, there’s a name for that, and that’s “The King” or “The Generalissimo” or something in that vein. So it is not illegitimate, Jon, to say that what a democratically elected leader does is fascist. 37% of Germans did vote for the National Socialists. So…