With Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, and America still trapped in a two-party system, Democrats are inherently the party of resistance now. There is, of course, one cardinal rule that Democrats must follow to fulfill this role.
Democrats must resist.
Frustratingly, Democrats are practically falling all over themselves to fail at this one simple task, and it’s probably going to doom us all.
Political energy and chasing votes
Winning elections requires getting votes. You need more votes than the other people on the same ballot. It’s that simple. Of course, deciding how to win those votes is more complicated.
The Democratic Party has a tendency to rush toward the center. Immediately after the 2016 presidential election, there was much gnashing over how Democrats “lost” Obama voters to Trump. It was almost immediately declared that Trump won because of “white working-class voters”, which caused discussion among Democrats to focus on winning those voters back. The idea goes that, if only Democrats had played to the center more, they would’ve won more of these voters (and with them the election).
But there are two fatal problems with this approach.
Problem one: The election wasn’t really decided by voters.
The first big lie of Trump’s Presidency was that Trump “won over” large numbers of voters. The truth is, Trump didn’t meaningfully move the needle much at all. There weren’t additional voters flocking to Trump, he got close to what any GOP candidate would get.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Wisconsin, one of the states that Clinton considered part of her “blue firewall” and Trump won in a shocking upset. Trump won in Wisconsin with a final total of 1,405,284 votes, which sounds like a large number, until you look at historical trends.
In 2012, running against President Obama, Mitt Romney pulled in a total of 1,407,966 votes in the state. That’s right, Mitt Romney got 2,000 more votes in Wisconsin in 2012 than Donald Trump got in 2016. And Mitt Romney lost the state, four years before Trump won it with fewer votes.
So, if Trump didn’t win over more voters, how did he win? The answer, it turns out, is turnout. While Trump got 2,000 fewer votes than Romney in 2012, Clinton got 238,000 fewer votes than Obama. Clinton was right to assume Trump would make no gains in the state, but she just didn’t get enough people to vote for her.
In the end, Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by close to 23,000 votes, despite Trump himself doing worse than his predecessor.
Some of those voters went to third parties. From 2012 to 2016, there was an increase in votes in Wisconsin among the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution Party candidates. But that doesn’t explain it all, either. From 2012 to 2016, the total number of votes in Wisconsin (across all candidates) dropped by 92,000 votes.
There are only two possible explanations:
- A large number of eligible voters left Wisconsin or died between 2012 and 2016; or
- People who voted for Obama in 2012 just didn’t show up to vote in 2016.
Trump didn’t win because Trump won over voters. Trump won because of people who didn’t vote for Clinton, because they either went third-party or didn’t vote at all.
This cuts both ways, though; poor voter turnout among Republicans could be Democrats’ salvation. It’s how Democrat Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in a special election last year, for the U.S. senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. If you compare turnout in the 2017 Senate special election to the 2016 Presidential election, it’s pretty clear that Doug Jones wasn’t a huge hit with Alabama voters. Jones got 673,896 votes, compared to Clinton’s pull of 729,547 votes in the state.
But while Jones got slightly fewer votes than Clinton, Roy Moore’s turnout fell off a cliff compared to Trump. Trump got over 1.3 million votes in Alabama in 2016, enough to blow Clinton out by a 2-to-1 margin, but Moore only got 651,972 votes. Literally half of 2016 Trump voters in Alabama sat out the 2017 Senate election.
These are the white working-class voters some Democrats are chasing. Democrats can’t really win them over. In a race between a pedophile and a Democrat, they chose to stay home. But at least that was enough to give the Democrat the victory.
Problem two: To be the party of resistance, you must resist.
Of course, it was obvious in the 2017 race that Roy Moore and Doug Jones were very different candidates. The strength of being the resistance party is that you get to motivate your base to show up, just by promising to fulfill your party’s role of resisting. Doug Jones got 92% of the votes that Clinton did in 2016, in a December special election.
And Doug Jones delivered. Alabama Republicans whined last month after Doug Jones voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court conformation. That kind of principled action might cost him in the next election, but he’s doing what Democratic voters expected him to do.
To put it simply: Democratic voters want to elect Democrats who will behave differently from Republicans.
So why, for the love of God, did Tennessee Senate candidate Phil Bredesen declare his support for Brett Kavanaugh? Bredesen had a chance to pick up a Senate seat for the Democrats, he didn’t need to weigh in at all and had skillfully avoided the topic for months, but his sudden declaration of support destroyed enthusiasm for Bredesen among his own campaign volunteers.
What did Bredesen expect to pick up by backing Kavanaugh? People who want Trump’s choices to be approved already had that option, by voting Republican. Voters angry about Kavanaugh’s confirmation are now trapped between a rock and a hard place; electing Bredesen might feel like an endorsement of his position on Kavanaugh, and those voters can’t trust him to behave meaningfully differently than Republicans on core issues now.
The one rule for opposing fascism is to elect anti-fascists. But what do you do when both major-party candidates are willing to rubber stamp our descent into fascism?
By rushing to the center, Bredesen failed the one cardinal rule of being the resistance party. Bredesen failed to resist. He positively declared and staked out his non-resistance. And in doing so, he took away options for voters who care about stopping Trump, who are the only voters he was going to get anyway.
I vehemently disagree with the notion that running left costs votes. Maybe it could cost some votes, but it fires Democratic voters up, and that’s important. Consider Texas, where Beto O’Rourke is passionately defending civil rights protests, humanizing migrant workers (and even comparing Trump’s child detention camps to the Holocaust), and opposed Brett Kavanaugh on the issues long before the world learned he was a rapist. And yet, after making all of those statements, the race is still being labeled a “toss-up”.
Remember, Ted Cruz won his last Senate race, in 2012, by 16 points. Texas is supposed to be unforgiving to liberals, the conventional wisdom has always been to run to the center, but Cruz is facing the fight of his life against an unrepentant progressive.
We live in an increasingly polarized world, where one side is literally pushing this country toward white supremacist fascism. Democrats need to find the courage to be the other side of that fight. Distinguishing yourself from racist fascists shouldn’t be this hard, and yet…
#MeToo and the end of America
2016 was a political perfect storm. One of the many things that went Trump’s way was having linton as his lone remaining political opponent when his “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments came out. Of all the political candidates to challenge him on this topic, Hillary Rodham Clinton was perhaps the least credible person to do so.
To explain, consider whether you agree with the following two statements:
- The #MeToo campaign is, at its core, a protest against men in power using that power to coerce or force women into sexual activity.
- No single American person has more power than the President of the United States.
If you agree with those two statements, you would expect the largest and disproportionate abuse of power possible would be, say, the President of the United States encouraging young female interns to have sex with him.
I’m referring, of course, to President William Jefferson Clinton. As Monica Lewinsky herself noted earlier this year, we still don’t look back at the Clinton presidency through modern perspectives on sexual abuse:
Until recently (thank you, Harvey Weinstein), historians hadn’t really had the perspective to fully process and acknowledge that year of shame and spectacle. And as a culture, we still haven’t properly examined it. Re-framed it. Integrated it. And transformed it. My hope, given the two decades that have passed, is that we are now at a stage where we can untangle the complexities and context (maybe even with a little compassion), which might help lead to an eventual healing—and a systemic transformation.
Lewinsky went on to write about her ongoing struggle to overcome the massive gaslighting she suffered, as a young woman, watching herself get blamed both for the affair itself and the political fallout it created. Is America really still at the point where it would blame the young intern, and not the President, for the affair? Are we past excusing a cover-up by the President of multiple sexual affairs, a cover-up that included witness tampering and perjury?
Even now, two years into the #MeToo movement, it’s hard for people to look back at Bill Clinton’s behavior in the 1990s and recognize how it affected the 2016 election. But it did, for one simple reason: Hillary Clinton supported and defended her husband.
Bill Clinton held the highest office in America, got young interns to blow him, and then lied to the public about it. And Hillary stood by him. That seemed to limit ability to condemn Donald Trump’s attitudes toward women. She couldn’t shame people effectively for supporting a sexual predator, since she had basically done so herself, for years.
I wanted to be wrong on this point, I really did. But just yesterday, Clinton reopened this wound all over again by defending her husband in a new CBS interview. Clinton was asked whether she agreed with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s statement that President Clinton should’ve resigned over his affair.
(Let’s be clear here: If we applied the same standards to Bill Clinton then that we want applied to Donald Trump today, he should’ve resigned.)
Mrs. Clinton replied “absolutely not,” and then insisted that her husband’s affair with Lewinsky was not an “abuse of power” because Lewinsky “was an adult.”
With that interview, Mrs. Clinton effectively dismissed nearly all sexual assault complaints of the #MeToo movement. Many women coming forward were adults in their 20s at the time they were pressured or coerced into sex by men in a position of power.
How does this help form a resistance against Trump and Republicans? It seems to do the exact opposite. Clinton is focusing on her husband’s legacy at a time we need to be condemning sexual assault in the bluntest and loudest terms. Even Republicans in Alabama can only take so much of it, opposing sexual assault and abuse is a winning topic politically, but Democrats can’t stop fucking themselves.
America wants and needs a reckoning right now. But these are the choices Americans are given: A serial sexual predator as President, or the protective wife of a serial sexual predator as President. A Republican Senator who would confirm a sexual predator to the Supreme Court, or a Democratic Senator who would confirm the same sexual predator. A party that accepts sexual prestaros, or a party that has constant internal party debates about whether sexual predators are bad.
It’s no wonder voters struggle to make choices here.
In the end, Democrats will be partly responsible for the collapse of democracy, because they just couldn’t get their shit together and actually stage a resistance before it’s too late.