Democrats Should Acknowledge Reality And Abandon Their Utterly Failed Anti-Trump Strategy (If You Can Even Call It That)

“Orange Man Bad” might be accurate, but it doesn’t work as a campaign slogan in 2024

For about a decade now, the Democratic Party has put a referendum to the American public: “Donald Trump is a racist, fascist, misogynistic strongman and alleged serial sexual assaulter who doesn’t care about democratic norms and who will seek, whenever possible, to demolish them if it benefits him. Do you really want someone like this to be president?” Over time, the party has been able to add ever-more damning, fully accurate details, like “felon,” “adjudicated rapist,” and “attack on the Capitol instigator” to this description of the now-former president.

The American people have answered the same way, over and over: “Sure, maybe.” 

Of course I’m oversimplifying a little bit, because a substantial minority of the country despises Donald J. Trump and would never vote for him in a million years. But thanks in (large) part to the vagaries of the Electoral College, polling suggests more than enough voters would vote to give him the White House. In fact, if you believe Nate Silver, he’s more than a 2-to-1 favorite at the moment.

I am intentionally setting aside my own feelings about Trump for the purpose of this post, but I’ve made them clear over and over and over. Suffice it to say, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that Trump is so popular, relatively speaking, and I know most of my friends can’t either. 

If you’re part of the Democratic and/or broader anti-Trump establishment, though, you have a professional and a moral imperative to wrap your mind around that fact. Look, you took a crack at the “Trump is racist and fascist” line — many cracks, in fact — and you got all the already-liberal folks on board, plus some moderate (mostly suburban) educated Republican types, at least for an election or two. But clearly, clearly, clearly, this is a failing strategy when it comes to consistently beating Trump at the national level. 

The most damning evidence against the orthodox Democratic strategy for fighting Trump and Trumpism is the trajectory of black and Latino opinion toward Trump. This graph from Bloomberg shows what those lines look like during seven years of blanket dissemination of the message that Trump is a dangerous and bigoted madman who is perhaps one or two steps removed from bona fide white nationalists:

It. . .didn’t seem to work. At all. This shouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone familiar with the heterogeneous nature of these voting blocs, and with the fact that both include tens of millions of moderate-to-conservative voters, but at the end of the day, if you’re a Democrat who thought Trump was beatable if only the racist/fascist drum was beaten hard and loudly enough, how can you come to any other conclusion that you’ve failed spectacularly? The very groups you are claiming to want to protect from Trump have warmed to him over time.

If you want to be cute, you can say, “Well, maybe those graphs would look even worse for the Democrats if they hadn’t hammered Trump the way they have!” I guess so, but at a certain point you’re kicking the evidence can so far down the road accountability becomes impossible. (The embattled Fire Marshal can always point to a hypothetical universe where even more things caught on fire than did during his time in office, and there’s no way to prove otherwise.)

Either way, many Democrats have become addicted to a strategy of demonizing Trump — an eminently demonizable person, to be fair! — rather than genuine attempts at persuasion. This is a complicated argument to make because 1) a lot of campaigning is criticizing your opponent, and 2) I don’t think we have good evidence on the precise role of persuasion, versus other factors, in determining who wins presidential elections. So a lot of this is admittedly speculative, but I still think it’s important to understanding what’s going on, especially as we continue to wander through the fallout of Biden’s very public implosion last Thursday night. (No, last night’s five-minute teleprompter-talk doesn’t resolve or even ameliorate any of this.)

Since then, there have been some truly shocking, condescending, bizarre responses from folks who, like me, do not want to see Trump in the White House again.