Dominick Sokotoff/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Biden makes remarks about the administration’s efforts to address inflation and supply chain shortages, on the USS Iowa overlooking the Port of Los Angeles, June 10, 2022.
Thanks to the utter extremism of the Supreme Court and the revealed lunacy of Donald Trump, public opinion has begun to shift against the Republicans. But it won’t automatically translate into more votes for Democrats unless Democrats give voters more reasons to believe that Democrats would change their lives for the better. The Democrats did just that in FDR’s day, right through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, until LBJ blew it all up in Vietnam, and in the process blew up the Democrats as an economically progressive party.
Some strategists see the revulsion against the Dobbs decision and the Court’s tone deafness on gun violence, as well as the growing disgust with Trump personally, as an invitation for Democrats to court suburban swing voters, with the corollary that Democrats should therefore resist going left on economics.
This counsel is profoundly wrong. Democrats need both, and with the right kind of leadership and narrative they can gain ground with both.
The same Republicans who would create an inquisitorial state to track down any person who has had, provided, or abetted an abortion have also been undermining the living standards and life chances of working people for more than four decades. The unpopularity of a far-right Court and a psychotic former president provides an opportunity to connect these dots, and win back working-class voters as well as suburbanites.
Done properly, there is no contradiction between these two goals. We need progress on both fronts.
Recent research demonstrates the power of a strong economic message. The group American Family Voices found in its recently updated “Factory Towns” report that Democrats had lost the most ground in small and midsized manufacturing counties in ten Midwestern states. The latest report, based on new focus group research, points out that:
The voters here are cynical about the Democratic Party, but they are equally cynical about Republicans. More importantly, this is a very populist group of people economically, and the number one villain for these voters is Corporate America. They see the GOP as thoroughly in the pocket of wealthy CEOs and the corporations they run. These voters agree with most of the Democratic Party’s issue agenda, especially, but not only, on economics.
Democrats, from Biden on down, could be gaining ground with these voters with a strong message that resonates with people’s lived experience. Their economic lives have been going down the drain because the Republican Party, which talks a good game on cultural populism, has been destroying their livelihoods. If you want to defend wages, trade unions, Medicare, Social Security, and a good deal more, vote for the Democrat. And if prices are too high, the prime villains are the same rapacious corporations.
The recent revulsion against Trump and the Court decisions gives Democrats a new chance to gain a hearing. But without a positive agenda, they won’t make the sale. And if we want to target the suburbs, a lot of economically vulnerable working families live in the suburbs.
The last several elections were all won or lost on the basis of turnout. Democrats need to give both base and swing voters strong reasons to head to the polls. The battles over reproductive rights, guns, and defense of democracy get us partway there, but only partway.
Democrats, from Biden on down, could be gaining ground with these voters with a strong message that resonates with people’s lived experience.
This brings us to Joe Biden. He has appointed many good people in the area of contesting the power of toxic corporations and banks. But despite all of his professed “working-class Joe” sentiments, Biden doesn’t come across as a fighter for the common American.
Why not? One theory is that he is reluctant to contribute to galloping polarization—though it’s hard to see how even Biden could think America could get more polarized.
Another more convincing theory is that he is mired in another era, a time when bipartisanship was possible. Case in point: Until last week, the COMPETES Act, which is devoted to bringing good jobs back to America, was making good headway in Congress. It’s a Democratic bill with several Republican co-sponsors and has substantial business and labor backing. But then Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, put out a tweet declaring that there would be no action on the bill “as long as Democrats are pursuing a partisan reconciliation bill.”
Translation: McConnell, even over the objection of many in his own caucus who support this bill, wants to deny Democrats any chance at serious accomplishment, as well as any credit for any success.
The White House press office, in the name of press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, put out a statement faulting McConnell for acting “to protect the ability of big pharmaceutical companies to price gouge. Senate Republicans are literally choosing to help China out compete the U.S. in order to protect big drug companies. This takes loyalty to special interests over working Americans to a new and shocking height.”
This is progress, but a president with partisan moxie would have taken on McConnell himself and not left it to his press secretary.
As Ron Brownstein recently wrote in The Atlantic, “many Democrats share a sense that … Biden and his team have been following, not leading. And that tendency points to an enduring question about Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972 and was shaped by a clubbier, more cooperative Washington. Can he be the inspirational leader his party needs to counter the aggressive moves by Republicans in Congress and in the states, together with their appointees on the Supreme Court?”
If Biden were more like Harry Truman, he’d be going around the country, telling the voters of all the good things that Democrats would do, to provide concrete benefits and resist rapacious corporations, if the voters would just return a few more of them. His slogan would be “Make it in America,” and he’d be challenging Republicans to stop blocking legislation to do just that. But maybe Biden, at age 79, is just incapable of changing his style.
It may help that Biden is not on the ballot in November. But thousands of Democrats are, from down-ticket local officials, to numerous governorships, to candidates for the House and the Senate. The Democratic Party has never been great at producing a coherent message. But where institutions fail, political common sense can fill the vacuum.
All of these candidates could and should be addressing the 40-year slide in living standards and laying it at the door of corporate America and its Republican enablers. This is a year when there is so much for Republican candidates to be defensive about. Democrats need to make the most of it.
