Josh Marshall and I are in sync:
I’d like to highlight a few excerpts from his post.
First (bold emphasis mine):
One of the Trump opposition’s consistent challenges through both his presidential terms has been making the case that Trump’s selfishness, corruption, incompetence and malevolence affects voters’ individual lives. One blindspot for the opposition during Trump’s first term, at least through February 2020, was that for many people, as crazy and terrible as Trump acted, if you just went about your life and didn’t pay attention to the news, none of it really mattered. Trump inherited a strong economy and then juiced it with free spending and tax cuts. Many people could just ignore it and go about their business. And of course that’s what a big cross-section of the population is always doing, especially those loosely committed voters who are most up for grabs in any election.
…
The political line of attack is pretty clear. Unlike so many other examples of chaotic and degenerate bullshit or egregious damage that shows up over time in indirect ways, this one is crystal clear: it’s all on Trump and something almost everyone feels in the here and now. You’re already struggling to make ends meet. Trump doesn’t care and isn’t doing anything about it. And all Trump will do is go create more chaos, do some stupid thing no one was asking for for his own kicks, making your situation worse.
As I’ve written in the past, Democrats asking themselves why people vote against their best interests is the wrong question. It’s hard to imagine anyone voluntarily saying to themselves, “I’ll vote against my best interest because…”. People vote in the perceived best interests, and they also vote based on what they perceive directly impacts their lives.
This is why you don’t really see demagogues the more local the political office. Because it’s much easier for voters to make the connection between impact on their lives (positive AND negative) and more local elected office. The further away government gets from people (i.e., the federal government), the harder it is for people to see the direct connection between issues/policies and direct impact on their lives. This opens the door for demagogues like Trump who tell people, “Only I can fix it” (would anyone ever believe that of a local councilperson or mayor or state legislator?) and who assure people that “others” (trans people in bathrooms, brown people scurrying over the border) are to blame for their difficulties. And without the direct impact connection, people are convinced to perceive that blaming others is actually in their best interests.
As Marshall points out, the Canadian tariffs - and picking a fight with our closest ally who the vast majority of people view incredibly favorably - are something that people can easily understand and easily connect to their lives.
More of this from our electeds and candidates please.
________________________
On a related note, we all know that the “go to” for Trump and all of his sycophantic supporters (including people in the administration as well as elected Republicans) - when pressed on how things are not going well in ANY policy arena - fall back on the tried-and-true tactic of “Blame Biden”. It’s automatically programmed into all of their brains. Iran War failure? Military failure? Inflation? Slow economic growth? Blame Biden.
Here’s the rub. Each of the last three Republican Presidents - H W Bush 41, G W Bush 43 and Trump 45 - have saddle subsequent democratic Presidents with economic and other policy disasters:
Bush 41 left Clinton with continued increases in the deficit/national debt (a legacy of Reagan before him), the remnants of the savings & loan banking crisis and a weak somewhat jobless recovery.
Obama took over from Bush 43 in the middle of the Great Recession with high and rising unemployment, a financial system on the verge of collapse and skyrocketing budget deficits/national debt. Households had lost trillions of dollars of wealth, the housing market collapsed and the auto industry was on the precipice.
Finally, there was Trump. Trump left Biden with a botched COVID pandemic, enormous deficits and rapidly growing national debt, unemployment at 6.4% and employment 9-10 million below pre-pandemic levels. As for inflation, well, Trump enacted the CARES Act and subsequent relief legislation that injected substantial fiscal stimulus (inflationary pressure) into the system when Biden took over, and the Federal Reserve was also maintaining extraordinarily easy monetary policy.
This begs the question. Why don’t Democrats relentlessly remind voters of the mess they continually inherit from Republicans and the steps they take every time to fix things?
I’d love to hear a valid answer from every single Democrat in a leadership position…
Robert Redford in the Candidate - "what Do We Do Now?
