Beyond Trump

The battle for the future is near

Donald Trump’s erratic debate performance and role as a COVID-19 superspreader has led to his sharp drop in the polls — showing Joe Biden leads as high as 14 to 17% nationally — which will probably also cost Republicans the Senate. But not before they place another justice on the Supreme Court, creating a 6 to 3 GOP-appointed, conservative majority, which threatens to stymie or undo everything that Democrats might hope to do, as well as potentially overturning Obamacare, Roe vs. Wade and more.

It was the highest priority for Trump and the Republican Party — a reminder of how unified they are, when push comes to shove — but not for the American people, or even Republican voters. The week after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Data For Progress found 65% support for passing new coronavirus relief legislation, compared to 22% support for confirming a replacement. Even Republicans narrowly favored coronavirus relief 44 to 43.

But Trump and his Republican enablers had their eyes on a long-term power-grab, rather than helping millions of Americans in distress. To bring about such sweeping changes through the court with a popular mandate would be one thing. But the depth of minority rule is breath-taking: Republican presidents have made 15 of the most recent 19 appointments to the court, prior to the current one, despite only winning the popular vote once since 1988.

As The Nation magazine’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, wrote back in February, when the balance was only 5 to 4:

Not a single significant policy or initiative proposed by the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination is likely to survive a Supreme Court review. Nothing on guns, nothing on climate, nothing on health care — nothing survives the conservative majority on today’s court.

Mystal had a hard time getting people’s attention, until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. But the GOP’s sharp reversal from the “rule” it invented four years ago, to prevent President Barack Obama from filling a court seat in February, seems to have finally done the trick.

So, the question looms: What are Democrats going to do? Not just about the Supreme Court, but about their entire approach to governing in the wake of the second catastrophic GOP presidency in a row, the worst since Herbert Hoover, if not the worst ever.

Like most Democratic lawmakers, Rep. Alan Lowenthal remains committed to “bipartisan solutions,” even after months of GOP stonewalling on further COVID-19 relief.

“I believe it is critical that we make sure our institutions are responsive, fair and democratic,” he told Random Lengths News. “In order to make the political system work for and reflect the desires of all Americans, we must take into consideration the views and input of those representatives on the other side of the aisle.

“While I believe we must not compromise on our principles and values, it is important that everyone regardless of their opinion and ideologies is able to add their input to the discussion. I have found that everyone, regardless of their opinion or ideology, has something to add to a discussion.”

Yet, when Democrats have pursued this path in recent times, they’ve been greeted with implacable hostility. After the George W. Bush catastrophe, President Obama made a concerted effort to reach out to Republicans — even, as unbeknownst to him, they plotted to deny him any accomplishments.  

As Robert Draper described in the prologue to Do Not Ask What Good We Do, Republican leaders met on the night of Obama’s inauguration and mapped out a strategy of total resistance to block him.  Most notably, Obamacare was based on a conservative Republican foundation (the universal mandate) conceived 30 years ago, and embodied the Massachusetts model known as “Romneycare,” because the GOP’s 2012 nominee had been governor at the time, with a major role in shaping it. 

Obamacare also included 188 Republican amendments which Democrats accepted in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation, without getting one single Republican vote of support in return. In fact, congressional Republicans falsely claimed it was “rammed down their throats,” fueled popular opposition based on lies about “death panels,” and used the hysteria that created as a result to mobilize their base and retake the House in 2010 — a position of power they held until losing the 2018 mid-terms.

What’s more, the man in charge when the GOP retook the House in 2010 — Michael Steele, then head of the Republican National Committee — is now one of MSNBC’s leading never-Trumpers, whose presence significantly shapes the messages sent to a large share of Democratic activists. There, on the so-called “Fox News of the left,” Steele and his fellow “never Trump” Republicans and ex-Republicans far out-number Bernie Sanders supporters, despite representing a much smaller percentage of the population, and virtually nothing of the Democratic Party’s political tradition.

Make no mistake, it’s good to have allies across the political spectrum in an election to save democracy, which 2020 surely is. But letting those who paved the way for Trump set the agenda for what comes after is simply a recipe for yet another disaster.

Three things contributed significantly to Trump’s success in the 2016 GOP primary — all of which the “never-Trumpers” bear some responsibility for: First, the decades-long failure of Republican politicians to deliver on their promises to GOP voters, and resulting erosion of trust; second, their commitment to unpopular positions, such as cutting Medicare and Social Security; and third, his red-meat appeal to racial resentment. Of these three factors, only the last has gotten acknowledgement, but not serious sustained re-thinking from the “never-Trump” contingent who paved the way for him.

That’s reason enough to reject letting them tell Democrats what they should do beyond beating Trump. But framing a positive agenda requires something more: A better understanding of how Trump won the general election, including thee under-appreciated factors: First, Trump’s commitment to appointing pre-approved conservative justices — then promising to consult the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, and then releasing a list of names before the GOP convention — which wedded both the GOP establishment and its religious right allies to him. The fact that the GOP is rushing to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, while refusing to pass desperately-needed coronavirus relief starkly underscores how crucially important this is to them.

If the Supreme Court really were as “above politics” as they disingenuously claim, this would make no sense whatsoever. Because it is clearly not, Democrats need to respond appropriately. Expanding the court is a necessity, to prevent it from stifling our democracy.

“I want to fight like hell to win control of the court so that a Democratic run court can be depoliticized,” The Nation’s Mystal told RLn. “Conservatives play to win, and Democrats must too. We can have peace, after we win.”

The second unappreciated factor why Trump won is the broader erosion of trust among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, which provided a fertile field for both Trumpian conspiracism and foreign disinformation. It’s well-known that Trump performed strongly among non-college educated whites. But what’s less understood is that this only applied to those lacking in social trust, as explained in a recent online seminar from the Michigan Institute for Data Science by Democratic data scientist David Shor. Social trust — the belief that people can generally be trusted — has been declining since the 1970s to around 30% today, Shor explained. Among white voters, those with social trust voted for Hillary Clinton more than Obama — up seven points among college graduates and five points among non-graduates. But among those saying people can’t be trusted, Clinton only did one point better than Obama among college graduates, and nine points worse among non-graduates.

Thus, the combination of less education and lack of social trust was the key to Trump’s razor-thin victory — as well as the surprise factor, as Shor explained: “answering phone surveys is very heavily correlated with whether or not you trust your neighbors.”

So, lack of social trust was the real secret sauce behind Trump’s election, even beyond what Shor said. Trump’s appeal to distrustful voters makes sense in multiple ways — on the one hand, he appeals to their sense of betrayal and appears to speak up for them, while on the other, he takes advantage of their generalized distrust: If one is generally trusting of people, then a schemer like Trump really stands out as unreliable, but if one distrusts everyone, generally, then there’s nothing particularly alarming about him.

The third unappreciated factor why Trump won was the Democrats’ failure to campaign on popular issues, as opposed to focusing on Trump. Shor dealt with this, too.

“The correlation between voting and issue views declined,” he noted.

He showed a slide from the Wesleyan Project showing the breakdown of presidential advertising from 2000 to 2017, broken down into “policy,” “personal,” and “both”. Ordinarily policy ranged from 80 to 60%, with John McCain as the outlier at just over 40%, and Trump well within the normal range, with 70% policy ads. But Clinton only ran about 25% issue ads, and almost 65% personal ads, plus another 11% or so that were both. The ads she ran most were precisely the kind run by the “Lincoln Project,” a “never-Trump” group whose biting, up-to-the-minute ads liberals love, but whose efficacy is probably quite limited, if 2016 is any indication.

In fact, Shor explained, one development coming out of 2016 was the use of large-scale online tests of ad effectiveness. They found that “roughly one in five ads that we tested made people want to vote for Republicans,” so obviously those ads never aired. What ads were those?

“The more people in the office liked the ads, the less well they did,” Shor said, which makes sense, because those making the ads lived and breathed politics, while the target audience was the polar opposite.

The first race this was used on was the Doug Jones Senate special election in Alabama running against Roy Moore, a populist Bible-thumper.

“What we found was that a lot of that stuff that really inspired or got liberals riled up actually was demotivating, talking about racist things that Roy Moore had done actually decreased African-American vote likelihood,” Shor said, while, “The thing that worked really well was a very straightforward communication about policies Doug Jones supported that would help people go to college and get good jobs.” Most significantly, this showed that there was no trade-off between motivating base voters and persuading swing voters — the same ads appealed powerfully to both.

These results were further validated by a large-scale experiment involving about two million people, testing messages for a generic Democrat versus Donald Trump. The main result was that “Talking about concrete issues that Democrats support on average does about three to four times better than attacks on Donald Trump,” with the best results on core economic issues.

“Telling people the Democrats want to expand Social Security or that they want to hire more teachers still does move people and is substantially better use of time than attacking Trump,” he said. The same goes for “talking about mental health.” In short, the issues Democrats have always cared about are issues that move voters as well. And — duh! — Democrats should run on them … hard.

This result fits perfectly with Lowenthal’s outlook, when I asked him a follow-up question, distinguishing between two senses of “bi-partisan” — one defined  by politicians, the other defined by more than 50 years of polling that finds significant bi-partisan support for progressive economic policies.

“I believe that most people support progressive policies, especially when those policies are presented in a non-ideological manner,” Lowenthal responded. “We can look at the overwhelming support for issues like universal health care, climate change, COVID relief, elimination of systemic racism and reform of our justice system, and the promotion of voting rights for all,” he said. But, “This doesn’t correlate with the pushback we see from the majority of the GOP in Congress,” he warned. “Bipartisanship doesn’t work if radical factions like the Freedom Caucus can veto any Republican measure (for example immigration or gun reform) and SCOTUS can strike down anything Congress passes.”

And that’s precisely the problem that’s going to confront us, if, as now expected, Democrats win control of the White House and Senate in November.

“I agree that there is plenty of consensus in the American public on major issues — provide universal healthcare, lower healthcare costs, take dramatic action on climate change, tackle inequality in our institutions, follow the science on ensuring COVID recovery,” Lowenthal said. “We can deliver on a progressive agenda if we make Congress responsive to the actual will of the people.”

But Democrats are also going to have to defang the court, or else risk seeing everything they do struck down. Now may not be the best time to talk about it in the midst of campaign. But the thinking is long overdue. And the time for action can’t be put off for long.