IF YOU'RE SEEING THINGS RUNNING THROUGH YOUR HEAD, WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

On Sunday (2/19), the New York Times published another one of those thumb-sucking opinion pieces which argued that since diehard Trump supporters haven’t abandoned ship yet, it proves that Democrats are wrong about everything.  It’s another verse in the never-ending song, “Why Can’t Democrats Be More Like Republicans?”  It’s a recurring cliché, but it’s also a serious misunderstanding of the current political situation.

Democrats are never going to convert hardcore Republicans.  The good news is, they don’t need to.  As I never tire of repeating, Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump.  The inherent small state bias of the Electoral College (where a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times as much as a vote in California) handed the election to Trump.  But his margin was razor-thin.  A shift of only 100,000 votes in three states would have changed the outcome in the Electoral College.  What Democrats need to do is find a way to change those 100,000 votes.  Of course, it would be great to get more than that, and in more than three states.  Let’s go for a landslide next time. 

Fortunately, there are several places where those votes can be found that don’t require deprogramming millions of Trump supporters. 

·         Category 1:  Democratic-leaning voters whose passion for email security kept them from supporting Hillary Clinton.  She won’t be on the ballot in 2020. 

·         Category 2:  Voters who bought the third party argument that there was no real difference between Clinton and Trump.  They’ve already been provided with ample evidence that they were wrong.  Some of those voters sat the 2016 election out, and others voted Green or Libertarian.  In at least four key battleground states – Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – third party voters swung those states to Trump.  My guess is that there will be a lot fewer third party voters in 2020, and that Democrats stand to pick up the majority of those votes.  That, by itself, is reason for optimism.

·         Category 3:  Last but not least, there are indeed potential Democratic votes among 2016 Trump voters.  The challenge will be to ignore the pundits who want Democrats to abandon their own base to chase Republican votes.  Instead, Democrats need to distinguish between the Deplorables and the Persuadables – hardcore Trump supporters vs. those who may have voted for him reluctantly and are now experiencing buyer’s remorse. 

The most effective tactic against the Deplorables is to highlight their excesses and make them the face of the Republican Party.  If Milo Yiannopoulos is the face of Republican Party, a whole lot of people will run the other way.   Rhetorically, the best way to drive a wedge between the enthusiastic and reluctant Trump supporters is to avoid blanket statements like (as Tommy Vietor put it on Pod Save America), “If you voted for Trump, you’re an idiot.”   That’s not persuasive language.   It’s true that some Republicans really are idiots and worse, but it will be more effective to reserve pejorative terms for specific people (e.g. Yiannopoulos, Flynn, Spicer, Conway) and specific behaviors (e.g. racism, or collaboration with Russia to influence American elections).

One specific behavior that qualifies as idiotic is the whole “We suffered for 8 years, now it’s your turn” meme that some Republicans are pushing.  Several of my FB friends have reprinted a longish post by someone named Scott Mednick, in which he listed many of President Obama’s accomplishments and asked after each one, “Has this caused your suffering?”  Unemployment is down, the stock market way, way up. The budget deficit way down, corporate profits up.  Violent crime down, number of abortions also down.  Do these things make you suffer? 

It’s a long, impressive list.  I wish I’d thought of it.  But while it might come in handy if you’re trapped in a political conversation at a family reunion, I don’t think it’s a scalable argument.   

Oddly enough, I believe that many Republicans really did suffer during the Obama years.  It’s just that the source of their suffering wasn’t President Obama.  If Republicans suffered for eight years, it was because they were living in their own nightmare fantasy world all that time.  They trusted the right wing propaganda machine, which told them that President Obama was going to take their guns, impose Sharia law, and make them get gay married. 

Donald Trump was the perfect candidate for voters with that mindset.  As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “At the heart of Trumpism is the perception that the world is a dark, savage place, and therefore ruthlessness, selfishness and callousness are required to survive in it. It is the utter conviction, as Trump put it, that murder rates are at a 47-year high, even though in fact they are close to a 57-year low.”

And lots of Republicans believe all that stuff.  In fact, they can’t get enough of it.  Like kids telling ghost stories around the campfire, they aren’t satisfied until they scared themselves out of their wits.  Now they’re addicted to the adrenaline rush of fear and anger. 

When Donald Trump says he actually won the popular vote because three million people voted for Clinton illegally, they believe it, and they’re pissed off.  When Kellyanne Conway concocted a totally bogus Bowling Green Massacre, they bought it.  Even after Conway admitted that she “misspoke,” 51% of those supporting Trump’s Muslim ban said that the Bowling Green Massacre was not only real, but that it proved that the Muslim ban was necessary.

There is a non-trivial segment of the Republican base is literally delusional.  Those are the people Democrats can safely ignore in 2018 and 2020.  As Thomas Paine wrote, “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason … is like administering medicine to the dead.”

But there are growing numbers of Trump voters who are beginning to realize what the loss of Obamacare would mean to them, or to a loved one.  Others fell for Trump’s bullshit about running the country like a business, overlooking the fact that most of his businesses have gone belly up.  Now that they’ve seen President Trump in action for a month, they’re appalled at the level of incompetence emanating from the White House.  Those are the Persuadables. 

Non-voters, third party voters, and Persuadables – there are millions of votes available for the right Democrat.  The challenge is to recruit those candidates and support them.