Talk tough on crime and immigration, don’t say trans, and sit back and let Trump’s economy make voters mad.
That’s the way to Make Democrats Great Again, or so say the roughly eleventy-nine Democratic-allied centrist political action committees and think tanks, some old, many new, who promise they know how to right (pun intended) the ship and rebrand the Democratic Party.
Nevada U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is heading up one of those groups, the Moderate Democrats PAC. That’s appropriate because she’s a one-time chair of the official PAC of Senate Democrats so she’s experienced at raising money. And when it comes to blind faith in moderation, you could say she’s a radical extremist.
Cortez Masto was momentarily and uncharacteristically trending this summer when she sparred with her Democratic colleague Cory Booker while working to pass a pair of “Police Week” crime bills supported by the entire Senate (including Booker; the whole thing was kind of dopey).
Alas, Cortez Masto’s long-held tendency to back all things cop notwithstanding, the Democratic Senate candidates her Moderate Democrats PAC is raising money for are still going to be called “soft on crime” or whatever in Republican attack ads. That’s just how it works.
And sorry, Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee. Marching in lockstep with Fox alumnus celebrity and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and being one of only eight House Democrats voting with Republicans to allow 14-year-olds to be tried as adults in Washington D.C. courts may have seemed like a politically prudent thing to do at the time. But it’s not going to stop Republicans from calling you a radical leftist criminal coddler, or words to that effect. In ads.
Cortez Masto and Lee, along with the rest of Nevada’s Democrats in Congress — Sen. Jacky Rosen and Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford — have also voted for things like a fearmongering Trump bill to deprive immigrants of due process under the law. But Republicans are still going to say Nevada’s congressional Democrats “love open borders” because that’s how Republicans roll.
The newest entry in the organizational race to persuade Democrats to tack right and party like it’s 1989 is a think tank formed by Adam Jentleson, a former staffer to the late Harry Reid. Jentleson tells the New York Times that the “folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” on contentious issues, especially LGBTQ+ ones.
Every Democratic politician in the country could stop talking about trans people this very minute. In fact, most of them already have. If they ever did. But guess what? Republicans are still going to squeal and scream that Democrats want, as Trump bizarrely puts it, “transgender for everybody.”
There may be some Democratic politicians who sincerely share Trump’s fever dream that “transgender for everybody,” whatever that is, is just around the corner. (Titus and Horsford don’t, by the way).
There are probably also some Democratic politicians who share Trump’s desire to create a shoot first-ask-questions-later-if-ever police state. Or who applaud Trump’s zeal for wrecking not only lives but the economy by indiscriminately deporting people whose only crime was doing what it took to escape poverty and/or oppression.
But if Democrats believe refraining from opposing Trump on divisive socio-cultural issues will make people vote for them instead of Republicans, that seems problematic. It’s not like Republicans are going to stop hammering Democrats on those issues just because Democrats don’t talk about them.
Given a choice between a Democrat who has officially cried “uncle” in fear of Republican red meat attack ads and a Republican who keeps launching those ads anyway, people who are moved by those issues can still be expected to vote for the Republican.
Ye olde thought leaders
The centrist groups vying for Democratic thought leadership are defined almost exclusively by what they want Democrats not to do.
As to what Democrats should do, the centrist group growth industry is fuzzy, collectively mumbling something about “kitchen table issues” and “common-sense.”
Policies and positions reflecting such phrases and concepts were used again and again by Democrats on the campaign trail last year (as they are every campaign year). And they were voiced far, far more often than support for LGBTQ+ rights or sensible immigration reforms. The policy pitch by the centrist groups sounds a lot like the same old.
Which brings us to perhaps the one strategy in the moderate Democratic agenda, (in as much as there is either a strategy or an agenda) that might be loosely termed proactive: Reaffirm support for popular policies, especially health care policies, and hope that voters get sick of Trump’s economic shenanigans.
As rebrandings go, it’s sad-trombone soft and tiresomely derivative.
And it fails to address perhaps the biggest questions about next year’s elections: What exactly is the electorate anymore, and what does it want?
In polling both before and after the 2024 election, voters said their top concern was the economy.
A Fox News poll released last week found 52 percent of those surveyed said Trump is making the economy worse, compared to only 30 percent who said he’s making it better (let alone great again). Numerous other surveys also find Trump underwater on the economy.
So maybe all Democrats need to do is vow to “fight” to protect health care provisions and programs, and then sit back while Republicans sink under the weight of Trump’s economic blundering. And then Democrats might at least take back the House in 2026 (assuming there will be an election), which is the first step toward overturning Trumpism in 2028.
But voter responses to pollsters about the economy notwithstanding, something other than the cost of things — and something other than immigration, and even something other than video of Kamala Harris saying “transgender” out loud, for that matter — was going on with voters last year.
A sizable percentage of Nevada voters told pollsters they wanted to “tear down the system completely.”
Could the tear it down vote be potent enough to neutralize voters’ economic frustration next year? Especially if the economy merely limps along (as per some projections) instead of dropping into recession (as per others)?
Normally that would be unthinkable. But “normally” doesn’t exist anymore.
The evangelizers who swear that centrism will solve everything and the Nevada politicians who love them promise they’ll save the nation by embracing “mainstream positions” and “common sense.”
The last time voters in the nation and Nevada had a chance to express themselves, they elected Trump president. In other words, it’s anybody’s guess if Nevada’s congressional Democrats, and groups like Jentleson’s, have the foggiest idea what, if anything, passes for mainstream common sense anymore.
What’s equally disturbing is how blithely they assume they do.
- Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current
