Democrats :: To Win, You Have to Want to Fight

The Party is Still Missing the Point

IBM Slide, Circa 1979

Years ago, in the before times, I participated in a discussion on political discourse at the University of Southern California. These were the Obama years, and I was still a Republican, so my Democratic counterpart and I went back and forth about which side was more responsible for the breakdown in political comity.

I started, as I often do in these Kumbaya sessions, that American politics has never been nice. The country was birthed in a war that lasted eight years and one of its first, most tragic events, was Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in a duel (see the musical for more.)

No less than our first president, George Washington, lamented the ugliness of politics, especially toward him, the Founding Father first among equals. He was happy to put politics and public service behind him as he returned to Mount Vernon for good.

James Baker, the legendary Washington insider (he lead four cabinet agencies and was WH chief of staff twice) once said, “Politics ain’t beanbags. Politics is a bloodsport. I damn well know that because I’ve done a lot of it and I’ve got the brusies to show for it.”

Or as my dad, a longtime DC insider himself, would say after listening to me whine, “Welcome to the NFL, pal.”

Yet, here we are, a decade into the Trumposcene Era and the Democratic Party still doesn’t have the will, desire, or ability to understand the fight we’re in, or what it takes to win.

President Bill Clinton was happy to carve up his opponents. Al Gore’s campaign dropped the news* of George W. Bush’s DUI just before Election Day 2000. Barack Obama was happy to have his team accuse Mitt Romney of pushing grandma off a cliff.

*I was standing next to Dick Cheney in the locker room of a technical college in Portland, Maine when this news broke. Everyone looked very tense, except for Cheney, of course. He deadpanned, “What’s the big deal? I have three.”

Back to USC (Fight On!)

At the end of our discussion, a gentleman asked me, “What happens when we run out of words?”

“When we run out of words,” I told him, “We pick up the guns.”

This, my friends, is what we’re facing. We utilize political strategy and tactics to settle our differences in more-or-less civil fashion. Governing should not be zero-sum, but political campaigns are. You win or you lose. There are no moral victories. There should be no pats on the back and ‘we’ll get ‘em next time.’ Not anymore, anyway.

Stark political rhetoric is not antithetical to democracy, it can be the bedrock of it. Being willing to say what needs to be said, whether it’s ‘nice’ is often the difference between winning and losing. Showing (not telling) voters your committment to cause and country matters.

“But Reed,” you say, “We don’t want to fight like Republicans. We don’t want to lie all the time.”

This is the cop out of all cop outs. Only lazy campaigns have to make things up out of whole cloth. Most of what you need to wage an effective, and yes hard-edged campaign, is sitting around waiting to be used.

Remember, of course, though, that an attack on an opponent for a vote they cast won’t work in and of itself. Politics, as Republicans understand, is a battle of values, not policy*. If you’re skewering an opponent for a particular vote, what is the value proposition you’re trying to convey with the attack?

*Dear Democratic Candidates: You don’t need to list every possible group and issue on your website. If you have a “D” behind your name, anyone visiting will get the shorthand of where you stand.

“How are you so good at messaging, and we’re so bad?” I’ve been asked this question dozens of times since we launched The Lincoln Project in late 2019. My answer is always the same, “Messaging is downstream of belief. Tell me what you believe and I’ll tell you your message.”

I had an epiphany thinking through this column. For years I believed Democrats couldn’t come up with a message because there are so many competing factions (which there are, and yes, creates a coherence dilemma.) My revelation led me to an even worse conclusion:

The reason Democratic messaging is so repellant to both swing voters and their own base is because its rooted an elite belief that they should be in charge simply because they’re smarter, better educated, and more enlightened.

They’re not, and voters keep telling them so.

Here is the key takeaway from Catalist’s recent review of the 2024 election:

Overall, we find that the Democratic Kamala Harris / Tim Walz ticket retained key parts of the Biden 2020 coalition, but at lower levels among a specific, interconnected set of subgroups, including young voters, men, voters of color, less frequent voters, urban voters, and voters living outside the major battleground states. No single demographic characteristic explains all the dynamics of the election; rather we find that the election is best explained as a combination of related factors. Importantly, an overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.

Republicans didn’t win in 2024. Democrats lost.

Yes, Let’s Do More of the Same

In order to ‘understand’ voters better, Democratically-aligned groups have begun lighting money on fire pretending to actually care what Americans actually care about. A recent New York Times article reviewing the six months since Trump’s reelection last fall included this gem:

“The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” it urges.”

You cannot make this shit up.

You see, the people running the “SAM” campaign don’t want to understand male voters, nor find some sympathy (God forbid empathy!) The party’s problems are not grammatical, they’re fundamental.

F%@*ing Focus Groups

I attended a dinner a few weeks ago with a number of high-level Democrats. American Bridge’s “Working Class Project” was raised as an example of reaching out to ‘regular’ voters through focus groups. One of the other attendees chimed in, “It does have a sort of Margaret Mead sensibility to it.”

Yes!

Focus groups are fine as far as they go, but they are clinical settings in which the participants are paid to participate. How about going to the places where these folks live and having a conversation with them; not because you see them as one piece of an electoral puzzle, but because you actually care about the issues facing them.

Voters are aware when you’re studying them like some long-lost civilization. “Watch as the North Dakotan goes to the grocery store…” Politics isn’t an anthropological experiment. Americans aren’t lab rats to be dissected and viewed under a microscope.

The Machines are In Charge

Barack Obama’s campaigns ushered in the ‘data driven’ era of Democratic politics. The irony, of course, is that the former president probably would have won those races with nothing more than Michelle Obama and an airplane.

Machines now run the Democratic Party. Every talking point, ad, video, and policy proposal is run through a battery of testing to determine its ‘effectiveness’ with voters. Any crispy edges are shaved off so as not to offend. Shocking to find out they’re not that effective. Just as voters aren’t zoo animals, neither are they 0s and 1s; bits of data waiting to be deconstructed and put back together again.

What started as a means of creating more accurate and efficient message delivery has become a bi-annual Cover Your Ass operation for the Democratic Consulting Class as they test, test, and test some more. When they win, “See it worked!” When they lose, “Well, we tested it all…We don’t know what happened…”

As I noted above, the reliance on machines, polls, focus groups, and data dumps gives Democratic candidates, operatives, and donors the ability to wage sometimes-sucessful campaigns without getting their hands dirty.

Author’s Note: If anyone tells you they won a campaign because of their killer prescription drug ad, they’re selling you something.

In the immediate aftermath of last year’s campaign, the Harris campaign braintrust said they didn’t respond to the Trump campaign’s “She’s for they/them” spot because the numbers didn’t show it was moving anyone. They couldn’t come up with a response from what the data because it was never going to appear there. Why? Because the Trump ad was a value proposition, not a policy statement: Who represents the world you understand more?

The First Step in Solving A Problem is Admitting You Have One

Earlier this month, the Democratic super PAC Future Forward hosted a conference for their donors at the Ritz-Carlton Resort in Half Moon Bay, California. The group raised $900 million last year, and spent most of it over the last two months of the campaign. When criticized for relying too much on testing, the group’s chief, Chauncey McLean responded:

“Those are all just fancy ways of saying we listen to voters and try to gauge whether any of the things we do actually work,” Mr. McLean said, according to a person in the room.”

You lost. Admit you lost. Admit the actions you took didn’t work. Maybe, just maybe, step out of the ivory tower long enough to concede that maybe your strategy was flawed, at least for argument’s sake.

Who deputizes these people with the responsiblity of saving the Republic? Whoever makes these calls should make different ones going forward. The ability to raise money does not connote the ability to spend it well or wisely.

Subjects vs. Objects

The Democratic leadership caste is committing the very violation they accuse so many of: Objectifying voters. Unwilling and unable to identify individually (read: subjectively) with those different from yourself leads to lumping millions of people into groups by their least common denominator (read: objectively.) Far from being worried about Tom Smith in Fresno, California, the messaging is aimed at, “White, non-college educated, male voters, 38-45 in rural areas who drive pickup trucks.”

As a voter if you know someone doesn’t like them, or is only willing to talk to them eight weeks before every election, they know you don’t really care about their worries. Democrats ask for the most precious civic item a voter has to give, but aren’t willing to put in the work to earn it.

It’s like asking someone to marry you on a first date.

You Have to Fight to Win

Liberalism, in the philosophical sense, is on its back in America. We have one party dedicated to the eradication of a pluralistic, socially democratic, post-industrial America. We have another that is unwilling to fight, for anything, because they see political combat as distasteful and beneath them. The practical outcome of the Democrats’ unwillingness to engage is political appeasement in another form.

After the Munich Pact of 1938, Winston Churchill made a statement, the first line of which is famous, but the following words are even more appropriate for today:

“You were given the choice between dishonour and war. You chose dishonour and now you will have war…And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

To my Democratic friends, on behalf of all decent, freedom loving Americans, make your choice: Fight now with words, deeds, and heart, or fight later with much different, much more destructive weapons.