David M. Shribman
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
There’s an old story about a dog-food manufacturer who created a new canine concoction with the best ingredients and infused with the finest nutrients. It was launched into the market with great fanfare. There was only one problem. The dogs didn’t like it.
The Democrats need to understand the power of this parable. They have potent arguments about why they should reclaim power on Capitol Hill and a set of grievances about the Trump years: a war that is deeply unpopular, gasoline and food costs that are stunningly high. There’s only one problem. The voters don’t like them.
The temptation, irresistible at the keyboard this week, is to invoke the old chestnut that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. The lesson for the dog-food manufacturer wasn’t to change the dogs. It was to change the food.
The corollary is clear. The Democrats can’t change the voters. They have to change the message.
Here’s the brutal truth: More than half their potential supporters are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, according to a New York Times/Siena University poll taken this spring. Two-thirds of arguably the most critical group of voters this fall, the Democratic-leaning independents, are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. Now factor in the redistricting sweepstakes, where the Republicans have been the clear winners, and you’ll conclude that the sunny skies Democratic strategists thought they saw suddenly are darkening.
Consider this: Only a quarter of all voters are satisfied with the Democratic Party, less than about a third who are satisfied with the Republicans.
The Democrats still may do well in November. Gasoline prices remain high. Inflation, which helped take down the party earlier in the decade, is back. The Republicans’ most visible figure, Donald Trump, is deeply unpopular. Historical trends for midterm congressional elections strongly favor the party out of power in the White House.
All of this is good for the Democrats. So are some of the hijinks Trump has been up to, playing a kingmaker’s role in GOP primaries by backing candidates who are on the fringe right in Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana against incumbents with strong proven voter appeal and — as we will see — with many allies in the Republican cloakrooms.
The MAGA loyalists he helped to win nominations will be substantially weaker than politicians like Sens. John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie would have been. But that’s not all. The three mutineers are now free to air their grievances with the president. Some once-reluctant Trump apostates may join them, especially among the 14 Republicans whose reelection campaigns don’t come until 2030, two years after the end of the Trump years in the White House.
One of them is Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who has had strong differences recently with Trump and who pilloried him in the Republican presidential primaries a decade ago. Another is Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has criticized Trump’s economic policies as cruel to the blue-collar voters who have been attracted into the GOP after nearly a century as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
The New Deal coalition that built upon those voters and their generational descendants is dead. The survival rate of the MAGA coalition is at present unknown but surely uncertain.
The message to the Democrats couldn’t be clearer. Half of potential Democratic supporters (52%, according to the Times/Siena poll) want the party to move to the center, particularly on crime (50%) and immigration (46%).
Separate polls yield further insights — and further paths forward for a party whose most visible faces are the old Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (who was born before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) and the young Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose political awareness was built after the turn of the century). Both of them tilt leftward.
This stands out: how negative Democrats are about Trump versus their relative ambivalence toward the Democratic Party.
“They hate him a lot more than they love their party,” said Douglas Rivers, chief scientist of the YouGov poll.
Shocking result of that survey: Though within the margin of error, Trump’s 38% favorability is slightly higher than the Democratic Party’s 36% favorability.
Thus, we come to the great Democratic debate: To what extent do Democratic candidates join Trump in trying to nationalize these midterm contests?
Trump has done so with his purges, which may be as unsuccessful as the ones conducted by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1938 sought to drive three conservative senators (Millard Tydings of Maryland, Walter George of Georgia and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina) out of the Democratic Party and make it a liberal movement shorn of the New Deal opponents who had stymied some of his efforts. All three were reelected. Ironically, FDR eventually needed their support for rearmament in the years leading to World War II.
For the Democrats to nationalize these elections, they would have to run against Trump. To some extent, a campaign based on gasoline and food prices does that.
But personalizing the effort to nationalize the campaign means that the party’s candidates would have to emphasize Trump himself.
He’s a juicy target; by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans believe Trump isn’t honest and trustworthy — and by a 56%-to-33% margin, say they don’t believe he has the temperament to be president. But Trump isn’t on the ballot, and two of the last three Democratic presidential candidates who made Trump the principal issue in the campaigns lost.
It may be tempting to dismiss the public wariness of the Democratic Party. The Republicans were in much the same situation during Watergate, only to win the White House three consecutive times in the 14 years after Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are not exactly in a robust position, either. The party now has a MAGA identity, but there is no assurance that it remains when Trump departs. In a way, the instability that MAGA represents may be a dagger to the heart of the GOP.
Yet that is only part of the American political crisis.
Fully 4 out of 5 of the dissatisfied voters want the economic system to be overhauled or torn down, according to the Times/Siena survey. And that occurs a month before the country is scheduled to celebrate 250 years of American independence. Talk about a threat to American democracy! It’s the dog that isn’t barking.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
