Why Can’t Democrats Make GOP Extremism a Campaign Issue?

In the past few weeks, Democratic strategists and pollsters have been surveying recent elections and polling data to size up where the party stands. Some of the findings have been ominous. A recent PBS Newshour/Marist Poll found that adults feel that Democrats are a bigger threat to American democracy than Republicans, although it was within the margin of error, at 42 to 41 percent.

Elsewhere, a memo from Democratic pollster Bryan Stryker surveying the outcome of the Virginia governor’s race offered similarly dour findings for Democrats. The memo detailed how the party’s “weak national brand left us vulnerable” in the gubernatorial election, where former Governor Terry McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin. The memo went on to say that voters think the Democratic Party is “focused on social issues,” not the economy; that Democrats lack a brand among swing voters; and that any congressional accomplishments the party has had over the last year have been eclipsed by “infighting” as the country careens “from crisis to crisis.”

“If we’re talking about someone being anti-democratic, that is, in pollster speak, not a pressing issue.”

It’s not that arguing about the precarious state of American democracy isn’t important, it’s that it doesn’t quell some of the pressing concerns among the voters that Democrats want to reach. “If we’re talking about someone being anti-democratic, that is, in pollster speak, not a pressing issue,” one Democratic strategist and alumna of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee told me. This strategist said the pressing concern for the party was to focus on appealing to the pressing concerns of voters (such as Covid-19, schools, and the economy) while also painting Republicans as a direct threat to those concerns.

The message Democrats needed to offer, the strategist said, is that “‘Republicans are dangerous, they are dangerous to themselves, they are dangerous to the country. They are dangerous to you with your two-car garage.’ That is something that swing voters care about. Anything that forces them to think about if government’s going to hurt them, or change their life, they hate. So if we’re reminding them that Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or any of these idiots could have power and influence and potentially change their life because they’re so dangerous and reckless, that’s a positive. If we’re telling them that these people are going to change how votes are counted, our base kind of cares about it …,” but the larger electorate doesn’t get activated in the same way.