One problem the Democrats haven’t solved: That message is underwhelming.
Leave aside the fact that its components are in tension. The Democrats’ central complaint against former president Donald Trump on abortion is that he enabled the restoration of democratic authority over the issue. They preferred government by judicial diktat.
Nobody expects rigorous logical consistency from a political party. But some inconsistencies are too glaring even for politics. Democrats were the ones cheering for a lawsuit to take Trump’s name off the ballot and backing prosecutions of him, sometimes of dubious merit, to damage him before the election.
Democrats could defend that stance by saying that “democracy” is a loose stand-in for what they’re really concerned about: the Constitution and its surrounding norms. It’s true that Trump, who tried to overturn an election he could not admit losing, is a threat to those. But Democrats are not convincing champions of them — not when they are trying to override the Constitution’s grant of life tenure for federal judges because they oppose most of the ones on the Supreme Court. And not when Harris has promised to bypass Congress if necessary to get the policies she wants on guns, health care and immigration.
Democratic attacks on Republican-backed changes to election laws have largely fallen flat. The Republican demand that voters present photo identification, a major sticking point in the debate about those laws, has supermajority support from Americans.
A Washington Post poll conducted in the spring found that more swing-state voters believed Trump would handle threats to democracy well than that Biden would. But even if Harris were able to achieve better numbers on that question, voters don’t rate such threats as a top issue. Gallup’s most recent survey found that only 2 percent of voters volunteered anything about democracy when asked to name the country’s most important problem. And that percentage has been falling.
Abortion might seem like a more promising campaign issue for Democrats. Polls regularly find a pronounced pro-choice tilt to public opinion, including greater confidence in Democrats than Republicans in addressing the issue. Both parties concluded that the issue damaged the Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.
But even in those elections, no pro-life incumbent senator or governor lost. And the case that voters who lean pro-choice should be alarmed about a second Trump presidency keeps running into Trump’s repeated statements of unwillingness to take any further action against abortion. To gin up the requisite fear, they have to suggest that in office he would be willing to take political risks he refuses to take now, and do it on behalf of a cause he manifestly doesn’t care about.
It’s a reach, which is why Democratic campaigners have to inflate the importance of the past statements of Trump’s running mate and of the positions of allied organizations such as the Heritage Foundation. If they had Trump dead to rights, they would not need to call so much attention to what’s on his periphery.
None of this means Harris is a sure loser. Trump has multiple vulnerabilities, including his fixation on cutting corporate taxes yet further, his promise to raise tariffs massively and indiscriminately, and his threat to cut off all funding for schools that require vaccines.
But with many states set to start voting in a little more than two months, Democrats need more than a new candidate. They need a new strategy.
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