With two weeks to go, Democrats are preparing to battle Donald Trump with no leader, no strategy, and loads of dread.
Some are vowing to resist at all costs. They see compromise as surrender, and argue that it would only give Trump oxygen, helping him to grow even stronger. As Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post asked recently, “What would common ground even look like? Deport just 5.5 million people, not 11 million? Cut Social Security only a little bit?”
Julie Roginsky, a Democratic consultant who has steered the campaigns of folks like Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Frank Pallone, carries this flag on her sizzling new Substack column, Salty Politics. “Democrats should not deliver one vote to help Trump succeed,” she says in the most recent “Friendly Fire” column in the Star-Ledger.
If this sounds familiar, go back in time to the heady days after Barack Obama won his first election, and Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. The Republican opposition was led by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, who announced that sabotaging Obama’s presidency would be his life’s mission. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” he said.
Call me skeptical. I don’t think Democrats should sing from McConnell’s hymnal. The attitude seems emotional to me, an expression of rage and frustration. And this is a time for Democrats be brutally strategic, like Don Corleone. This isn’t personal; it’s strictly business.
The political imperative now is to change the hearts and minds of voters who just elected Trump decisively. By what logic is reflexive opposition to all-things Trump likely to sway them? And it’s not exactly patriotic to hope for a political breakdown that paralyzes our federal government. Bad things can happen, like national bankruptcy.
The task ahead is more subtle. It’s a game of pick-and-choose. Rubin is right when she plants a flag on mass deportation and Social Security.
But what if Trump begins by flooding the border zone with more border patrol agents, more immigration judges and more asylum officers? Democrats just proposed that, and Kamala Harris endorsed it. Should Democrats oppose it now, because it comes from Trump?
What if he proposes a big increase in the child tax credit, as JD Vance advocated during the campaign? We did that during the Covid pandemic, and it cut child poverty nearly in half, briefly. Should Democrats oppose that, too? RFK Jr. is a certified nut job, but what if Trump goes along with his plan to cut subsidies for sugar in our diets? (Booker, for one, has signaled that he might support that.)
The best advice for Democrats I’ve heard comes from James Carville, the Ragin’ Cajun, the man who steered Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 and is now 80 years old. He wants to bring the fight to Trump, not by opposing everything, but by going on the offensive with an aggressive plan to win back working-class voters who tipped this election in favor of Trump.
“Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy,” Carville wrote last week in the New York Times. “Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back…If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss.”
That starts, he says, by opposing tax cuts for the rich, as Trump plans. Gallup reports that 55 percent of Americans believe the wealthy pay too little already, and just 12 percent think they pay too much. So, Democrats ought to hammer that, Carville says.
Next up is a call to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, another policy that is wildly popular. In November, Alaska and Missouri voted overwhelmingly to increase their states wages to $15 an hour, while voting for Trump at the same time. That’s a fight worth picking.
“While Democrats have next to no chance of passing a bold, progressive economic agenda in the next four years, what we can do is force Republicans to oppose us,” Carville says. “We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for. Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour.”
After all, Trump is an economic royalist. He cut taxes for the rich, and left the minimum wages at $7.25 an hour, during his first term. That’s $15,000 a year for full-time work. He opposed Obamacare and fought efforts to cut the price of prescription drugs by using Medicare to negotiate discounts from Big Pharma. He didn’t lift a finger to cut the costs of child-care or housing.
Opposing everything that Trump proposes is not a strategy, it’s an attitude, one that’s not shared by most Americans. So, here’s hoping Democrats pick their fights carefully, that they hit Trump where is vulnerable. As Carville says, it’s still the economy, stupid.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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