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Thanks again for your questions, readers. Please keep ‘em coming.
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Nancy: What do ordinary Trump voters think about this chaos, the ongoing shitshow? Do they know much or anything about it? Our neighbors at our weekend place in Suffolk County, Long Island (home of EPA killer Lee Zeldin) are hardcore GOP supporters and Trump fans/Hillary haters who explained their vote in November by saying 1. They wanted to prevent an imaginary tax from destroying their small business 2. They objected to the ginned up campaign by Democrats about « women losing their rights » How to find out what ordinary Trump voters, not sycophants, are thinking?
I like to think of Trump supporters as inhabiting concentric rings. In the inner-most ring are the true diehards. Maybe 20-30 percent of the population. Basically the fascist rump of the country. The middle ring comprises low-information voters who have been voting Republican their whole lives and do so by rote. And in the outermost ring, you’ll find people who understand at some level that Trump is a bad guy, but thrill to him as a tribal leader, or like his vibe, and so they glom on to various talking points and hallucinations to justify their bad decisions to themselves and others. Outside of these circles you’ll find swing voters (some of whom have voted for Trump) and Democratic partisans—but these are “Trump voters.” Your neighbors strike me as classic outer-ring Trump voters. And they’re the only kind that might be broadly reachable.
I obviously can’t speak to your neighbors per se, but check out the comments from the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey I posted here. I suspect many of the respondents are also the kinds of people who felt a kind of cultural affinity for Trump, or convinced themselves he’d be better for business. Now they’re finding out the hard way, and they’re telling us what they’re thinking.
As Paul Krugman and I discussed on Politix this week, Trump’s first term floor of about 38 percent approval may have been elevated by the strong economy he inherited and claimed credit for. It’s at least reasonable to wonder whether that floor will fall as reality sets in and people in the outer ring exit the coalition. Perhaps a quarter of the country will never leave him—they’d rather rule an impoverished, fascist America than participate in a prosperous American democracy. And it’s very hard to get people like your neighbors to admit to a mistake. But Trump seems determined to test their stubbornness.
Jacob Crites: I’d be curious to hear about the merits of the establishment backlash to David Hogg’s primary-challenge…um, challenge. It seems to me Dems have lost the art of persuasion, and articulating the value of democracy itself. So I think Hogg encouraging citizens to become candidates is a great way of accomplishing that, and reminding complacent Dems that votes should be earned, not expected. But I’d be interested in your take!
The Democratic Party’s extreme institutional antipathy to primary challenges is, on one hand, a totally explicable and normal way for a party to be, and, on the other hand, self-serving and outmoded. It simplifies things for party officials, insures against the risk of losing the incumbency advantage—and contributes to the Democrats’ harmful, blindingly apparent ossification. To sell their view of things, they argue primary challenges are a drain on resources, divide the party, and air dirty laundry that can be detrimental in general elections. It’s not that there’s no merit to these concerns, but it’s like the cost half of a cost-benefit analysis, viewed purely through the lens of what makes life easier for the Democratic Party as an institution, rather than what’s best for the country.
By contrast, even before Donald Trump ran for president, the institutional GOP wanted to tamp down on primary challenges, but was losing control of things, as outsiders successfully primaried incumbents in all kinds of states. A decade on, Trump uses the threat of primary challenges to discipline Republican members even in closely contested seats. And the result is…Republicans control every branch of government.
But that shouldn’t be read to imply that primary challenges are good as a rule. Republicans have blown a lot of winnable races by ousting successful office holders and replacing them with kook candidates. It’s only this hubris that has saved us from larger Republican majorities and more Republican governorships. So the key is to foster a culture on the broad left that is competitive but also non-indulgent. Does anybody (other than maybe Nancy Pelosi and her understudies) now think it was bad that AOC primaried Joe Crowley?
I have no particular brief for Hogg. What makes his idea appealing to me, as I understand it, is that (unlike some of his progressive forebearers) he doesn’t advocate for fielding progressives to challenge moderate or conservative Dems (only for them to lose in purple or red territory). The idea is for regular citizens to challenge long-serving safe-seat Democrats, and, in so doing, clear out some stale underbrush. This is, on paper at least, a viable-if-risky way to make the party younger, more dynamic, and better at fighting—and it could work, so long as the field is open, not plowed for challengers who pass various divisive policy litmus tests. It interrupts the process by which a politician (like, say, Dick Durbin) serves for way too long, only to be replaced by someone almost exactly like Dick Durbin, just 10 or 20 or 30 years younger.
That said, I totally understand why the DNC doesn’t want Hogg doing this while serving as an officer. It’s ridiculous when you think about it. Hogg isn’t the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party. The quickest and most legitimate way to mix things up would be for Democratic voters to nominate an outsider for president, and for that person to clean house at the operative level and change party culture. Not for an operative to go rogue.
When I say I think Democrats should be less fearful and resentful of primary challengers, I mean they should stop closing ranks around bad members and dead weight just because they happen to be incumbents, stop threatening retribution against operatives and organizations that advise primary challengers, and things of that nature. That’s much different than saying the DNC, or operators inside of it, should set up outside PACs, pick and choose who should be challenged, and put them on blast in their states and districts. That’s a recipe for chaos and self sabotage, and we won’t like it if the precedent gets turned on independent-minded members by some future Rahm-like operator. Why not just step down from the DNC and run the operation independently?