Democrats need to talk about their good issues

Abortion, health care costs, and January 6

I have a pretty simple model for keeping track of who’s winning and who’s losing in any discourse battle leading up to the 2024 election. If we're talking about abortion rights, or health care more broadly, or January 6, then we’re playing Kamala Harris’s game and she’s winning. But if we’re talking about immigration, inflation, or Joe Biden, then we’re playing Donald Trump’s game and he’s winning.

You don’t need to think this is fair.

The US has had the strongest inflation-adjusted growth in the world, and Biden and his team (despite some mistakes) deserve credit for that, not blame. And the good news is that if you compare Democrats’ current standing to almost any other rich country’s incumbent party, they are actually in great shape. The problem is that they’re still in bad shape. Time spent arguing this point is time wasted. Time spent talking about women dying after delayed care due to abortion bans or the tradeoff between tax breaks for the rich versus health insurance for working people is time well spent.

This is why I disagree with the inclination of many liberals, including my old boss Mike Tomasky, to demand that the media express more moralistic outrage about Trump’s immigration stances.

To be clear, I share this sense of moral outrage and have written so in the past. I’m also personally very interested in the immigration issue, so much so that I wrote another immigration piece last week, only to feel sheepish about it and avoid promoting it, because I was planning this piece and wanted to better practice what I preach.

Which is not to say that I think Democrats, or the broader progressive community, should ignore every issue outside of health care and January 6. Sometimes you need to talk about what’s in the news or what people are interested in. But the right strategy is to try to tie things back to your best topics. For example, it’s interesting that we have breaking news about Mitch McConnell’s awareness of Trump’s low character, but I think the most important thing for Americans to know is that at the end of the day, McConnell and Trump worked together to overturn Roe, to raise the deficit with tax breaks for the rich, and to try to take health insurance away from millions of working families — a gambit they will try again if they win in November.

Democrats are spending hundreds of millions of dollars this cycle on radio, television, and digital ads that have been tested for their persuasiveness. But while this kind of paid media is important, it’s ultimately much less influential than what people see in the news or hear from their friends.

And to that extent, I want to differentiate my position from those who say that news media coverage of Trump doesn’t matter. What I want to say is that it matters in a different way from how a lot of liberals seem to think it matters. Getting TV and newspapers to say “TRUMP IS A REALLY BAD GUY” louder is unlikely to make a difference. What does make a difference is if voters’ general sense is that abortion rights and health care are at stake, and that Democrats generally prioritize the economic interests of the middle class over those of the rich.

Topics matter as much as tone

The evolution in my thinking about this goes back to an error that I made. When the Dobbs decision came down, I knew that Republicans thought they could temper the backlash by pointing out that Democrats’ position on abortion is itself fairly extreme and that they oppose various legal restrictions that poll pretty well. My sense was that Republicans had this right and to win on the issue, Democrats were going to have to moderate some.

In retrospect, this was basically wrong.

On abortion, the public currently faces a binary choice between two parties, both of which they find somewhat extreme. But that doesn’t mean they feel equally about the two parties. Forced to choose between a party that would maybe permit some abortions they don’t approve of, and a party that will force millions of women into unwanted and potentially deadly pregnancies, they strongly prefer Democrats. To the extent that Republicans sometimes have to talk about abortion, it’s of course best for them to highlight late-term issues. But whatever Republicans are saying about abortion, they’re still talking about abortion and they’re still the abortion-banning party. Most voters disagree with them.

What’s more, the longer any discussion of abortion rights goes on — whether on a television panel or in a comments section or among friends — the greater the odds that someone on the anti-abortion side will let slip that they think Democrats are “baby killers” or “abortion is murder.” It almost always ends as a potent reminder that conservatives’ conscience forbids leaving this up to the states and ultimately requires them to commit egregious invasions of privacy — investigating routine miscarriages as potential homicides, monitoring pregnant women’s interstate travel, and many other things that no sane GOP politician would talk about in public.

In a broadly similar sense, it’s true that Trump’s most extreme immigration rhetoric makes him look like a psychotic asshole whose views are out of step with the public.

But Democrats still don’t want to get sucked into a long argument about immigration. Public opinion on the topic retains considerable nuance, but it has broadly swung to the right. If you make people choose between the Party That’s Too Mean and the Party That’s Too Lax, they’re going to choose Too Mean. The strongest rhetorical move on immigration, by far, is to pivot. Remind people that border crossings are way down this year, even though Trump killed a very tough asylum bill for personal political power. And what will he do with that power? He’ll restrict access to abortion, cut health care for working families, and deliver tax breaks to his billionaire friends. What Democrats want from the media isn’t more articles saying “Trump is bad,” it’s more articles covering Trump’s weak issues.

Even negative coverage can be helpful

Another relevant example is the Social Security privatization fight of 2004-2005. The world was a very different place back then, and generally speaking, George W. Bush received much kinder media coverage than Donald Trump ever has.

His press coverage during the early months of this fight was especially positive. He was basking in the glow of electoral victory, but beyond that, this was an issue where the press had conservative leanings. The coverage tended to emphasize how courageous Bush was in taking on the third rail of American politics and how opportunistic and irresponsible Nancy Pelosi was for refusing to even entertain negotiations. At the end of the day, though, even though the tenor of the coverage was favorable to Bush and skeptical of Pelosi, the articles still explained that Bush (heroically!) wanted to privatize Social Security and Pelosi (irresponsibly!) didn’t want to touch it. It’s easier to sway people’s attention than their underlying opinion, and all this coverage amounted to shouting, “PAY ATTENTION TO PARTISAN DISAGREEMENT ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY,” which helped Democrats.

Conversely, if you look at a publication like The Free Press, part of what makes it such a clever pro-Trump op is that they don’t cover the health care stakes in the election with a conservative spin — they don’t cover it at all.

You could imagine a world in which FP ran articles praising Trump’s plans to cut ACA subsidies, raise the prices Medicare pays for prescription drugs, and reduce Medicaid funding for long-term care for seniors and the disabled. But lots of people who’ve tuned in for FP’s (very good, in my opinion) right-leaning coverage of culture war issues would read that stuff and say, “Oh, hah, now I remember why I’ve been a Democrat all these years, notwithstanding annoyance over some woke stuff.”

Any discussion of health care tends to favor Democrats because (except in the immediate wake of the ACA passing) most people are fundamentally morally aligned with progressives on this issue. Just listening to conservatives explain their own ideas repels the majority of voters, so a smart conservative publication doesn’t cover the topic.

Or, rather, The Free Press covers it very narrowly through the lens of gender-affirming care and race.

Some people have suggested this is because the publication is more focused on cultural issues than economic ones, but they have remarkably little coverage of abortion rights, considering its central role in the campaign.

I say this all not as a criticism, exactly, but as an example of effective agenda setting that progressives could learn from. Fox News operates in a more lowbrow manner, but the emphasis on discipline and agenda setting is similar. A lot of liberals are obsessed with the way Fox pumps conservatives narratives into the bloodstream. But I think the real tell is the narratives they don’t pump. There are no segments where Greg Abbott talks about how great Texas’ abortion ban is. They don’t put conservative wonks on to talk about cutting the minimum wage to $0. By the same token, Elon Musk doesn’t tweet about how his taxes should be lower.

The head and the heart

I think progressives struggle with this idea of discipline relative to conservatives for a few reasons.

One is just that conservatives outnumber liberals in the electorate, so the ideological “base” of the Democratic Party is always playing from behind.

Another is that political movements of the left are organized to fight for a kind of utopian vision, while movements of the right are organized to fight against the left, in a way that I think makes “identify and exploit the left’s weak points” a natural focal point for rightists. Everyone left of center has spent the entire fall pre-litigating a Biden/Harris transition in a way that has no parallel on the right, even though the range of plausible outcomes with a Trump administration is much wider.

Last but not least, though, there’s a widespread view on the left that there are particular kinds of moral obscenity associated with Donald Trump. The aspects of his character that strike progressives as most hideous — his tendency toward scapegoating, demagoguery, bigotry, and transgression of basic standards of decency and conduct — simply aren’t the things that generate his biggest electoral weaknesses. It’s not to say they don’t matter. Millions of people who voted happily for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are now Democrats because they do matter to many people. But they don’t matter to everyone, especially not to people inclined toward a very cynical view of politics and the world.

By contrast, the fact that Trump overturned Roe and wants to make fiscal tradeoffs that prioritize low corporate income tax rates over guaranteed health care coverage is kind of boring. Republicans have held those positions from time immemorial, and while most Americans disagree, they also (especially health and taxes) seem like areas where “reasonable people can disagree.” Nobody ever got cancelled for holding an incorrect view of the cost-benefit ratio of Medicaid expansion, nobody ever tried to get Facebook to censor takes touting the long-term growth benefits of capital gains tax cuts.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that Trump’s absolute low point in the polls came when the news was dominated by Affordable Care Act repeal. There’s a reason Musk is always so vague when he brags that he and Trump are going to cut “waste.” There’s a reason the Free Press’s culture war coverage rarely addresses abortion. There’s a reason frontline Democrats’ ads all acknowledge voter concerns about the cost of living and then pivot to reducing health care costs. Progressives can’t single-handedly control what gets covered in the media and what goes viral. But everyone — from elected officials and nonprofit workers and academics to journalists and people with mid-sized social media followings and even just people who read and click on the internet — all have some agency here. And down the stretch, you’re either trying to steer the national conversation in a productive direction, or you aren’t.