To fight Trump, Democrats could steal a page from the GOP’s playbook

They can’t win just by trying to tear down Trump — just ask Hillary Clinton. The answer they’re looking for can, ironically, be found in the Republicans’ playbook.

Democrats need a compelling vision to offer to those who are not part of their coastal, progressive base. They must re-engage with blue-collar voters in fly-over country who were once the backbone of their coalition but have defected to the GOP.

Four months after Trump crushed them, and six weeks after he first sat behind the big desk in the Oval Office, there’s no evidence that Democrats are ready to do either.

But if the party’s power brokers are still clueless about what to do, so are many Democratic loyalists. They seem to agree on only one thing, which is that Trump must be fought aggressively, every day, at every level, on everything.

Judi Dickerson, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, is one of those liberals energized by Trump and feeling called to action. She attended the Democratic National Committee’s late February meeting here in Atlanta just to observe the election of Tom Perez as the new party chairman.

Asked what the Democratic message should be, or whether the party needs to make room for cultural conservatives who reject the progressive agenda, Dickerson looked perplexed. She said she wasn’t sure. Then the discussion turned to Trump and her gaze hardened, her indecision evaporated.

“I don’t think there’s anything redeemable about him,” Dickerson said.

“He’s immoral. He is definitely the shadow who has brought out the shadow in this country in people, and we have to keep addressing what is good and fight against what is dark. And I think he’s got to be resisted every step of the way.”

The president’s support among Republicans ranges from hopelessly devoted to conditional.

As said facetiously during the campaign, he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and his base would stick with him. For other Republicans, their backing is somewhere along the wait-and-see spectrum, and depends on whether he keeps specific promises.

All possibility of detente between Trump and Democrats ended the moment he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower and referred to illegal Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. The escalator has kept on going down, as far as the Dems are concerned.

With every provocative Trump tweet, the sinking disappointment Democrats felt on Election Day recedes a bit more and is replaced by determination to fight him and his agenda. They don’t hesitate to describe Trump as racist and xenophobic, reckless and dangerous.

Their determination, if channeled into activism, could boost them in elections. In a Feb. 25 special election in Delaware that decided control of the state senate, Democrats saw higher turnout and won by 16 percentage points, a 14-point improvement over their 2-point victory in 2014.

Still, personal attacks on Trump, which Democrats seem to favor, are less effective than a conventional approach that focuses on policy. But if Democrats adjust their strategy and try to opt for a cooler, less foaming approach to their adversary, they risk the wrath of their grassroots, which see anything less than force-10 vituperation as weak-kneed appeasement. “Normalizing” the president is verboten in left-wing circles.

“That’s hard for us, as Democrats, to do, because we’re obsessed with him — we are,” says Matt Canter, a pollster with the Democratic firm, Global Strategy Group. “It has to be about [voters], not about him.”

Canter, a veteran of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee when it was run by Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says the data are clear: Normalizing Trump is necessary if Democrats are to position themselves well to win congressional seats in 2018.

In a national poll of 1,000 registered voters in late January, GSG found that the best way to reach swing voters, who the Democrats need in the midterm elections, is to treat Trump like past Republican presidents. They should discuss how the his agenda would do harm.

For instance, 62 percent of swing voters responded better to a message that said Trump’s conflicts of interest would make an “already-corrupt” system worse, than to a pitch that said his business entanglements would “lead to major corruption unlike anything we have ever seen before” (38 percent). But those numbers are reversed among base Democrats.

Democratic leaders need to come up with an affirmative message, something other than “Trump is a jerk.” That task falls largely to Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, of California, whose colleagues didn’t do much better than Clinton in the last election.

Learning from the GOP

Eight years ago, Republicans were at a similar low point.

President Obama had just won overwhelmingly and he enjoyed high approval ratings. The GOP was powerless to stop him. The party had barely enough votes to muster a filibuster in the Senate, and fewer than 180 out of 435 seats in the House.

The Republican base wanted their representatives in Congress to say “no” to everything Obama proposed. And they obliged. But they did more than that, paving the way for their return to power as Obama’s insistence on pushing healthcare reform created an unexpected opportunity.

Republicans, led by former Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, who was then the House minority leader, came up with more than criticism of the new president. His message was, “Where are the jobs?” Then Kevin McCarthy, of California, who was the chief deputy minority whip (and is now majority leader) was tasked with building an agenda to answer the question.

Republicans chose that message over another option that asked voters to elect Republicans to put a “check and balance” on Obama. The GOP calculated, wisely, that addressing policies voters cared about trumped an argument about process.

On Election Day 2010, when Republicans added eight Senate seats and 63 House seats to their congressional tally, 63 percent of voters said in exit polling that the economy was their top priority. Despite disquiet over Obamacare, only 18 percent said healthcare was the most important issue.

David Winston, a Republican pollster who advised GOP leaders about their message, and still advises them, said “Where are the jobs?” wasn’t intended to be “gimmicky.”

“It was intended to frame the question for the election,” he explained. “It was the one question that was front and center in everybody’s mind. The idea was to focus on the concern the electorate had.”

One of the House Republican leaders tasked with pushing the message in that midterm cycle was the conference chairman, Indiana’s Rep. Mike Pence. It seems to have made an impression on Democrats. Recently, Pelosi posted a tweet critical of Trump with the hashtag #WhereAreTheJobs.

Jason Kander, the liberal former Missouri secretary of state who out-performed Clinton by 8 percentage points on the 2016 ballot and came within inches of ousting Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, said Democrats have to take their message everywhere.

Writing off rural and working class voters is a recipe for continued failure in states such as his. Missouri used to swing both directions, but is now reliably red in major statewide elections. It’s also, Kander warned, a strategy for indefinite powerlessness.

That was the tough love this rising Democratic star delivered to his party in a keynote speech to DNC members in Atlanta, as they gathered to elect a new slate of activist leaders for the post-Obama era.

“I refuse to concede the idea that there are voters who belong to the Republicans and not to us. We should make our argument to everyone,” Kander told the Washington Examiner after his speech. “It’s really just about communicating our values, and not limiting that communication to people who we think might already vote for us.”

The Democratic Party has been doing less and less of that since Obama’s groundbreaking victory in 2008.

The former president was elected twice on an inclusive platform directed at all communities. But as his tenure progressed, Democrats focused increasingly on non-white voters, who continue to grow as a share of the electorate, and less on whites.

With millennials in mind, the party also turned sharply left on issues such as guns and marriage, becoming less welcoming to culturally conservative white voters who might otherwise be interested in voting for the Democrats’ economic agenda. That approach culminated with Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The former secretary of state invested most of her resources appealing to coastal progressives and reliable Democratic voting blocs such as Hispanics and African-Americans. She paid little attention to white working-class voters who have been drifting from the party because of its fixation on gun control, gay marriage and transgender rights.

That’s a stark reversal from Democratic strategy in the 2006 midterm elections (and 2008), the last time they rose to power.

Then, rather than using ideological litmus tests, the party recruited candidates who supported abortion rights as well as gun rights. Democratic leaders knew they would be able to appeal to swing voters and conservatives.

Under that strategy, led by Schumer at the DSCC and leaders at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democrats picked up 52 House seats and 14 Senate seats over two elections.

They were helped by Republican missteps. Voters lost confidence in President George W. Bush, opposed the Iraq War and were fed up with corrupt Republicans on Capitol Hill. But veteran Democratic operatives say their candidates were able to capitalize because they were acceptable to a broad cross section of voters.

Lanae Erickson, a demographer with Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington, said a similar approach is required again.

A report she co-authored, “Why Demography Does Not Equal Destiny,” demolishes the Democratic strategy of the past few years that banked on progressives and rising non-white demographics to ensure permanent majorities.

Among the roadblocks Democrats ran into, according to the report, was that national demographic changes are not equally distributed across the country, and that most voters don’t identify as liberals. Plus, voting behavior changes over time.

Underlying these miscalculations was the Democrats’ unmistakable intolerance for voters who have been slower to adapt to social change. That factor has contributed to steep losses the party suffered starting in 2010, Erickson said, a record that included lost majorities in the House and Senate, several governor’s mansions and nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures.

“We’ve had very, very rapid cultural change, and going forward we have to make space for people who are still struggling with that change, while we’re staying true to our values,” Erickson said.