Do the Democrats really want to beat President Trump in the 2020 election more than anything else in the world? They insist that they do, but the way they behave suggests otherwise.
If beating Trump were their priority, they would have focused their beams on the one-fifth of Trump voters who thought Trump was “unpresidential” and then moved heaven and earth to win them over.
Democrats, if they wanted to beat Trump above all else, would have targeted those put-off Trump voters, emphasizing civility, comity, and reliance on norms (along with a knowledge of civics and history). This might require a candidate with some conservative sensibilities, as Alabama Democrats opted for in Doug Jones.
Jones, faced with Roy Moore, a credibly accused molester of children, presented himself not as a liberal, but as someone simply sensible, modest, and sane. Republican voters in Alabama now have a senator who will often vote against their viewpoint, but at least they are spared the embarrassment of Moore in the Senate, where he would have done grave damage to the image of both the party and the state.
Were the Democrats as hot to dump Trump as they claim, they would have tried to recruit a more Jones-type candidate (though admittedly more to the left, as the rest of the country is not Alabama).
Instead, Democrats have a field of 20 or so unbridled left-wingers, including a couple of bona fide socialists. There’s also Joe Biden, the soi-dissant friend and hope of the middle class. But the party forced him, under duress, to abandon support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds for abortions. Repeatedly, he has folded like a deck chair at the crack of a whip.
So, the Democrats are about to pass on a once-in-a-generation chance to build a center-left coalition. But if they aren’t about to reach out a hand to potential new voters, do they have at almost the same exact moment to drive them away with a stick?
On the morning of Jan. 22, 2019, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he had passed a law permitting abortions to be performed in his state until the moment of birth and perhaps even beyond it. He said also that to celebrate the occasion, he was lighting One World Trade Center in pink. At that moment, surely thousands of conservatives who were considering voting for Democrats just to teach Trump a lesson suddenly snapped their minds shut.
Fifteen percent of the populace supports totally unrestricted abortion, and you can rest assured all of them already are voting for Democrats. Many moderate Catholics in the upper Midwest — in the states that pivoted from Obama to Trump — would support a Democratic Party, but not a gleefully pro-abortion party.
As Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post, “None of the Democrats offer any concessions to Republicans who are unhappy with Trump … Rather than build a cross-partisan coalition to defeat Trump, Democratic candidates seek to use that dissatisfaction to force people to accept policies they would otherwise reject.”
A campaign that won’t try to bring in some new voters and tells some of its current voters that they’re no longer welcome puts ideology over expansion and winning.
Are they sure they want to beat Trump after all?
