Never Trumpers David Brooks and Bret Stephens took some heat over the weekend for columns on the emerging radicalism of the Democratic field.
The Stephens column was more of a criticism of the positions Democrats have been taking, and less directly a plea for Democrats to nominate somebody he could vote for. But Brooks was explicit: “Dems, please don’t drive me away” he begged in the headline. The article began, “I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?”
Liberals are right to be annoyed by the suggestion that Democratic candidates should be trying to cater to David Brooks and the rest of the narrow Never Trump audience. Never Trump exists within the media ecosystem, but has no detectable voting base.
According to Gallup polling, 89% of Republicans approve of Trump’s job performance. And this cannot be chalked up to a mass exodus from the party that left only core Trumpists. In May, Gallup found that 30% of the electorate identified as Republican, which is higher than it was when Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015 (25%) and around where it was when he effectively clinched the nomination in early May 2016 (31%). There have likely been some people who left the party and some people who now identify as Republican who did not before, but the bottom line is that Brooks is not broadly representative of the American electorate.
So I get this sarcasm from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
We should just ditch this whole primary thing and just have a small panel of Never Trump Republicans solomonically decide which Democrat would make them most comfortable.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 28, 2019
All kidding aside though, while it’s perfectly fine to ignore the demands of Never Trumpers in the context of a Democratic primary, once liberals do so, they are no longer in the position to shame people who don’t want to vote for the Democratic nominee.
Embracing a radical Left agenda because you think Trump is vulnerable so you may as well shoot for the moon is understandable, but it’s also completely reasonable for those who don’t like Trump but don’t buy into that agenda to say, “No thanks.”
