Democrats Need To Run On Fear
NBC exit polls from a society in steep decline. Trump won despite these numbers.
https://www.the-mane-course.com/journal/the-leopards-are-hungry-and-they-will-eat-well
One of the many things the 2024 election has taught me is the importance of anger in this country’s politics. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran an overwhelmingly positive campaign, with “We’re not going back” as their slogan. At the time, I thought it might work, that providing a contrast with the grievance politics of Donald Trump and JD Vance was a good strategy. Given the results of this election, that strategy clearly failed the Democrats. And the leopards will have a feast.
Consider that exit polling suggests Trump won voters who believed democracy was at risk. That’s insane, and it really makes me feel like there’s no hope for this country. Even if Trump doesn’t actually become a dictator and suspend elections, I don’t understand how we come back from this. You can out-organize voter suppression all day long, but you can’t out-organize the fact that half the country really wants to live in a dictatorship run by people who hate the same people they hate. But for the sake of the people who will be harmed most by the incoming administration, we have to try.
All of this leads me to my thesis: Democrats need to run on fear. Unlike the Republican Party, who come up with insane stories about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating peoples’ pets, or transgender women having an unfair advantage in womens’ sports, the Democrats don’t need to lie in order to make voters fear the consequences of Republican rule. They shouldn’t have needed to in this year’s election, but they went for positivity instead, and look where it got them. I don’t like the thought of politics being exclusively about negative campaigning, but it’s clear that’s where we are at now, and it’s best to accept things as they are rather than as we might like them to be.
The deceased victims of the Robb Elementary massacre in 2022. Image taken from Good Morning America. The GOP (and their allies, the NRA) have their blood on their hands.
Let’s look at gun violence as an example. The weapons crisis in this country is already through the roof, and it’s likely to get worse now that an NRA shill is going to be President once more. One of the things I’ve noticed when reading about these shootings is that the consequences are so often sanitized for the general public. For instance, I get ads from Sandy Hook Promise on YouTube literally all the time, and the cute 6-year-old kids are invariably shown smiling as though they just went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They never show what a victim of an AR-15 or AK-47 actually looks like once they’ve been torn apart by the bullets.
For those who say this would be disrespectful to the victims and their families, I will fully acknowledge that I can’t speak for all of these people, or even any of them (because I’ve thus far been fortunate enough not to be directly affected by gun violence). However, if my loved one died that way, I would want the graphic photos of their corpse to be publicized. When it comes to gun violence, if a solution is even possible at this point, it’s only going to happen if the general public sees exactly what these weapons can do. The New York Times, for all their faults, published such a report last year called “Terror On Repeat”, but you have to actively look for it. Imagine if the images were plastered all over the evening news, which is sure to get a boost in ratings from the insanity that’s about to occur with Trump in power once more. If people couldn’t avoid seeing these images, maybe they’d be determined never to give the NRA’s enablers power again.
Gravestone of Amber Nicole Thurman, who died in Georgia as a result of the state’s abortion ban. Trump made that possible.
Now let’s talk about abortion. In 2022, the first regularly-scheduled election after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, NBC’s exit polls state that Democrats won voters who believed abortion should be legal in “most cases” by a 22-point margin. This past Tuesday, such voters tied. You read that right; moderately pro-choice voters split their votes evenly between a woman who emphasized abortion rights in her campaign and a convicted felon who bragged openly about having overturned them. If you were going to write that into a dystopian novel, or a screenplay, it would get rejected because your agent would never believe that voters could be that stupid. And yet, it’s real life.
During the 49 years when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, Republicans ran vicious ads showing images of aborted fetuses, all for the sake of energizing their voters to elect them and eventually overturn abortion rights. And it worked! Of course, once Trump passes a national abortion ban (which he will, given that he has control over both chambers of Congress), maybe these “pro-choice” voters mentioned above will see the light. But I wouldn’t count on it. It’s going to take a lot of soul-searching to understand why so many pro-choice voters chose Donald Trump. I knew the Democrats were a broken-down, dysfunctional disaster of a party even before the recent election, but even I could not have imagined this level of incompetence.
The January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol. Trump is going to pardon every last one of these people.
Finally, let’s look at what David Pakman described as the number one most humiliating moment of Trump’s first presidency. I am talking about the mob he incited to storm the Capitol to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election results. Even after that, about two-thirds of the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives voted to overturn the election and make Trump a dictator. And well, now I guess they got their wish. Not only is Trump himself never going to be held accountable for attempting a coup, but he’s almost certainly going to pardon all his foot soldiers from that day’s Beer Gut Putsch. Today is 1932, indeed.
The Democrats should have run ads about this. They should have included testimony from Democratic lawmakers and Capitol Police who feared for their lives that day. But what would have been even more powerful in my mind is reminding people that if Trump returned to power, there would be nothing stopping him from becoming a dictator. As with my suggested messaging about gun violence and abortion rights, they wouldn’t even have to lie. Dying in a mass shooting, facing dire health consequences because you can’t access reproductive health care, or ending up in a concentration camp because Trump’s a dictator…these are legitimate things to be afraid of in present-day America. The Democrats were unable to take advantage of such easy attacks.
Many people on Reddit are saying that Trump can just cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections. Given that most of the swing states still have Democratic Secretaries of State, given the decentralization of the US’ electoral system, I’m not sure I buy that. However, they certainly won’t be totally fair given voter suppression efforts. But if Democrats are ever to retake power, they would do well to remember that Trump did not steal the 2024 election. Even if he shouldn’t have been allowed to run, he was, and he won the popular vote because people voted for him, and people voted for him because they didn’t realize what the consequences would be. Democrats need to make these consequences feel real to the average voter, and the next few years may give them plenty of help.
As always, if you have anything to say about what I have said here, feel free to comment.
