Here's A Simple Exercise To Help Democrats Rebuild—It's One They're Desperate To Avoid
Where does the typical marginal voter learn what he thinks he knows about politics?
Did you happen to catch wind of this exchange between CNN’s Pamela Brown and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer over the holiday break?
If you can’t play the video you can read the transcript in footnotes.1 But the gist is this: Congressional Republicans will not to scrutinize Donald Trump’s financial conflicts of interest unless they’re forced to by the revelation of secret, corrupt deals with foreign governments—and even then maybe not.
Comer acknowledged that Trump’s bank records, rather than his tax returns would clarify the nature of his business dealings and the sources of his money, but omitted (and wasn’t pressed) on the fact that he personally intervened to halt the production of Trump’s records when he became chairman in 2023.
It’s vintage Trump-era GOP: bottomless tolerance for corruption, covered in a deep rot of bad faith. If you watch the full interview, you’ll see Comer’s still pretending to be outraged about sleazy things Joe Biden’s son did a decade ago. We know he’ll spend the next two years scrutinizing trivial or fake Democratic indiscretions while Trump and his loyalists rob the country blind.
Less than two weeks later, Comer’s Democratic counterpart, Gerry Connolly, also appeared on CNN, and mentioned none of it.2 After musing over the possibility of working with the incoming Trump administration on immigration issues (?) Connolly explained why he thinks House Democrats were right to elevate him, rather than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to become the oversight committee’s ranking member.
“The decision about leadership ought to always be based on a proven record, skill set, competence, capability, and your plan for moving forward,” Connolly said. “I've never had my chance to be a ranking member or chairman of a full committee. This is it.”
And so the Republican standard for oversight (none, when Trump is president) went unquestioned. Democrats have already interrupted the informational cascade that would be required for low-information voters to learn about Trump’s proliferating conduits for bribery, and the complicity of Republicans in Congress.
I think we can see in this sequence of events why the pre-holiday row over who should be the Democratic face of Trump accountability was such a bad omen.
CARVILLED IN STONE
I started by asking if you caught wind of any of this. Presumably some of you did—you’re subscribers to this thickety political newsletter, or you clicked on a headline written for news junkies. You care about these kinds of things.
But if you missed it, consider what it says about the likelihood that people who don’t follow politics closely heard any of it. How could they possibly know that Trump will take even fewer steps in his second term to address conflicts of interest than he did in his first? That the people who could force a stop to his corruption have announced they will turn a blind eye?
Reaching them with that information would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but it’s all but impossible if Democrats take no interest.
What reached them over the holidays instead? The New Years Eve mass killing in New Orleans, most likely. Trump’s lies about it, perhaps? The fact that someone blew up a Tesla Cybertruck in front of Trump’s Las Vegas hotel was pretty big news, but not the fact that the disturbed man who did it was a MAGA diehard who wanted to create pretexts to “cull” Democrats.
Against this backdrop, I see Democrats and liberals reverting to the same cliches they always turn to in defeat. They need to stop talking like out-of-touch elites and rediscover “kitchen-table issues.” They lost ground among working-class voters, ergo their policy appeals must be out of sync with the economic needs of the everyman. At times like these, they appear to have learned the lesson moderate thinkers like Matt Yglesias want them to learn:
“Back in 1992, James Carville supposedly hung a sign in Clinton campaign headquarters that said, ‘it’s the economy, stupid,’” he wrote during Joe Biden’s first year in office. “By the same token, Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if every staffer’s computer monitor had a Post-It stuck to it that said ‘the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.’”
I don’t think this is the best heuristic for Democrats as they regroup after losing once again to Donald Trump, whose agenda is aimed at the banquet table, rather than kitchen table. Good policy is important, relating well to people without college degrees is important. But my sticky note would be different in the following way: