Democrats: Stay focused on what really matters to voters
Our instinct is to always attack Trump, but we have to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot
Congresswoman Madeline Dean recently went viral with her funny line, banana prop in hand, about not being able to build bananas in America.
She made a good point – you can’t grow bananas here for the most part – and got a lot of laughs. But for me, it was a cautionary tale about the moment we are living in, and the temptation to go viral with clever sound bites attacking Trump. Because all those working class voters whose votes we’ve been seeking now have one more viral reminder about how Democrats don’t care about building things in America.
You know how Republicans are going to use this clip? They are going to make sure working people who work in factories and live in factory towns see the earlier part of that clip where she is talking about how trade deficits don’t matter. They are going to use that clip to tell working class folks that Democrats don’t care about making things in America.
Which of course isn’t true: No President did more to begin the process of rebuilding manufacturing in this country than Joe Biden. Trump’s reckless and constantly changing tariff policies will do more damage than good to American manufacturing, and will raise prices for consumers in the meantime. But going for the cheap laugh line and the viral video in attacking Trump on trade will do Democrats far more damage in the long run.
When you poll working class voters, “making things in America” is one of the most popular phrases – and values – people have. Being dismissive of this idea by saying trade deficits don’t matter is deadly.
So, yeah, we don’t (with a couple of small exceptions) “make” bananas here, and tariffs on bananas are a dumb idea that will raise the cost of bananas. Good thing to point out. But don’t be dismissive and mock the idea of making things here, because that will drive working class folks even further away from us.
There’s a bigger point here: Working class families outside of the Beltway don’t care about which party is winning debating points and which are poking at each other more cleverly. They don’t love the viral video moments from congressional hearings. They don’t spend their time worrying about whether it was Biden last year or Trump now showing more signs of senility.
What they do care about is which party is going to fight for them on the issues that matter the most to them: they want to know if they will still have Medicare, Medicaid, or good private insurance; they want to know if good paying jobs are going to be coming back to their communities; they want to know if their parents and themselves will still be able to count on Social Security; they want to know if they will be able to make ends meet.
They don’t watch political news closely; it’s a very small part of their lives. But they have impressions of the two parties and of leading politicians. If it seems like one party wants to make things in America, that will matter. If it seems like one party is trying to take away their family's health care coverage, that will matter, too.
Let’s not leave the impression we are more focused on being clever than on fighting for people in their real lives.
A propos of staying on message, the brilliant Sarah Jaynes, of Rural Democracy Initiative/Winning Jobs Narrative, said this recently at a meeting (of All In for NC): "Hard work is a love language for working people. The heroes of the story are working people; portray government as helping that, not being the star. E.g. - child tax credit: puts $ in the pockets of working families so that they can go to work and participate in our economy. First, you have to DO things for working people to raise their quality of life and standard of living."
Every time people talk about trade, they should point out that giant corporations are responsible for moving work off-shore. Computer chips are the best example. Intel and others took US know-how and US capital to Asia to save a few bucks on chip making.
They did so because they were greedy bastards with no regard for US workers. They did so because the Taiwanese and others offered enormous tracts of land, tax breaks, and infrastructure improvements, and other goodies I don't know about.
But labor is not the crucial factor in chip-making. It's a purely mechanical process. The labor is in packing and shipping the chips. Sure, there's some cost in operations and repairs, but that's not the decisive factor. And in chip design, which is still done here as far as I know.
We can fly enough chips to keep a factory running making PCs and blades for next to nothing, compared with the loss of US jobs.
But Dems don't want to blame their donors, so this goes unsaid.