How Democrats can move past "low-dominance messaging"
Donald Trump is moving very quickly with his "shock and awe" plans to rule as an autocrat who views multiracial pluralistic democracy and its system of checks and balance as an impediment to his power. Central to Trump's threat and promise of being a dictator on "day one" of his regime, is putting in place a Cabinet and other senior advisors who will follow his commands without any objections — even if those commands are contrary to American law, the Constitution and the country's established democratic political culture and norms.
At the New York Times, Peter Baker describes Trump's personalist rule and shock doctrine strategy as follows :
Somehow disruption doesn't begin to cover it. Upheaval might be closer. Revolution maybe. In less than two weeks since being elected again, Donald J. Trump has embarked on a new campaign to shatter the institutions of Washington as no incoming president has in his lifetime.
He has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation's capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Suffice it to say, so far there have been more of the former than the latter. Mr. Trump has said that "real power" is the ability to engender fear, and he seems to have achieved that.
Mr. Trump's early transition moves amount to a generational stress test for the system. If Republicans bow to his demand to recess the Senate so that he can install appointees without confirmation, it would rewrite the balance of power established by the founders more than two centuries ago. And if he gets his way on selections for some of the most important posts in government, he would put in place loyalists intent on blowing up the very departments they would lead.
If more Americans had listened to the pro-democracy alarm sounders like M. Steven Fish and voted accordingly, the United States and the world would not now be beset by the calamity that will be Trump's second administration and his MAGA successors.
M. Steven Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He has appeared on BBC, CNN and other major networks, and has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Foreign Policy. His new book is " Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge ."
In this conversation, Fish explains his frustration about the 2024 Election and how, contrary to what some politics watchers and experts have concluded, Harris and the Democrats did in fact have an excellent chance of winning but unfortunately made a series of poor choices that doomed her campaign. This includes a failure to embrace a high-dominance leadership style, consistent and bold messaging and a compelling and direct story that addressed voters' concerns about the economy, illegal immigration, crime and other immediate quality-of-life issues.
This is the first part of a two-part conversation.
How are you feeling right now? How are you making sense of Trump's victory in the election?
The first few days after the election were pretty rough, but now I'm feeling energized for the coming war and I'm examining the evidence to help me understand how we can win the next round. The Democrats' losses across almost every demographic confirmed what we have been talking about over the past few months. The problem wasn't their policies or the economy. They lost because of their clueless campaign, pure and simple. With that in mind, I'm starting to organize a network of political operatives, influencers, journalists, donors, scholars, activists and aspirants for office who are eager to replace the Democrats' abysmal messaging with a strategy that wins.
You and I have discussed the need for Harris and the Democrats to adopt a high-dominance leadership style if they want to defeat Trump and stop his MAGA movement and save democracy. If the Democrats followed the advice in your book, your New York Times op-ed and in our conversations here at Salon and elsewhere, where would we be right now as a country and world?
I believe Harris would have won, with all the attendant advantages for democracy, peace and prosperity here and around the world. The irony and the tragedy are that during the interval between Harris' debut as the nominee-apparent in late July and the debate in mid-September, the Democrats finally got their act together. They focused largely on their own great plans and limited their attention to Trump to ridiculing him. During the DNC, the Democrats cast Trump as weak and pathetic rather than treating him like an 800-pound gorilla who should terrify us. Harris largely did the same during the debate. The proof of concept was there: When the Democrats switched to a higher-dominance mode, they controlled the narrative, their prospects brightened and Trump stalled.
But the Democrats then reverted to their low-dominance norm. They fell back on their timeworn, futile tactic of ceding the spotlight to Trump. Rather than just ridiculing Trump's victim complex, promising to kick his self-pitying ass and then immediately directing attention back to their own great plans for the country, the Democrats devoted precious campaign time, especially in the critical homestretch, to repeating Trump's increasingly outrageous statements and enjoining everyone to join them in being afraid and offended. Trump knew what he was doing. He kept escalating his incendiary comments while the Harris campaign focused on desperately trying to highlight how extreme, divisive and mendacious he was. As a result, he dominated news coverage, looking bolder and badder than ever and leaving the Democrats looking like sputtering, defensive, fact-checking, umbrage-filled morality police. The Democrats' strategy of letting Trump be Trump and hoping everyone would finally come around when they saw how awful he was failed again.
Harris also failed to bear down on her hard-edged prosecutor-versus-felon narrative, which figured prominently during the early, effective stages of her campaign. Maybe she yielded to the far left, which admonished her for stigmatizing felons. That's what she did in her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019-2020, which helps explain why her first campaign folded before she could even get it off the ground.
How did Harris make her case to the American people? Was she bold enough?
Harris faltered there, too, and it might have been the most damaging aspect of her low-dominance messaging. She was rightly criticized at first for avoiding interviews and when she did finally start talking to the press, she blew it. Worst of all, she habitually dodged questions, offering banal, scripted, unmemorable answers that reinforced the impression that she was weak and lacked the courage of her convictions. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single novel, provocative, brash, daring, or entertaining thing that Harris said during the last seven weeks of the campaign. One consequence was that a lot of people remained unsure what she stood for. Even worse was the widespread suspicion that she didn't stand for anything.
We all watched the spectacle unfold. How would her policies differ from Biden's? Well, she couldn't say but could confirm that her presidency wouldn't just be a re-run of his. How, then, would it differ? Her answer: Well, you know, her first term wouldn't just be a Biden second term. How, then, did she vote on California's Proposition 36, which would recriminalize retail theft and some drug offenses? Her answer: "I am not going to talk about the vote on that." On immigration: Didn't she take office seeking to decriminalize illegal border crossings and didn't she and Biden wait too long to deal with the border problem? Her answer: Our immigration system is broken. Fine, but didn't she take too long to try to fix it? Her answer: The problem predated Biden and her. OK, but couldn't they have acted earlier? Her answer: She had prosecuted drug traffickers earlier in her career.
It came to look as if avoiding risk was the name of her game and that her aim was to run out the clock without saying anything controversial. This is what low-dominance politics looks like.
For months, I have been warning that Harris was likely going to lose the election. I had similar concerns about President Biden. Unlike some, I was not drunk on the "hopium." I was taking a detached view of the data and trends and how Trumpism is a symptom of many deep problems in American society and not the cause. Needless to say, that was not a popular opinion. You had similar concerns. What were we seeing that the mainstream news media and commentariat types — especially the professional centrists — were not?
Let's just take one matter that the mainstream news media and commentariat rarely focused on and that's the gains the Democrats could have made by seizing the flag. Early in Harris' campaign, the Democrats seemed attuned to the power of patriotism. The DNC was all red-white-and-blue and chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" Harris' speech treated Trump as a menace to American national security and global preeminence. She pledged to stand by our allies, stand up to dictators and ensure that America had the world's most lethal fighting force. She cast her progressive aims as the whole nation's business and the keys to showing the world what America is made of. She followed up in the debate with hard shots at Trump's credentials as a patriot and a protector, saying that Putin would eat his lunch and military leaders said Trump was a disgrace. But then the "we're-the-party-of-America-and-the-Republicans-are-the-party-of-Putin" drumbeat largely faded. Rather than build a gripping, inclusive liberal patriotism that the country is starving for, Harris fell back on targeting specific groups and complaining that Trump was being divisive. That was not a winning response to Trump's un-American ethnonationalism.
The mainstream media and commentariat hardly noticed the problem. The fact is that many Americans are more proud of and grateful for their citizenship than practically anything else. People prefer political leaders who make them feel great about their country and who identify themselves with its promise and glory. That includes most working-class voters and first- and second-generation Americans. And here's some interesting data: In the 2020 American National Elections Studies survey, 80 percent of African Americans said their ethnic identity was extremely or very important to them, compared to just 20 percent of whites. But 72 percent of Blacks, versus 64 percent of whites, also said their American identity was extremely or very important to them. These numbers don't reveal much evidence of raging majoritarian white nationalism or the notion that African Americans would be alienated by flag-waving.
Trump's media mouthpieces, of course, didn't make the Democrats' mistake. FOX and kindred outlets were saturated with commentators from across the racial and ethnic rainbow touting Trump-as-matchless-lover-and-protector-of-America and as the guarantor of its greatness.
Was it possible, within reason, for Harris to overcome negative public perceptions about the direction of the country and negative sentiment towards the Biden administration?
It absolutely was possible. Commentators who obsess over these numbers act shocked at just how forlorn the folks have become. But if you look back in the data, you'll see that most of the time more people say the country is moving in the wrong direction than think it's moving in the right direction. If those perceptions were accurate, we'd all be back to living in caves by now.
What's more, the correlation between satisfaction and electoral outcomes isn't even very close. According to Gallup, on the eve of the election in 1996, just 39 percent said they were satisfied with how things were going in the country, but Bill Clinton won reelection in a rout. Four years later, at an unusual moment of national optimism, a whopping 62 percent expressed satisfaction—but George W. Bush beat incumbent Vice President Al Gore anyway. In 2004, Bush was handily reelected, even though only 41 percent said they were satisfied with conditions in the country. At the time Obama was easily reelected in 2012, just 30 percent said they were. At the moment Trump left office in January 2021, a grand total of 11 percent of Americans said they were satisfied, which was way worse than the numbers under Biden. But that didn't prevent a majority from voting to return Trump to the White House a couple of weeks ago.
What about the American people's experiences with and perceptions, real or imagined, about the economy and inflation? Voters who emphasized the economy and inflation were more likely to vote for Trump and MAGA. Voters who were more concerned about democracy chose Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
The Biden Administration managed it with aplomb. Still, people couldn't forgive Biden for inflation, even though he had nothing to do with it and they told pollsters they were worse off than under Trump.
The economy couldn't have been better for the Democrats: four percent unemployment, three percent GDP growth, two percent inflation and a stock market that couldn't quit setting records. Negative views of the economy were the product of the Democrats' refusal to hammer home, day in and day out, how well the economy was doing on their watch. Harris could have constantly blared the truth about our economy being the envy of the world and then promised that we ain't seen nothin' yet. She also could have pounded at the fact that COVID aftershocks alone were to blame for the earlier spike in inflation. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Bill Clinton showed her how to do this in his appearances in small-town areas in swing states, but Harris missed the cue. She remained mired in the 21st-century Democrat's delusion that you score more points—even when you're in power and the economy is sizzling — by expressing wan sympathy for supposedly suffering voters and then promising some goodies to ease their pain.
In fact, if you look at the data, you'll find that people tend to think the economy is doing well under leaders who tell them it is and that the sky's the limit with them at the helm. Obama and Biden didn't fit that description; their pollsters warned them against crowing since their numbers showed that many folks weren't "feeling the benefits." Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, economic confidence sagged under Obama and Biden, even as they presided over stunning recoveries. It's true that last year Biden finally started touting "Bidenomics," but congressional Democrats and practically the whole liberal commentariat quickly shut him down; didn't the president see the polls showing that most people weren't "feeling the benefits?" How would they take to their anguish being ignored? Biden subsequently dropped the Bidenomics talk, though there's no doubt that his debility and consequent inability to carry the message had at least as much to do with his unpopularity and public pessimism as the content of what he said.
Let's contrast that with leaders who followed the high-dominance practice of endeavoring to shape opinion rather than allowing their messaging to be dictated by polls. Ronald Reagan started touting "Reaganomics" at a time when his approval ratings were stuck in the high 30s and long before the economy recovered from its late-1970s doldrums. His party closed ranks behind him and relentlessly amplified his message. Consequently, as Jim Tankersley reported in a remarkable piece in the New York Times in November 2023, "At this point in [Reagan's] presidency, Americans were far more likely to report hearing positive news about the economy and prices than they do under President Biden. They even reported hearing better news on unemployment, at a time when the rate was near 9 percent. It is 4 percent today." Reagan went on to win reelection in a landslide. Bill Clinton felt everyone's pain, but he never failed to explain that his Republican predecessor had created it. When the economy took off during his second term, he made sure everybody knew who was to credit. Trump has never even bothered to pretend he cares about anybody's pain. When he was in office, he just told everybody that they were enjoying the greatest economy in world history and after he left office, he told them how much Biden's economy sucked and how once he returned to the White House happy days would be here again. Guess under which presidents confidence in the economy was highest?
Because they are institutionalists, and as expected, President Biden and Kamala Harris have been emphasizing the need for civility and an orderly transfer of power. Biden just met with Trump in the White House. Of course, Biden was not afforded that courtesy by Trump and his attempted coup on Jan. 6. During the campaign Biden and Harris said that Trump was an existential threat to the country and its democracy. They said he was a tyrant and a dictator in waiting. Harris and Biden are now normalizing Trump. How are you reconciling this? The contradiction suggests much deeper problems in the Democrats' political messaging and American political culture more broadly.
Trump is a great danger who is comparable with other tyrants and evildoers who shouldn't have been elected — but he was elected. Obviously, there should be no normalizing Trump's illegal, democracy-wrecking, national-security-compromising behavior. But the Democrats' usual way of abnormalizing Trump — did you see what he just said?! Aren't you scared to death by what this bully is doing?! — has got to stop. That approach only builds Trump up. The only effective way to deal with Trump is to ridicule him, troll him and otherwise diminish him with expressions of disdain and contempt. As we've discussed, for a brief period during the campaign, that's what the Democrats did and it worked wonders. After the Democrats returned to making the election a referendum on Trump and his awfulness, Trump bulldozed them without breaking a sweat.
One way to both keep our morale up and to counter what will undoubtedly be Trump's claim that he won the most spectacular mandate in world history is to remember and act like we remember, that despite the Democrats' limp homestretch messaging, Trump won the popular vote by just two points (50-48). But for about a quarter-million votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Harris would have won the Electoral College. We're still in a half-and-half electorate, as we've been for the better part of this century.
The fact is that the only way to protect the country from the Republicans is to beat them in elections and we've got to remain focused on that above all else. That means making the Republicans pay at the polls next time for their antics. With the Republicans in charge of every branch, the Democrats' options for stopping Trump from implementing his policies are extremely limited. And if the Democrats focus their efforts on playing frantic policy whack-a-mole to limit the damage of this or that Trump-imposed measure, they'll just end up playing the cat while Trump flicks the laser pointer around. They'll also risk providing cover for Republicans to escape blame for the disasters they create. If Trump follows through on his promises to impose massive tariffs and expel millions of undocumented migrants, inflation will soar. The most important thing Democrats can do is to make sure voters know why. And no more rescuing Speaker Mike Johnson from the wrath of the "Freedom Caucus"; let them turn the House back into a circus if they're so moved. No more swooping in to prevent government shutdowns, which enables the Republicans to keep railing against "fiscal irresponsibility" while avoiding the political consequences. Let them shut it down — and make them pay politically for doing so.
