Dems Don't Need To 'Moderate,' They Need To Stop Focus Grouping Themselves Into Oblivion

It comes across as fake and calculating anyway.

Tightrope walker. Source: BeFunky

Ever since the first moment I laid eyes on him, I have not been able to stand Gavin Newsom. This was not for lack of trying. I really did try to see the Golden Boy everyone but me seemed to see. I tried it every time I heard some know-it-all on social media or pundit talk about how he was the perfect Democratic presidential candidate due to his good looks and suave demeanor. And when he started his little war on the unhoused, I thought to myself, “Yes, sir, I knew your ass all along.”

Judging by his podcast, I think we can all agree that I was correct in this matter.

At this moment, Democrats and some Never Trump conservatives are doing the thing they always do, which is to hem and haw about how to win over voters in more purple and even red areas. Oh, it is the neverending conundrum! Which group of people do we roll over on? And how hard? How many focus groups can we do? How do we hit that sweet spot of “just bland enough so people who aren’t 100 percent fascist will consider voting for us instead of Republicans?”

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There is nothing some folks love like homing in on “the one thing they did wrong” (that is probably not the one thing they did wrong) and trying to correct it in increasingly awkward ways. Like when they do campaign ads of themselves shooting guns in flannel shirts.

I am going to be incredibly honest, here. What really hurt Kamala Harris wasn’t the “they/them” ad. The first thing, the most important thing, was that she didn’t win the primary. That is not her fault, mind you, it’s Joe Biden’s for not stepping down earlier as many of us were dying for him to do. People already hated the tendency of the Democratic party to always do everything possible to ensure that the person whose “turn” it is gets to be the nominee. They hated it even more when someone was just appointed as the nominee. People feel that kind of “wrongness” or unfairness in their bones and it’s hard to shake.

The other thing is that the woman was focus-grouped to death. Go back and look, she said nothing even marginally spicy throughout the entire campaign, and when she and Tim Walz had an offense move that actually hit — calling Republicans, rightfully, weird — they were told by the consultants to knock it off and they did. Part of that reluctance to take any particularly strong stance on anything is what resulted in the decision to not let the Uncommitted group of pro-Palestinian delegates give a very lovely planned speech at the DNC. That alone would have done so much to heal a very serious divide on the Left and made a lot of people feel more comfortable voting for her. A lot of people who happen to live in Michigan and Pennsylvania, to boot.

Unfortunately the “one thing” a lot of people seem to have settled on is support for transgender rights. The key, they insist, to winning in these not-so-blue areas, is to just accept that the people there really, really hate trans people and to just go along with that.

That is not the answer. The answer is, actually, to tell them to get the fuck over it. To tell them, straight to their faces, "I feel embarrassed for you that this is a thing you are whining about."

I’m sorry, but if people are frothing at the mouth over “pronouns in bio!” there’s no amount of asshole a Democrat can be to win them over in that area. The competition is simply too fierce.

What they can do is say “OK, well, you can keep trying to vote a group of people out of existence, keep letting the Right whip you up into a frenzy over shit that will pretty much never affect your day-to-day life unless you are a professional internet troll, or you can not have to worry about healthcare, child care, how you are going to make rent or afford a house, or pay your student loans back. You can send your kids to school without worrying that some nut with an AR-15 is going to blow their head off. You can get excited about your kids report card without worrying “How am I going to pay for college?” You can get pregnant without worrying that, if you miscarry, doctors will wait for you to go into sepsis before treating you.

These are things that actually matter in a person’s life, and the more Democrats earnestly and honestly fight for those things and make them happen, the less enticing the Republican offer of “We’ll work to make trans people miserable and make it so you can say the ‘R’ word again!” will be.

It’s worth noting that “being shitty to trans people” isn’t even a guaranteed slam dunk for Republicans these days, either. Four-time Omaha mayoral incumbent Jean Stothert — who made much of her campaign about keeping trans people from going to the bathroom — lost this week to Democrat John Ewing Jr. and now that Midwest city will have its first Black mayor. Andy Beshear of Kentucky has one of the highest approval ratings of all 50 governors, even as he keeps vetoing every anti-LGBTQ+ bill he can.

All of this aside, Democrats pretending to be assholes in order to win over bigots will come across as fake and they will lose anyway.

One thing that I know a lot of people who read this will very much not like to hear (and I know, because it did not go over well the last time I mentioned it) is that Bernie Sanders is continually rated the most or one of the most popular politicians in the United States.

Please listen to me when I tell you why. It is because people believe he is sincere. They believe he believes the things he believes. They are less bothered by him being an out-and-out socialist than by Democrats they secretly suspect are socialists, because, hey! He’s out there saying he’s a socialist. They don’t think he has anything to hide. Whether they agree with him or not, he’s out there being himself, and who he is remains consistent.

I’m not going to say I like Rand Paul. I don’t. But I do feel some kind of way about the fact that he knows exactly what he believes in and who he is and that it doesn’t change based on what is convenient. Sure, he’s been out there this week advocating for cuts to Medicaid, which I find grotesque, but he’s also openly, and without reservations or minced words, criticized the Trump tariffs and Trump accepting a plane from Qatar.

And hey, there have been more than a few occasions where Rand Paul just being who he is has actually resulted in him voting a lot better than some Democrats (FOSTA/SESTA, for instance). There is something to be said for people who just are who they say they are.

Part of Trump’s appeal, frankly, is that he’s so incredibly flawed that people see it as a “What you see is what you get” situation, even though many of them are now learning that “What you get” is a whole lot worse than what they saw.

The best chance Democrats have at winning is to throw all of the focus group shit, all the polls, all of this “trying to appeal to ‘moderates’ on social and cultural issues without also losing votes from the people they’re throwing under the bus” tightrope-walking nonsense right out the window and just be fucking honest. Just have actual principles that they stand by and don’t abandon when it’s politically convenient.

That is the kind of “purity politics” people actually want. They don’t want perfection, they want people to be real.

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Let me tell you a little story. Or a few little stories.

NAFTA was a Republican deal that was put together before Bill Clinton was ever in office. He made it less bad before he signed it, which he didn’t have much choice about. Who gets blamed for NAFTA? Democrats.

The Democratic Party, worried about being called “soft on crime,” came out with the 1994 crime bill to prove how totally tough and badass they were. To this day, they’re still living it down and dealing with criticism from both parties over how terrible it was.

When the Iraq War came around, Democrats (other than Barbara Lee) voted for the war and joined Republicans in flag-pin-wearing jingoism, while their constituents protested in the streets. Who later shouldered most of the blame for the Iraq War, electorally? Democrats. Who somehow managed to get criticized by Republicans for having voted for it.

In 2008, Barack Obama said he only supported civil unions and opposed “same-sex marriage.” He later admitted that this was absolute bullshit and he, like we all knew, supported same-sex marriage all along but pretended not to in order to not freak out certain constituencies. But you know what Republicans looooooove to say now? That they’re just like 2008 Barack Obama and that liberals are now hypocrites for thinking they’re bigots. (Or that they’re less bigoted than he was, because they’re now fine with same-sex marriage)

It never works. The thank you cards never come, and the “recognition” they hope for doesn’t arrive until a really, really inopportune time. That is why the only winning strategy is for candidates to not have that kind of strategy — to not be that goddamned calculating — to begin with.