Did You Forget That Trump Will Also Be Commander-in-Chief? This Time He May Use That More Forcefully

Although I Don't Know Any Of Them, Most Americans Think He's Doing A Good Job

Mandate to do a good job for Americans, not rip up the system

This year, turnout was slightly down from 2020. Of the 245 million eligible voters, approximately 158 million bothered (63.8%). And of that number, just under half voted for Trump. And yet, CNN polling shows that most Americans (55%)— not most voters— approve of Trump’s chaotic and dysfunctional transition and have high expectations for his presidency (54%). I bet they have no idea that Trump is planning an unpredentented military purge. “At the end of the day,” wrote Don Moynihan, “democracy often depends upon whether the military will open fire on their own people. Will they blindly follow orders by an authoritarian, or will they respect democratic norms?” Trump wants his own generals in place, not ones who are loyal to the constitution, ones who are loyal to him.”

Reading through that CNN polling, I felt like I was on another planet. I can’t understand how anyone could feel any confidence in how he’ll handle the job. And Jon Favreau would agree with me— that I can’t understand and that I need to. He would tell me to stop talking to other progressives and start talking to what voters have to say. Yes, many of them are stupid as shit, with heads filled with conspiracy theories… but each has the same vote that you and I do.

“Even if we don’t agree with the views of leftists or liberals or Never Trumpers or MAGA Republicans,” he wrote, “we understand them (or at least we think we do). The people whose views we don’t understand tend to be the people who simply don’t follow politics that closely. And yet, that’s most Americans. This majority still votes, but not in every election. They typically vote for the same party, but not always. Their political beliefs can be all over the map: left on some issues, right on others; willing to compromise on some issues, not on others. They tend to be less partisan (which doesn’t mean they’re centrist), less ideological (which doesn’t mean they’re moderate), and less likely to see politics as a black-and-white, life-and-death struggle with clear heroes and villains (which doesn’t mean they don’t care). They’re also less likely to have a four-year college degree, which is now the best predictor of how Americans vote and the central divide in American politics— a divide that continues to grow.”

If the party lost in 2024 because people were fed up with high costs and an old incumbent, maybe we can win in 2028 if people are still fed up with high costs and an old incumbent. Or maybe Democrats can just crank up the economic populism. Or sand down the edges of identity politics. Or create better ads, or hire smarter operatives, or run younger candidates, or find a Joe Rogan but without any of the stuff that makes liberals mad and Rogan popular. Surely, someone on Bluesky has the answer.

The truth is, 2024 should be a clarifying moment for those of us who have spent the past decade trying to keep Trump out of power. Half of the country just took another flier on the guy who attempted a coup— a convicted felon who somehow won 16 million more votes than he did in 2016. Democrats are about to have as little power as they’ve had at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.

Democrats need to get back into the persuasion business. Interactions with voters, frustrating as they often are, are always a good reminder of how different it feels to talk politics with a person you’re genuinely trying to persuade. You don’t speak in phrases from a candidate’s overly polished speech or carefully worded interview answers. You don’t talk like an ad that supposedly tests well but somehow sounds like every other Democratic ad you’ve ever heard. And the conversations certainly don’t sound at all like people talk and argue about politics online…

Persuading voters is primarily the job of politicians and political professionals. But we now live in an era when the typical voter’s occasional glimpse at the spectacle of American politics is less likely to be a candidate’s speech or a campaign ad than an algorithmic assortment of takes and arguments from media figures, activists, and anyone with an opinion and a social-media account. This means that, whether we like it or not, the small minority of us who obsessively follow and talk and post about politics play a role in shaping the views of the majority of Americans who don’t: a multiracial, working-class majority that has come to believe politics is largely irrelevant to their lives.

And can we really blame them?

Trump has been the main character of American politics for nearly a decade, so that certainly hasn’t helped, but neither has the exhausting drama he’s pulled us into, over and over again. He acts, we react, and sometimes overreact. Political obsessives see a debate in which the stakes are total and the right side is obvious. But more often than not, the person who’s just checking in sees a fight that sounds both silly and sanctimonious, trivial and hyperbolic, inaccessible and exhausting— all of which feeds into the autocrat’s empty promise that he can liberate us from the messier parts of a system in which everyone gets a say and nothing seems to get done.

Democrats can no longer just assert that this path is wrong; we have to show that a better way exists— yes, in the policies we propose and in the facts we present, but also in how we approach the essential work of politics in a democracy.

When someone expresses a view we find immoral or offensive, it’s not that they never deserve to be scolded or shamed. It’s that making people feel unwelcome or unwanted is self-defeating and antithetical to the project of democratic governance— a radical belief that everyone has equal worth and deserves an equal voice in organizing a society where dissenting views are tolerated, minority rights are protected, and progress happens only when minds are changed.

The last time Democrats suffered a defeat of this year’s magnitude [see graphic at the top of the page] was in 2004, when George W. Bush won the popular vote to secure a second term and the Republicans controlled Congress. Some people have pointed out that, at the time, the smart money was on Democrats nominating a swing-state moderate in 2008. A Black guy from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama who had broken with his party on the Iraq War wasn’t really in the cards. The suggestion is that maybe Democrats should worry less about where our next candidates fall on the political spectrum and more about whether they can rally the party faithful.

But that is based on a misconception about why Obama was the last Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to twice win an electoral majority. For all the attention on his charisma and ability to inspire, an underrated aspect of Obama’s appeal was how hard he tried to empathize with the people he was trying to lead. Even if they weren’t for him, he made it clear that he was for them. Part of that capacity came from navigating so many different worlds as he grew up. But part of it was his background as a community organizer.

Organizers understand better than just about anyone else in politics what it takes to change minds, because they spend their days talking with people who aren’t like them, don’t know them, and don’t think like them. I spend way too much of my life arguing about politics online and on mic, but the disagreements I appreciate the most— the conversations that make me think differently— are almost always with people who have a background in organizing for a cause or campaign. Whether the person’s politics are to the left or the right of my own, their experience tends to make them more patient, understanding, and compelling than 95 percent of social-media interactions. That’s because organizers aren’t looking to perform for the people who already agree with them. They’re looking to persuade the people who don’t. They don’t just want to be right. They want to win.