The Poverty Wages of Democratic Resistance

Maybe time for a different approach?

Welp, Trump is pretty unpopular and his ratings are very poor on a number of key issues, including the economy and inflation. But Democrats as a party don’t seem to be benefiting. Far from it, as illustrated by these data showing which party has a better plan on various issues from a just-released Reuters/Ipsos poll:

---

---

As Democrats clutch their tattered garments about them and mutter angrily that this is all the thanks they get for their noble resistance to the evil Trump, one might venture the suggestion that it is time to try a different approach.

Nah. Time for more of the same. The #Resistance is surely just about to break through if Democrats are sufficiently militant. Hence the gathering momentum for forcing a government shutdown to extract concessions from the GOP. One slight problem: it won’t work. The concessions will not be forthcoming, Democrats will be forced to back down and they will be blamed for the negative effects of the shutdown. But at least they’ll be resisting and doing something.

This is as dumb as it sounds. Much the same could be said about Democrats’ urge to turn it up to 11 on each and every move by Trump and his administration. Is there a person in this country today who does not already know Democrats hate Trump and think everything he does is terrible?

I don’t think so which suggests that continuing to inform voters of this fact can only have limited effectiveness, especially in convincing them that Democrats are a superior alternative to Trump’s party. Take the issue of immigration. Democrats have not stinted in their intense criticism of the actions of ICE agents, including comparing their actions to that of a “modern-day Gestapo.” And it is true that many of these actions have not been popular with the public.

Yet as noted above Republicans are still widely preferred on handling immigration—especially among working-class voters. It would appear that Democrats’ fusillade of criticism of ICE is not convincing voters Democrats have better ideas on how to handle immigration challenges. And why should it? The Democrats’ utter disaster on immigration policy under the Biden administration will not be so easily forgotten.

Josh Barro makes the relevant points:

For too long, Mr. Biden and his team asserted they couldn’t stop the surge without new legislation. That proved false: In 2024, having failed to get an immigration bill through Congress, Mr. Biden finally took executive actions to curb abuse of the asylum system and slow the flow of migrants across the southern border. When Mr. Trump took office, illegal border crossings slowed to a trickle. In other words, the problem had been fixable all along; Mr. Biden simply did not fix it until much too late.

Barro acknowledges that some Democratic commentators and policy shops are (finally) grappling with the need to fix a flat-out broken asylum system and other dysfunctional aspects of the immigration regime Democrats presided over. But there is a notable lack of appetite for dealing with the flash point of deportations/ICE other than denouncing the Trump administration. This is no small omission and indeed undercuts any attempt to portray Democrats as truly reformed on the issue of immigration.

[Democratic immigration policy] won’t work without a robust and credible commitment to enforcement, including interior enforcement (emphasis added). That’s because you can make whatever rules you want about who is supposed to immigrate and how, but if you continue to allow millions of people to come live in the United States in contravention of those rules, the immigration situation on the ground will not match what is written in policy.

The mental block that Democrats have here relates to an instinct about deportations: a feeling that it’s presumptively improper to remove an unauthorized immigrant who has settled in our country if that migrant hasn’t committed a crime unrelated to immigration. These people have been here a long time, the idea goes. They’re not causing trouble.

But if we build a system where people very often get to stay here simply because they made it in—the system that prevailed during most of Mr. Biden’s term—then we don’t really have an immigration policy, and voters won’t have any reason to believe us when we say our new policy will produce different results about who comes here.

Liberals also note, accurately, that there are negative economic consequences to a stepped-up program of interior enforcement that doesn’t focus narrowly on criminals…But these near-term economic costs need to be weighed against the way that stepped-up interior enforcement makes any future immigration policy more credible and more effective by sending migrants the message that they need a valid visa to stay in the United States.

The need to make a credible enforcement threat does not require Democrats to endorse specific enforcement practices of the Trump administration…Democrats are right…to call for a more effectively targeted approach. But that more targeted approach still needs to contemplate that being in the country without authorization is reason enough to deport someone (emphasis added).

Yup, this will be a hard one for Democrats to surrender on. But surrender they must. Otherwise, why should voters take them seriously?

Much the same is true of the crime issue. Democrats are more than happy to call out Trump actions like putting the National Guard in Washington DC (not needed, everything’s great!) and his threats to do the same in other cities. Again, specific actions by Trump are not necessarily popular but the Democrats’ furious denunciations are doing nothing to rehabilitate their image on public safety, as witnessed by the data above. Far more important is Democrats’ association with horrific crimes like the Charlotte, NC, knife murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train by a deranged individual who should no way have been on that train. If Democrats cannot be trusted to keep psychotic criminals off the street, why would/should voters trust Democrats over Republicans to handle public safety? It does not compute.

Basically, Democrats have two choices: they can be a loyal soldier in the #Resistance or they can be a different kind of Democrat, with emphasis on the “different.” Leaning into the former makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to be the latter. Democrats’ revealed preference at this point is to stick with the #Resistance and pursue various subterfuges to avoid the need to truly change their positions—even if the return on that strategy continues to be meager. Marc Novicoff in The Atlantic points out:

[E]ven the elected Democrats most insistent on the need for change seem focused on adjustments to the party’s communication style, rather than to its substantive positions. One school of thought holds that Democrats can woo cross-pressured voters without having to compromise on policy at all, as long as they switch up their vocabulary…A related theory of rhetorical moderation is about emphasis, not word choice. Because Democrats are much closer to the median voter on bread-and-butter material issues than Republicans are, perhaps they just need to talk more about their popular economic ideas and less about their unpopular social-issue positions…

For Democrats to appeal to cultural conservatives, some of them probably have to actually be more culturally conservative than what the party has offered in recent years, and not just adopt a different affect or ignore social issues entirely. Or they could simply cross their fingers and hope voters spontaneously adopt new perceptions about the party. That strategy offends no one and incurs little risk. That’s why it’s unlikely to work.

Damon Linker boils the challenge down to its uncomfortable essence:

The only sure way to defeat Trumpism is to defeat it at the ballot box. But the only way to defeat it at the ballot box is for opponents of right-wing populism to improve their showing in elections. And the only way for opponents of right-wing populism to improve their showing in elections is for them to stop driving voters who want tougher policies on crime and immigration, along with less embrace of the progressive outlook on race and gender, into the arms of the Trumpified Republican Party…

There really is only one option [for Democratic success]…promising to give the voters some of what Trump is offering them, but with greater restraint, competence, and humanity.

This cannot be done through the #Resistance playbook. It’s really that simple. Will Democrats wake up to this fact or continue drawing their poverty-level political wages? We shall see as 2026 and, more threateningly, 2028 loom ahead.