Charles Sykes is the editor-in-chief of the Bulwark .

To: All Democrats

I’m guessing you’re feeling pretty good right now. As a result of his racist tweet storms, President Trump has managed to simultaneously unite fractious Democrats while further alienating moderate voters. He richly earned an historic vote of condemnation from the House of Representatives.


Even before that meltdown, the latest NBC/WSJ poll showed three Democratic candidates – Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders – all leading the president in general election matchups. He remains historically unpopular and there’s no reason to think that will change anytime soon.

Given all that good news, I understand why you really aren’t in the mood for more concern trolling from Never Trumpers, because you got this, right?

So, let’s talk about the 1972 election.

In the year leading up to it, the Democrats were giddy with anticipation. The country was still mired in a bloody war, the economy was a mess, and President Richard Nixon, while lacking Trump’s theatricality and instability, was regarded with fear and loathing by much of the country. In the 1970 midterms, Democrats won the popular vote in House races by 8.7 percent, while adding a dozen seats. In 1971, Nixon’s approval ratings dipped below 50 percent, and stayed there. Surely, they told themselves, they could beat this guy.

Nixon’s vulnerability attracted a host of potential challengers, with Senator Edmund Muskie, a previous vice-presidential candidate, as the front-runner. He had gravitas; The Times opined that “No national leader since Franklin Roosevelt has been better than Mr. Muskie in delivering a conventional ‘fireside chat.’”

But they noted that despite Muskie’s appeal, many Democrats “believe the times call for radical change.” For some Democrats, Muskie “appears a little too cautious. He evokes respect, but not enthusiasm.”

This “mild dissatisfaction” gave an opening to a far more liberal candidate, one who spoke to the activated left of the party, George McGovern. For Democrats who shared McGovern’s anti-war passions, his record “establishes his moral superiority,” the Times wrote. But it also noted that others feared that “his views have too sharp a cutting edge and would energize as many elements as he won over.”

That turned out to drastically underestimate McGovern’s weakness. As unpopular as he was, Nixon would go on to win 49 of 50 states, 520 electoral votes, and nearly 61 percent of the popular vote, beating McGovern by nearly 18 million votes.

It’s possible that Nixon would have beaten any Democrat, but what happened in 1972 was not inevitable. It was, however, a choice. Democrats chose to move sharply left – to indulge their ideological id. Nixon ran against the party of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” The result was a massive landslide for a vulnerable incumbent.

Of course, history does always repeat itself and 1972 was also a very different era; but it was not a kinder or gentler time. That election came on the heels of the Sixties, when cities burned, campuses erupted, revolutions seemed imminent, and things were falling apart. In 1972, voters pushed back hard.



***

The last time we talked, just before your debates in Miami, I worried that you would blow this election because cockiness and wishful thinking are dangerous combinations.

But you assured me that, despite blowing the 2016 election, you didn’t need any advice from Republicans. We’re Democrats, you said, we totally know what we are doing to defeat Trump, so now let’s talk about forced busing, the racism of the Betsy Ross flag, open borders, and health insurance for illegal immigrants….

You think this is unfair? Wait until you see what a billion dollars’ worth of attack ads will do with this stuff.

If it helps, forget about Never Trumpers, because we aren’t your target audience or your problem. The 2020 election will be decided by swing voters – the sort of voters who turned out last year and helped flip the House. But don’t take them for granted.

Voters are open to universal health insurance; but they will revolt against proposals to take their private insurance away. Voters are appalled by Trump’s cruelty at the border, but they will also be appalled by proposals that sound like “open borders.” They want a fairer society, but socialism is toxic.

Please don’t take my word for it.

You don’t think “open borders” is a problem? After Elizabeth Warren unveiled her own immigration plan, Kevin Drum wrote in Mother Jones (Mother Jones!) that even though he has criticized Republicans who had accused Democrats of favoring open borders, “I have to admit that it’s hard to see much daylight between Warren’s plan and de facto open borders.”

After several candidates suggested decriminalizing illegal border crossings, President Obama’s former secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, said that the proposal was “tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders.” The idea, he said, “was unworkable, unwise and does not have the support of a majority of American people or the Congress, and if we had such a policy, instead of 100,000 apprehensions a month, it will be multiples of that.”

This has been the pattern since I last wrote to you. Most voters oppose government health coverage for illegal immigrants and yet, at the second debate, every Democrat on stage raised a hand in favor.

Only 37 percent of voters favor abolishing all private health insurance. But when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Bernie Sanders, “Will these people be able to keep their health insurance plans, their private plans through their employers” under his plan, Sanders responded “no,” as he shook his head.

Don’t even get me started on late term abortion or gun control. Try road testing those issues in rural Michigan before you measure for the curtains in your new White House office.

After the first two debates, liberal columnist Richard Cohen declared: “GOP strategists must be hyperventilating over all the goodies arrayed before them. This is a campaign even Trump could win.”

Longtime progressive Ruy Teixiera also notes that Trump is unpopular and “quite beatable.” But, he writes, defeating Trump “requires you keep the election a referendum on him and not unpopular Democratic ideas” like reparations, abolishing ICE, the Green New Deal, and the elimination of private health insurance. So far, he thinks the record is grim.

Jonathan Chait, a columnist for New York magazine, has similar concerns. He notes that none of the big bold ideas has any realistic chance of being enacted by the next president. So, the political reward does not match the political risk the Democrats are taking. “They’re not laying the ground for a sweeping new progressive agenda they can pass in 2021,” Chait writes. “They’re merely seeding Donald Trump’s attack ads.”

Faced with this, a lot of you have fallen back on the Myth of the Pivot. You are telling yourselves the comforting story that you can easily pivot back to the center after the primary season is over. This assumes that politics has not fundamentally changed, which seems a bizarrely fanciful notion for anyone who has lived through the last cycle.

For better or worse (and I personally find it horrifically worse), the GOP is united behind Trump. But the fuel for their loyalty is not Trump’s sterling character or even his policies. The animating principle of the right is anti-leftism and Trump will make the case that the left is at ramming speed, not just on economics, but on every possible fault line in our cultural political wars. Trump might be racist, as his incendiary attack on “the Squad” of freshman Congresswomen proves, but he’s not entirely wrong to think that tying Democrats to their most extreme voices is a potentially winning strategy.

For all of his erratic and unhinged narcissism, Donald Trump has a vision: He wants 2020 to be 1972 all over again.

Trump is framing the choice Americans will have to make in 2020. He has chosen his enemies and defined them: “These are people that hate our country. They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”

His message: My opponents don’t just disagree with me… they hate me. They hate you. They hate America. They hate everything you stand for and have built. The four minority women are not really Americans, they are aliens, socialists, communists... immigrants who have spit on the gift we have given them.

In other words: I may be awful, but you people are dangerous.

This ugly stuff may well backfire. Trump could lose the popular vote next year by a larger margin than in 2016. But he could still win the Electoral College if he holds Reluctant Trump Voters and the swing voters who sampled the Democrats in 2018.

The variable is what kind of campaign you run. You can indulge your ideological id, or you can run to defeat the incumbent president.

As it was in 1972, it’s your choice.

