The lamentations on the part of numerous political observers that the Democrats lack “a message” are becoming more frequent with the advent of the midterm elections. But they don’t comport with reality, even though many Democrats also express the same worry. First, message discipline isn’t particularly characteristic of the Democrats, as opposed to the Republicans, who are more homogeneous and hierarchical. There are ideological and regional differences within the Democratic Party, ranging from the very liberal left to centrists, particularly those who don’t represent the coastal states. The recent split among the Senate Democrats over immigration strategy was one example. It pit the more leftward Democrats, especially those who are considering a run for the presidential nomination in 2020, against those from more conservative states. The leftward members and what some other senators call “the 2020s” wanted to make a statement that guaranteeing protections for the so-called Dreamers, or DACA kids, was more important than keeping the government open—a position that Republicans were using against Democratic senators up for reelection this year in the more conservative states. (Those who’ve criticized Democratic leader Chuck Schumer for “caving” apparently didn’t see that he was trying to get his at-risk senators off that limb. They also overlooked the fact that the Democrats didn’t have the votes to prevail and therefore lacked the “leverage” that they imputed to him.)

It’s a lot easier to convey party cohesion in a presidential election year, when there exist an actual head of the party and a platform. (An exception to this general point is Newt Gingrich’s poll-tested “Contract with America,” which served as a party doctrine for the House Republicans in 1994.) But even when the Democrats have a presidential candidate there are limits to their cohesion. Ours isn’t a parliamentary system where voting is largely done along party lines, as is the voting of the members once they’re elected. Our elections are more based on the individual candidates than on their party identity. Indeed a candidate’s biography could well be his or her platform—the message. It could be some kind of an outstanding record: heroic military service or athletic achievement or a famous prosecutorial career, and this can matter a lot more than party identity.

Actually, one positive effect of the lack of a “message” is that it allows a candidate to define his or her own race and to come off as authentic rather than as a party tool. Running as an individual can also protect a candidate from being “Nancy Pelosied.” The Republicans specialize in portraying Democratic candidates as instruments of a party leader who can be stereotyped. For decades the Republicans have defined a Democrat running for Congress as a vote for Nancy Pelosi, understood to be a “San Francisco liberal.” (Meaning pro-gay rights and pro-leftmost policies; it’s been so pounded in that what’s supposed to be objectionable about her no longer needs be spelled out. She’s been made into a symbol rather than a person.) Pelosi got a bit of a reprieve when Hillary Clinton ran for president. I don’t think it’s an accident that the two most politicized Democrats—by Republicans—in recent years have been women.

It’s simply a fact that the Republicans are better at attack politics than the Democrats are. And I mean that without a value judgment. If a Democrat occupying the Oval Office had done any one of the following things, all hell would have broken loose from the Republicans: allegedly, but a charge with solid documentation, buying the silence of a person (or maybe more) with whom he’d had an extramarital affair; refusing to implement a law to put new sanctions on an opposing country for having messed with our last presidential election; and presiding over a White House staff with more than a hundred people who lacked security clearances, many of them obviously requiring such a clearance to do their job.

The list could go on, but this, too, is all part of the matter of messaging, and who does it better—whether or not that’s a positive thing. Consider the difference between the dangers supposedly posed by Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server at her home while she was secretary of state and dozens of people without a security clearance in highly sensitive jobs seeing the most classified material anyway. (There’s also been a substantial difference in the attention of the press to these two matters, but that can be at least partly explained by the overload of scandals produced by the Trump administration.)