Enough of the thumb-sucking over Democratic Party ideological labels. Liberal, centrist, progressive — that’s not the priority now. Devoting energy to testing whether candidates rigidly embrace selected special issues takes focus away from the major task of getting people out to vote. This year, more than ever, voting means getting ballots cast for the side that believes in America’s promise of freedom, opportunity and justice for all. Achieving that end requires a vote to keep twice-impeached felon Donald Trump and his running mate, the politically mercurial JD Vance, as far from the White House as possible.
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The kind of chant only Donald Trump could love
Who gets to govern, and who’s left to sulk, gets decided at the ballot box.
Elections matter.
It’s as simple as that.
It’s a lesson we should have learned by now.
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Here we are in a world where the Supreme Court has overturned long-established legal precedents protecting fundamental rights. President Joe Biden rightly argues that today’s court conservative majority, as a White House fact sheet put it, “has gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office.”
All true. But Trump didn’t will all that to happen. He had help.
I wrote this in a September 2016 column, less than two months before Trump won the election, and it bears repeating: “Examine his frightening list of right-wing court nominees. Install a Trump White House and say farewell to civil liberties, voting rights, consumer rights and reproductive rights.”
Trump, as president, did as Trump the candidate promised. He nominated the conservative Supreme Court justices who helped take a knife to Roe v. Wade and strike down affirmative action programs a year later. It is Trump’s reconfigured Supreme Court that has given him — and future presidents — a “get out of jail” card for crimes committed in office.
Say it again: Elections matter.
Trump reached the White House because turnout among key Democratic voting blocs in battleground states fell in 2016, dooming popular-vote-winner Hillary Clinton in the electoral college.
Americans who skipped voting in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina helped Trump make good on his word.
But Clinton fell victim to more than disaffected voters.
She was wounded by heaps of negative ads about her targeted to Black audiences by both Trump’s campaign and a Russian influence operation — well documented by the 2019 report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. And she was undercut by some on her left flank.
A prescient Politico magazine piece in May 2016 by Bill Scher, “Why Does the Left Hate Hillary?,” captured some of what she was up against within her own party. One line jumped out of his penetrating look into her career and then-presidential campaign: “Perhaps it’s because many progressive voters sense that she doesn’t have the religion when it comes to movement-style politics.”
Come forward to the present moment.
At a rally in Michigan on Wednesday, when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide,” she warned them: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”
Trump and his supporters clearly agree with that.
Speaking of Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said, “They picked another radical left-wing Democrat who will cater to Hamas and will not actually be supportive of Israel.”
Trump dug in with slurs of his own.
“Everyone thought it was going to be [Pennsylvania Gov. Josh] Shapiro. It turned out not to be Shapiro,” Trump said on Fox News. “I have very little doubt that it was, you know, not for the reason we’re talking about. It was because of the fact that he’s Jewish and they think they’re going to offend somebody else. And you wouldn’t feel very comfortable if you’re Israel right now with this team.”
“This is the worst team ever assembled for a Jewish person or for Israel. Either one. The worst team ever assembled,” he added.
Trump and Donalds share the goal of stoking division among people at odds over Israel’s war with Hamas and the mistreatment of besieged Palestinians. Trump also sees benefit in stirring up resentment in Democratic strongholds in Michigan and Minnesota, where Biden’s reluctance to apply heavy pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might hurt the Harris-Walz ticket.
All of which is to be expected from Trump and his ilk, who seek power through the exploitation of cleavages between Americans.
Don’t fall for it. Don’t let the perfect be enemy of the good by diving down ideological rabbit holes. And don’t let social and cultural differences triumph over alliances around values that work for the common good.
Such alliances get all of us closer to that dream of an America filled with freedom, opportunity and justice.
Elections, after and above all, matter.