Hammering home the key point: 2018 was a huge victory for center-left Democrats, not for Squaddies

Frank Bruni

If Trump has his way, this campaign will be a bogus referendum on a bastard definition of patriotism. 

It will be a race-obsessed and racist jubilee. 

Don’t play along.

But, you say, his racism must be called out. 

A demagogue must be branded as such. 

Not to condemn incipient fascism is to play midwife to the real thing.

That’s a virtuous take, but is there really any reason to believe that it’s the recipe for Trump’s demise?

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. 

Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. 

Check out the Times, the Guardian, and every Dem site in the known universe.

They're doing it again.

Race-baiting the GOP, 24/7.

Again.

How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump

Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. 

That’s the 2018 midterms.

It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. 

More important, their victories had zilch to do with why or how Democrats regained control of Congress and have dubious relevance to how Democrats can do the same with the White House in 2020. 

The House members they replaced were Democrats, not Republicans, so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.

Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. 

Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. 

None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They touted more restrained agendas. 

And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. 

They knew they didn’t need to. 

For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.

Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. 

Both lost. 

While first-time candidates endorsed by the progressive groups Justice Democrats or Our Revolution certainly won House elections last year, not one flipped a seat. 

The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.

. . . .

 Polling has shown that when voters are told that Medicare for all would mean an end to private insurance or an increase in taxes, support for it drops below 40 percent.

And according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey published a few days ago, 51 percent of voters support the sweeping raids by ICE that the president trumpets, while just 35 percent oppose them. 

That suggests that anything that smacks of open borders — which is how President Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, described Democratic presidential candidates’ positions in a recent op-ed essay in The Washington Post — puts those candidates at odds with public opinion.

. . . .

Nancy Pelosi knows this. 

It’s why she hasn’t been talking up the Green New Deal, single-payer insurance or impeachment, and the suggestion that this makes her some squishy centrist pushover — some musty relic from a timid era — is bunk. 

She has her eyes on the most meaningful prize, one she pursued successfully in the midterms: Democratic victory. 

And she can see that in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published a little over a week ago, just 21 percent of registered voters said that there was enough evidence for Congress to begin impeachment hearings.

. . . .

I wonder what would happen if the Democratic nominee simply refused to talk about Trump. 

No responding to whatever stupid nickname he comes up with. 

No sweeping denunciation of some deed of his that any sensible American already knows is wrong. 

Just the articulation of better solutions to America’s problems. 

Trump would go mad with the lack of attention. 

And maybe then, thank heaven, he’d go away.