We’re Not Going Back (to 2020)

Patriotism, Realistic Optimism, and Grace.

Well, that was awesome.

There are two levels to victory: the fight within the party and the fight against The Former Guy.

Coming out of the convention, we are winning both of those fights.

But both are precarious:

• Democratic presidential nominee Kamala (who Is Moderate) now has a narrow lead in the presidential forecasts (Nate Silver has Harris at 53% likely to win the electoral college). And Harris is moving to the center, uniting her party while executing a centrist pivot. Trump is stewing, bringing back the most disastrous operatives in the GOP and dividing his party. Only half of Trump’s cabinet endorsed him for a second term. Meanwhile, Harris had a Republican on stage every night of the DNC. But 53% is still coin toss-ish.

• The DNC stage - and the soul of the party - was dominated by our team: the Big Tent Democrats, the pragmatists, the winners, those practicing democracy instead of just talking about it, our Never Trump compatriots, the localizers, The Depolarizers were the overwhelming force in Chicago. It wasn’t just what was said: the patriotism, all the touting of the Bipartisan Border Security Bill, the Republican validators on stage, etc. But rather, it’s what was not said: no mention of student debt cancellation, climate pessimism, or decriminalizing the border.

We are Not Going Back to 2020’s disastrous primary rhetoric.

Kamala is moderate. And Kamala being moderate is how we win both fights.

Team Normal

I’m not a selfie guy or a Wear Noticeable Shirts guy. But en route to O’Hare airport, I just had to wear my Team Normal shirt. This gear is from the fantastic center-left entrepreneurs at Carolina Forward (Lauren and I noted in our Democracy journal piece on a new generation of centrists who are learning from the political extremes).

Well, I’ve never gotten so many approving looks from strangers. And don’t think I’ve ever noticed being surreptitiously photographed before.

The first TSA agent I was stopped by at the airport pointed at the shirt and said, of all things, “How great was Geoff Duncan?” (Watch the former GOP LG from Georgia here)

Team Normal? People GET IT immediately.

Let us know: Should we get some more Team Normal gear going?

What We Mean By Normal

There has been some grumbling over calling today’s GOP “weird,” which we’ll get to later this month. But as the political scientists

David Broockman

and

Josh Kalla

recently wrote in Slow Boring, convincing voters that Harris is normal is better than just calling Trump weird.

And normal can be inspiring, as Joe Klein wrote this morning:

There is an assumption to the slogan “We’re not going back.” It is an assumption that has eluded the Democratic Party in an era dominated by various identity and interest groups, when grievance conveyed credibility and pessimism about America prevailed. The startling, improbable assumption is this: We have made progress. We have moved past the ethnic cliches and racial obsessions of old. We are victors not victims. And the only place in the world where this could happen was in the United States of America. We have experienced a human rights miracle in the past 60 years. That’s why we love our country. That’s why we’re patriots. That’s why we’re so damn joyous.

It was there, staring us in the face all week at the Democratic convention…but it came home for me when Pete Buttigieg—and boy, is he good—talked about the fraught normality of him and his husband, Chasten, trying to feed the three-year old twins mac and cheese with the phone ringing and all hell breaking loose. The sheer everyday normality of that would have been impossible a generation ago. Their marriage is quotidian now. In the grand sweep of human history, there has never been a movement for tolerance and dignity that achieved its goals so quickly— and its goal was only that: normality.

Blueprint has some great polling showing the value of positive messaging on Harris, showing her moderate credentials.

Super Bowl Rule

We’ve learned a lot from

Matthew Yglesias

, including this lesson: what Democrats say in advertising they have to pay for (effective in winning over voters) can be very different from what they say online and everywhere else (often too far left). And we need to close that gap (read the full Yglesias AM piece here):

I’m always urging Democrats to pay more attention to the ads they run, since ads can be rigorously tested and the ad-testers aren’t under the same social and professional pressure to cook the books as the major pollsters. This was a convention that (mostly) seemed to take that to heart. Democrats on the stage talked like Democratic Party campaign ads rather than like people who’ve had their minds poisoned by push polls from advocacy groups.

We can call this the Super Bowl Ad Rule - if you’re paying a ton for people to see something, you’ll be very deliberate and disciplined in the message. Democrats must do that more in “free media,” like social media, rallies, and television interviews.

Juxtaposing the convention’s effectiveness with other Democratic messaging exposes just how far we’ve fallen short in winning elections (aka “protecting democracy”). Here’s Yglesias again on that tension coming out of the DNC:

Democrats draped themselves in the flag, in the actually existing nature of the American people, and in mainstream values. It was great.

So why mixed feelings? Mostly because I want Democrats to be like this all the time. And because you can see clearly at the convention that those in charge absolutely do know how to be good when they want to. There are furious arguments about political strategy happening all the time. But with the pressure on, the same people who sometimes claim to believe that curbing LNG exports is the key to engaging youth voters are, in fact, perfectly capable of delivering a genuinely appealing message. Why not act consistently on this knowledge? Maybe in the Kamala Harris Era they will!

That’s our job.

(More) Democrats Should Try Harder To Win Elections

As we wrote in Democrats Should Try Harder To Win Elections - and as Lauren is breaking down on The Depolarizers podcast - there’s a new generation of energetic centrists who know which way to pivot. Here’s Yglesias again on what’s worked over the last month:

the vibes haven’t won swing voters over to a progressive message — the vibes have won progressives over to pride in the Democratic Party (which, after all, is the more progressive party), allowing the party to focus its attention on trying to assuage the concerns of swing voters. We’ve written about this before at Slow Boring, but Democrats’ leftward drift after 2012 was largely a psyop staged by left-wing advocacy groups who convinced the party that left-wing policy stances were key to mobilizing young and nonwhite voters. What happened since Harris took over is precisely that she regained ground Biden had lost with young and nonwhite voters based on her better vibes, while doing none of the leftist messaging stuff. That’s great!

The trick of trying to pursue a moderate course of action on any subject is that if you don’t actively occupy the discourse space, attention naturally flies to extremes.

The attention is shifting. They’re noticing Jared Golden (NBC News profile last week: “He’s not a lone wolf. He’s ahead of the pack.”). They’re noticing Rebecca Cooke (new interview: She's a waitress. He's an insurrectionist. She may take his seat in Congress).

And they’re noticing because they’re out there, loud and proud in their localizing, depolarizing authenticity. You can support them on our Win The Middle slate here.

Not 2020 Anymore

Klein again:

But, I suspect I’ve buried the lede: The Democrats are not a party of woe-is-me victims anymore. They are not the party of dilettante leftist academics—even Bernie Sanders, in his ascetic, bloviational speech, didn’t demand Medicare for All, but settled for eyeglasses and hearing aids for the elderly. The Democrats shucked the left this week. They became the party of optimists and strivers, of blended marriages and mixed marriages, of the vast human complications of the 21st century. They are the party of frozen eggs and IVF, and the private dread of praying that scientific procedures will produce desperately desired babies. They are also the party of grieving parents, whose children were killed by automatic weapons.

Most of all, they are the party—as presented this week—of neighbors. And the neighbors, as often as not in 21st century suburbia, are people whose skin color may be different, but who can gossip together about this teacher or that in their kids’ middle school, and who can root together for the Mets or Mankato East.

As one leftist on Twitter noted:

A harsh example, but they know: it’s not 2020 anymore. It’s also not 2020 because the Squad isn’t growing - it’s rapidly contracting. It’s not 2020 because progressives are losing open seat races to normie Democrats. It’s not 2020 because Harris realizes that winning the middle is how we mobilize our base. Our actual base, the ones in that arena, the ones who voted Biden in the 2020 primary, who donate $5 to Harris, aren’t the ones who sit outside of the DNC. The people sitting outside of the DNC can’t be our base: you can’t call it a base if they are constantly threatening to leave you.

It’s not 2020 anymore. Our actual base - the people who want Democrats to win - are in the driver’s seat. The polarizers can get in and win, or be left behind. But Kamala Harris is not bending to those who derailed 2020.

There’s a bright future for Team Normal. Support the team captains on our Win The Middle slate here. And let us know about the merch.