“When they go low, we kick them.”
—Eric Holder, Attorney General under President Barack Obama
Before the 21st century, there was no concept of red states or blue states. Many states that we would now firmly consider layups for either party frequently voted for the other, including my home state of Louisiana, which voted once for Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1976 and twice for Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
Nowadays, in our era of gerrymandering and heightened political polarization, a handful of “purple” states bear the responsibility of deciding our next commander-in-chief every four years. While this intensified competition has emboldened conservatives to pursue increasingly radical policies, both fiscal and social, it has had an opposite, chilling effect on the policy of the Democrats. While Republicans consistently push policy to the right, Democrats are fixed at the increasingly conservative center, often defanging progressive policy and preventing the implementation of widely popular social and economic programs.
One of those policies is progressive immigration reform. Republicans have whipped many voters into a frenzy about a so-called crisis on the border to the point that it is a top election issue in 2024. A recent poll by Axiom even suggests that 51% of Americans support mass deportations of undocumented migrants. Compare this to a poll conducted in 2021 (from the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, no less) that claimed 55% of Americans supported opening pathways to citizenship for undocumented migrants, while only 24% supported the deportation of all undocumented migrants.
Research has proven time and time again that immigrants are a net benefit to the economy, increasing local wages and rarely impacting the job market for U.S. citizens. Statistics also show that they commit fewer crimes on average than American citizens, and they bolster our aging labor force. Yet, Democrats have pandered to the right wing instead of dismantling GOP fear mongering — President Joe Biden used executive authority to implement an asylum ban in June, and it is nearly identical to a Trump-era executive order that Biden struck down shortly after taking office.
This was a fundamental political miscalculation. If reducing immigration is a top issue for someone, they will not be reasonably swayed by the Democrats’ comparably less aggressive policy proposals and will instead opt for the party whose political platform is centered around combating immigration.
The correct political strategy for the Democrats is to redirect voters and dismantle the incorrect and, frankly, xenophobic assumptions at the core of the immigration panic. The party’s tendency toward reactionary politics — changing course to suit the political appetites of voters who have been fed unchallenged propaganda from the GOP — is not a winning strategy. “When they go low, we go slightly above them,” will not convince voters.
The Democrats’ insistence on maintaining the long-dead vestiges of American political civility are similarly misguided.
In March 2016, when Republicans defied legislative precedent and refused to undergo the hearing process for President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland until after the results of the 2016 election, Democrats were rightly miffed. But at the Democratic National Convention in July of the same year, First Lady Michelle Obama coined the phrase that would define Democratic rhetorical strategy for nearly a decade: “When they go low, we go high.”
While Democrats clung to the moral high ground, Republicans drummed up the fringes. Donald Trump, who was then the presidential nominee for the Republicans, appealed to xenophobia and sheltered and downplayed overt white supremacy, such as his response to the Charlottesville Riot in 2017: This essentially served to bring far-right talking points and politics into the conservative mainstream.
Simultaneously, Trump spoke to those who were disenfranchised by the very real negative economic effects of neoliberal governance, vowing (however insincerely) to return American manufacturing jobs from overseas and champion the working man. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president in 2016, called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables,” bringing an air of condescension and moral superiority to her campaign that alienated many voters and contributed to her historic loss to Trump that year.
The moral high ground fell out from under the Democrats, and the long-term result was President Trump’s successful appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, to the Supreme Court less than a week before the 2020 presidential election that he would lose to President Joe Biden. The Democrats had been played twice, and the result was a 6-3 conservative majority in the highest court in the country.
Then the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade, and with it all federal abortion protections. Then, in June, the court made the president immune to any criminal liability for “official acts” taken in office. So much for taking the high road.
The result of the Democratic Party’s holier-than-thou rhetorical approach was the enabling of a potent and destructive moral hazard for its chief opponent. A moral hazard is an economics term describing a situation in which a given actor is incentivized to engage in increasingly risky behavior because they are protected from bearing the full weight of the consequences. An example of this is bailing out a failing bank without placing any new regulations to discourage the practices that tanked them in the first place. The bank would thus be incentivized to resume its risk-taking, because it knows that if it lost out again, it would most likely be bailed out once more.
The Republicans operate under political realism. They know that if moral superiority is the strongest rebuke their opponents can muster, they can undertake almost any political endeavor they so choose, regardless of how fringe or unpopular it is with the American public. As a result, Republican rhetoric has become increasingly radical. Democratic or liberal-leaning voters, on the other hand, are disincentivized to vote because they have little confidence that their party will actually fight against conservative policies.
This is the same electoral pitfall inherent in the philosophy of “lesser-of-two-evils” voting. While it is undoubtedly true that Biden won the 2020 election because the threat of another Trump presidency emboldened many to hit the ballot box (some for the first time), Americans tend to have the political memory of a goldfish, and Trump’s incumbent advantage in 2020 was tainted by his somewhat lackluster response to a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic.
Make no mistake, Donald Trump has a strong chance of taking office again in November, and polls from both before and after Joe Biden dropped out of the race reflect the fact that Democrats cannot run on negative enthusiasm alone. While the new Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, is polling 2.9 percentage points ahead of Trump, the Democrats’ historic defeat in 2016 proved that polls are not always reflective of an election’s outcome.
Biden’s old rhetoric about Trump posing an existential threat to democracy, while no doubt true, fell flat against voters’ concerns with their immediate circumstances and problems under Biden’s leadership. This served to make Donald Trump and his Project 2025 ideologues more appealing to undecided voters, contributing to the political pressure for Biden to step down.
Thankfully, it seems Harris understands this rhetorical pitfall very well. In a fresh breath of realpolitik, the Harris campaign has reversed course from Biden’s and adopted an entirely different strategy to combating Trump in the upcoming election, opting to call him and his allies “creepy” and “weird.” Her selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the office of vice president reflects her dedication to this new modus operandi, as he was the first to popularize the insults.
Such insults evoke in-group-out-group calculations and feelings like disgust among voters. In rhetorical terms, Harris has abandoned the ethos-minded moral grandstanding of her political predecessors in favor of a more colloquial and below-the-belt “pathos” strategy.
It seems to be working. Harris’s lead over Trump is also partially due to the Heritage Foundation’s draconian and Christian nationalist Project 2025 proposal (many framers of which have top positions in the Trump campaign). If successful, it would pose a legitimate threat to American democracy. In that vein, Democrats have woken up to the fact that the days of civility in politics are over. We live in a more polarized country than we did 20 years ago, and the right wing’s fringe policy positions cannot be casually dismissed with haughty rhetoric and moral superiority.
The Republicans are no strangers to underhanded rhetorical tactics. From asserting President Obama was a Kenyan citizen, to claiming Harris is not a Black woman, Republicans’ odd and offensive claims over the years have no doubt earned them the moniker of “strange.” I, for one, am excited to see Democrats return the low blows directly, but in a comedic way: At the Democratic National Convention, Walz made a quick reference to the online rumor that the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, performed sexual acts on a couch. “And I got to tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz said.
Just as a jury cannot unhear a lawyer’s retracted statements in court, an unfortunate political rumor — no matter how dubious — can stick in the minds of voters like glue. It should be noted, however, that the Democrats have enough tact to refrain from seriously endorsing blatantly false and uncouth rumors about their opponents, a hallmark of Republican rhetoric. You will not see Walz asserting the veracity of the couch debacle on CNN: That would ruin the joke.
Now that Democrats are finally revising their rhetorical approach, we can only hope they offer a compelling progressive policy platform to distinguish themselves from the Republicans. Civility is overrated, and there is too much on the line to risk politeness.
Hal Fox is a student at the University of Mississippi studying international relations and is the managing editor of The Daily Mississippian.
