Here’s a simple but inarguable point: Trump’s decision to pardon (and/or commute release of) all the January 6th insurrectionists is deeply unpopular. Your best evidence for that is the responses of Republicans who are asked to react to or justify it. They’re doing the most practical thing: dodge the questions and wait for those questions to subside. Wait for it to become old news, something that happened in the past. Democrats’ job is to prolong the period of questions for as long as possible. There are many ways to do it, as I explained yesterday. The job of a political opposition is to spend every day illustrating for the public what’s bad about the current government being in power. That’s not tawdry or institutionally selfish or unhelpful. It’s a functional, essential feature of our political system. To the extent you’re not able to do that, the folks in power must be doing a fairly good job. And that’s a good thing to know, even if it’s an unpleasant reality for the opposition. It’s quite literally what you’re supposed to do for the broader framework of government to function.
A second key point is that it’s not just one thing. Some people see the status of the January 6th insurrectionists and domestic terrorists as umbilically connected to Democrats’ focus on democracy and the rule of law under Joe Biden and in the 2024 election. Some wrongly see the verdict of the election as being that that didn’t matter. Nobody cares. That’s a misunderstanding of what happened. But the bigger point is that it’s not all one thing. It’s not cost of living versus rule of law or health care coverage or abortion rights or immigration or half a dozen other things. It’s all of it. People live in a complex world. All of these things touch us at one point or another. Despite those lists of top issues, people don’t live in silos where it’s one thing or another. Importantly, credibility in one area bleeds into all the others. If you see Donald Trump doing something and get the impression that he has bad priorities and bad values, that bleeds into every other issue. And vice versa.
The other part of the equation is embracing what we don’t know. You may individually have strong beliefs about each of those issue areas I mentioned above. But that doesn’t mean you know which of those will resonate with the public most over the next two years — which, in political science-speak, will be most “salient” to voters. So you do them all and you see. It’s natural that people who contest elections (and all the other people who live politics, either directly or vicariously) think that how things transpire is related to which strategies or slogans or ads each side runs. But that’s not really how things work. No one is really controlling the processes of political change like that. It’s more like an ocean everyone is navigating — with tides and swells and strong winds and storms that may hurt or help. No one seriously looks back on the 1976, ’78 and ’80 elections or the 2004, ’06 and ’08 elections and thinks, wow, Republican and then later Democratic strategists really got super smart for a while! Part of this is just the agony of living in history. We don’t know what deeper trends we are living amidst that only later observers will understand. What it means more practically is that we have to be open to new information, seeing what works and what doesn’t, being adaptive. Political communication is actually a case where the analog of the wisdom of markets applies. Let a hundred flowers bloom, especially early in a campaign cycle. A single, centralized point of communication and idea work is unlikely to arrive at just the right angle. Oppose everything that is worth opposing and then see how things shake out.