Why Exactly Do They Hate Democrats
The myth of "gobbledygook"
I get the objections to Democrats like Clinton, Biden and Harris from the left -- the insistence that they are basically corporate centrists who spout progressive rhetoric but would never really challenge the status quo of deep income inequality that is at the root of American decline. (I’m simplifying, but that’s the basic thrust.) Also, they accuse them of supporting foreign policy that remains fundamentally imperialist, and in the case of Gaza, genocidal.
What I don’t get is the recoil from the right that led so many Trump voters to conclude that they had little choice but to vote for Trump yet again. Over and over, you hear his statements like: “I didn’t like Trump, but I couldn’t vote for a Democrat, so I chose the lesser of two evils.”
Evil? What is it, exactly, they hate so much? Biden passed a ton of really good, useful legislation - extending Obamacare subsidies, the child tax credit, (that unfortunately had a time limit), and giant spending on badly needed new infrastructure-- including extensive investment on fighting climate change. No ruinous tariffs, and he got us out of Afghanistan (badly, but did American’s really care about the plight of Afghans?) True, sloppy immigration policy, but compared to turning ICE into the Gestapo, a humane dream.
He also delivered an overall thriving economy and very low unemployment. True inflation became a problem because of the effects on the supply chain of the epidemic, but was going down. Did they really forget living through Covid, and how much better Biden handled that than Trump? Harris should have sailed through in a landslide, just by promising more of the same.
And yet Republicans have managed to convince 40+ percent of the country that Democrats only want to tax you more and spend it all on on foreign aid, PBS, and welfare spending on the undocumented. Twenty million Americans were covered by Obamacare, which is finally popular, but no connection seems to be made with this being solely a creation of Democrats. Jesus, it has Obama’s name on it!
Every pundit chastises the Dems for bad messaging, warning them that can’t just attack Trump, they have to tell the voters what they are for, and in doing so, not to fixate on policies that make the eyes glaze over. Even Obama scolds Democratic candidates not to speak “gobbledy-gook.” I watch MSNOW almost constantly. Please name the politician who does that. Booker? Warren? Whitmer? Buttigieg? Talarico? Newson? Sanders? Crow? Murphy? (I could go on.) Who hasn’t got that simple-speak memo? Tell me. I contend that the goobledy-gook-speaking Dem politico is an urban legend dating from the days of Dukakis, but is no longer true for many years.
Trump had to get us into a ruinous war for millions of voters to “consider” voting for Democrats, but many, clearly grudgingly. Polled as a party, the Democrats are just as unpopular as the Republicans. What actual Democratic policies did they find so objectionable? Not giving tax cuts to billionaires and lowering the defecit? A rural health clinic within a half-an-hour’s drive? Aid to Ukraine? FEMA working? Reduction of insulin cost? Expansion of Medicare benefits? No government shutdowns? A well-functioning Social Security and IRS? No, they think that decent government they benefit from just happens magically – they don’t really think this their tax dollars at work.
The problem is good government is invisible, and its value only recognized when it is suddenly eviscerated. It is very, very hard to make sexy while it is working.
And if it weren’t for the filibuster, and Joe Manchin blocking its removal, we could have restored full voting rights, and passed other really transformative legislation. But the Democrats get no credit for that, because most Americans still could not tell you what the filibuster is if you put a gun to their head.
Again, I get what the left doesn’t like – funding and arming a genocide will be a bloody asterisk on both Biden, and, to a lesser extent, Harris, and I will never forgive or forget that. But who on the right objected to Israel’s bloody savagery? Three years in, some murmurs, finally, but most red-state voters still can’t find Gaza on a map, and only object to foreign wars if Americans are directly involved. Israel could never have murdered several hundred thousand Gazans without American taxpayer dollars, but that is down on the list of why they hate Democrats.
There’s a perception that foreign aid, writ large, accounts for a huge portion of American spending, when it’s a small fraction, and pre-Musk, was saving millions of lives. All foreign “aid” is not alike – but red voters throw it all in one big bucket, and never object to ridiculously high defense spending that is increased every single year. I don’t know how Democrats can explain all that without being accused of speaking gobbledy-gook.
Yes, it can’t hurt to find better ways for the Democrats to message. But the huge swing likely in the midterms is not going to be due to Democratic politicians finding a smarter way to communicate, it will be due largely to the implosion of Trump, and the Vichy Republicans who remain in his thrall. It will be due to the amount of damage they will continue to inflict that is so grievous, it almost seems intentionally designed to wake up red America and finally convince them that Trump is as toxic to the country as we have been telling them he is since 2015.
MCO 2026