Fighting Authoritarianism: A Democratic Imperative

Donald Trump recently asserted that “a lot” of Americans want a dictator and declared that as president, he (along with the police) has the right to do “anything I want to do.” He is deploying armed soldiers in blue cities, using flimsy “emergency” excuses. He is likely directing the IRS and the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. He is trying to take control of the Federal Reserve and manipulate core economic statistics to hide the damage he is causing with his unilaterally and legally contested tariffs. He targets judges who oppose him and shakes down public and private institutions. His Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, ranted that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.” This is the backdrop for a battle among Democrats and affiliated groups about fighting authoritarianism as the party’s approval hit new all-time lows.

While many Democrats in Congress have ample courage and fiery messaging, the leadership—especially House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer—has been lackluster. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker have inspired Democrats with trolling attacks and fierce resistance in recent weeks. In Texas, statehouse Democrats showed courage against the GOP majority’s shameless midterm redistricting power play, and the Democratic National Committee under Chair Ken Martin is showing a far stronger spine than it was early in the year. (I’m a DNC member and supported Martin’s bid to be chair.)

Unfortunately, an influential cadre of consulting firms is diluting the Democratic message when it needs to be more potent. These firms have considerable clout in center-left circles and promote a political fallacy that imperils not just elections but the American experiment itself.

Recent cases include memos from an influential consulting firm, Blue Rose Research, which has the ear of House and Senate Democratic leaders and was profoundly influential in the efforts of Future Forward, the widely criticized SuperPAC operating on behalf of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. Blue Rose is a strategy and consulting firm headed by David Shor, a Barack Obama campaign alum and one of the most prominent advocates of “popularism,” a philosophy that urges candidates to calibrate their messaging to whatever is most popular in tested messages. Shor and other popularists usually use quantitative survey methods to attempt to discover what is most popular.

The leaked Blue Rose memo states that Democrats should avoid discussing Trump’s authoritarian actions and dismiss them as “distractions” and “stunts.” Instead, the party should refocus on “kitchen table issues” that resonate with voters. Unfortunately, Democratic leaders are listening. In August, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Trump’s vow to place armed soldiers on Chicago streets against the governor’s wishes an “effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction.”

Blue Rose’s memo is based on assumptions and even more flawed data from poorly written questionnaires that are often self-contradictory and fail basic empirical principles. Even if you believe that quantitative survey methods can replicate real-world public opinion, it should cause deep concern when your best-performing and worst-performing messages are nearly identical.

More importantly, this methodology elides how voters experience political messaging in the real world. Full disclosure: my work is in qualitative research and focus groups, which also have methodological challenges but tend to replicate the opinion environment better than quantitative surveys. I typically do not work for political clients. My interest here is purely in improving Democratic messaging and winning elections. Also, the point is less about attacking Shor and Blue Rose specifically but rather about questioning the credibility of quant-based popularism.

Even if you could prove superior persuasion effects from a message that unprecedented fascism is merely a distraction from cost-of-living increases, there is no reason to believe voters will listen. In the attention economy, only messages noticed by the lower-information and social-media-attuned voters on which elections depend really matter. And those messages need to excite. Even if you could prove that boring messages resonate better, the problem is that voters usually won’t even see them.

Blue Rose’s flawed methodology also assumes that the words of leaders can’t alter issue salience and popularity. But experience belies such complacency. Trump began the year as prohibitively popular on many issues, including immigration. Now polls show he is deeply underwater, primarily due to pushback. The task before leaders is to use emotional messaging to change public opinion, not to follow it. Minimizing Trump’s shattering of Democratic norms as mere distractions may represent where voters are now, but it does not move them to where they could be. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not dismiss the Nazi threat as a mere distraction from unemployment.

Even if Blue Rose’s approaches had marginally improved electoral effectiveness outside of artificial quantitative survey environments broadly, it would be dangerous for Democrats to embrace them. That is because Trump’s authoritarianism affects voting itself. Without an all-of-society resistance between now and the crucial 2026 midterm elections, the president seems sure to use federal power to intimidate, disrupt, or cancel elections where he can. (If this seems like hyperbole, such a prospect is no more far-fetched than the scenario of a mob storming the U.S. Capitol and threatening the life of the Vice-President to stop electoral certification would have seemed on January 5, 2021.) Minimizing Trump’s imperial ambitions imperils free and fair elections.

All too often, left-leaning voters upset at the Democratic Party assume that donors are directing it to offer a milquetoast response to Republican and corporate power. But the party’s backfooted stances often happen when the House and Senate leadership listen to consultants with wrongheaded notions about how to win.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at this week’s DNC Meeting in Minneapolis, disagreements among Democrats about strategy pale compared to Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. This is true. But the corollary is that all Democrats, especially those in leadership, must treat the presidential threat as a clear and present danger and communicate that alarm to the American public. Anything less is political malpractice.

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