January 6 Isn’t an Electoral Strategy
A guest post from Discourse Blog's Paul Blest; plus, a preview of my talk with Osita Nwanevu this afternoon on Callin
Today marks one year from the January 6 riot, where a right-wing mob tried to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election and officially naming Joe Biden as president.
Since that event, the right has made a concerted effort to take over democratic institutions at the state and local level around the country, part of what appears to be a plan to seat the next president no matter what the voters say.
As Osita Nwanevu wrote at The New York Times on Tuesday, those same democratic institutions under threat of right-wing takeover today already shoulder a lot of the blame for what happened last year:
The riot was an attack on our institutions, and of course, inflammatory conservative rhetoric and social media bear some of the blame. But our institutions also helped produce that violent outburst by building a sense of entitlement to power within America’s conservative minority.
The structural advantages that conservatives enjoy in our electoral system are well known. Twice already this young century, the Republican Party has won the Electoral College and thus the presidency while losing the popular vote. Republicans in the Senate haven’t represented a majority of Americans since the 1990s, yet they’ve controlled the chamber for roughly half of the past 20 years. In 2012 the party kept control of the House even though Democrats won more votes.
[…]
With these structural advantages in place, it’s not especially difficult to see how the right came to view dramatic political losses, when they do occur, as suspect.
I’ll talk to Osita this afternoon at 4pm EST on my Callin show. Please join us live if you can, or catch the show on replay.
In the meantime, below you’ll find a guest post from Discourse Blog’s Paul Blest on the politics of 1/6—and how Democrats are overplaying the event to their own political detriment.
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This piece originally appeared on Discourse Blog, a collectively owned news and culture site which, like The Flashpoint, is a member of the Discontents media collective. Discourse Blog is offering Flashpoint readers a special 25 percent discount off all annual subscriptions; click here to claim yours.
by Paul Blest
In 1873, Alexander Hamilton Stephens was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in Georgia. A year later, Stephens’ party took back the House of Representatives in one of the first midterm waves in U.S. history. In all, it took less than a decade from the end of the Civil War for the party of “states’ rights” to win back power and install the former vice president of the Confederacy as chair of a House committee.
What this episode in our history shows—aside from the fact that Reconstruction should have lasted longer, much longer—is that voters have extremely short memories. Roughly three-quarters of a million people died during the Civil War. Nine years later, all it took was an economic panic and an explosive bribery scandal for the party that had led the union through its most tumultuous period to lose power to the party which had sought to end that union. (Its means of victory were not entirely peaceful, either.)
January 6, 2021, could have been much, much worse than it was, and it could still be the predecessor to something worse. But it was not the Civil War; contrary to the claims of Hill reporters and Lincoln Project bloviators, it wasn’t even 9/11. And a year after Trump supporters rioted the Capitol and temporarily delayed Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, it currently looks as though voters in the midterm elections coming up this year really don’t care.
A Morning Consult poll released Sunday, for example, found that while nearly 60 percent of voters fault Donald Trump for the attack and nearly half blame congressional Republicans, voter sentiment towards the Republican Party itself is actually better than it was right before January 6. The Republicans would likely be in a good position to take back the House of Representatives even without gerrymandering and their efforts to make it harder to vote, but having used the past year to further cement their power, the GOP is the odds-on favorite right now.
This doesn’t mean the Democrats should entirely ditch the January 6 committee, although so far, it’s been utterly ineffective in changing anyone’s mind about what happened that day, or doing anything except making martyrs of former Trump officials and associates who tried to help him overturn the election results on bogus fraud charges that no one in their right mind actually believed.
There’s an ongoing debate within the party on how and when the Democrats should use January 6 as part of their campaign strategy, as CNN reported Sunday. “I just disagree with this notion that we shouldn’t talk about this and that we shouldn’t talk about what is at stake here and that this isn’t important to people in their everyday lives,” Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who comforted Rep. Susan Wild as the riot was ongoing, told CNN. “It would be a massive mistake for us to discount this.”
But again: as traumatic as January 6 may have been, when push comes to shove, it’s not what people are voting on. As CNN pointed out, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring attempted to tie his opponent to the Capitol riot by linking him to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helped fund and organize the Save America rally on the Ellipse before Trump supporters marched to the Capitol. Herring lost.
January 6 cannot be the Democrats’ primary campaign theme this year, and it cannot be a fallback option if the Democrats don’t pass any of Biden’s agenda, if the child tax credit permanently dies and student loans are resumed, and if the Biden administration doesn’t end the pandemic as we know it or at least get a better handle on it. If the Democrats want to put themselves in the best possible position to win the election and ensure whatever it is we have left of democracy survives for a few more years, they’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way—talking to voters about the ways in which Democratic control has made and will continue to make their lives better. But before they talk about it, they have to have something to show.
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