Joe Biden must learn how to win ugly

Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the race for the Virginia governorship is a story as old as the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yet it isn’t specifically a Virginia story, a Terry McAuliffe story, or even a Joe Biden story. It’s a story about the Democrats and their habitual naivety when it comes to playing politics in ways ugly enough to win.

There’ll be a lot of talk now about the “Biden slump” and some of that is well deserved. Biden keeps playing to his weaknesses, ignoring his strengths (he needs fitting with a shock collar to ensure he isn’t allowed to sit with his eyes closed when the cameras are on him). When the President went in front of the nation last Thursday to announce the infrastructure bill, he chose to do it early in the day when most Americans would have been at work. He also compounded the error by announcing a bill that wasn’t entirely nailed down, handing even more power to the two recalcitrant “Democrats”, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who increasingly look like sleeper agents working on behalf of the GOP. The result is an administration whose wins are tainted by doubt and failure. Donald Trump would have gone live at primetime backed by a line of leggy Las Vegas dancers. He knew how to sell, even when he had nothing to sell. He spent four years making stalemate look like a succession of resounding victories. Biden needs to take a page out of the Populist Playbook and try to be popular.

As it is, Virginia should never have gone red. A month out from election day, Terry McAuliffe had clear daylight between himself and his challenger, Glenn Youngkin. All he needed to do was play a safe, steady endgame and avoid the Republicans’ hot button topics, especially around “critical race theory” in Virginia schools.

Except he didn’t. Instead, he gifted victory to his opponent. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he replied in precisely the kind of gaff that Democrats historically tend to make.

It’s an example where too much honesty doesn’t serve the Democrats’ cause. He might have been right to support teachers and their profession but it’s a bad strategy if you’re trying to convince an electorate you’re against government intrusion into their lives. He should have said: “If students are indeed being taught history in a way counterproductive to their education, then I will certainly look into it and ensure it never happens so long as I’m your governor. Virginia children need to be taught history in a way that is consistent with the values of this great nation.” He could have then draped himself in the American flag, which certainly wouldn’t have hurt his chances. Leaving the blunt pragmatics until after he’s won office would certainly have negated the danger. Instead, he seemed to express support for schools teaching anything and, in this case, allowed his opponent to accuse him of wanting to indoctrinate them with a poison that is almost exclusively the product of fevered Republican imaginations rather than any mainstream US educational system.

And that is the lesson the blue team needs to take away from this defeat. Unless the Democrats can come up with a strategy to negate Republican talking points, hammered home 24/7 on cable news networks until they begin to resemble facts, they might as well prepare packing up in the White House, as well as in governors’ residences and Senate and House offices.  

Republicans know how to win ugly, and so it proved. “Critical Race Theory” is this year’s “Defund the Police”. Next year it might be “Gender critical possums are taking over the government”. It really doesn’t matter what crazy argument Republicans make if the Democrats do nothing to counter it with effective messaging. Neither CRT nor DTP should have ever gained traction among voters, most of whom couldn’t even tell you what they really mean. Yet that is precisely the Democrats’ problem. They allow the other side to define the space.

This is what is happening at the moment in Texas where Governor Greg Abbott has asked the state’s school boards to ensure that students aren’t exposed to pornographic literature in school libraries. The Democrats should tear into the lie, stating the obvious: that pornography isn’t available in school libraries and that this is a true expression of government overreach by a party that is always seeking to be censorious. Rather than laughing it off as “silly” or too contemptible to debate, they should lean into what the next Trumpian Republican government would look like. Democrats need to be reminding voters what is at stake if Republicans take the House in the midterms and, as seems increasingly likely, the White House in 2024.

They need to be less passive and less certain of their righteousness. They need to be less… Democrat.