Divide & Conquer ... the GOP
Divide & Conquer ... the GOP
Democrats must revolutionize their election mobilization strategies ... ASAP. One way to do that: drive wedges between elements of the Republican Party and force them to talk policy
G.S. Potter, PhD | Senior Editor
The Democrats must revolutionize their election mobilization strategies. They must abandon the lazy politics of broad national messaging which ignores the real work of hyper-localized mobilizing. They also need to pour their funding and attention into low income wards of color in ways that connect voters to both services and ballot boxes simultaneously. They can’t win unless they do both of the above.
But there is another strategy that the Democrats need to apply if they want to ensure they walk away with both the House and the Senate still in their control by November (along with a few Governor, state legislative and Secretary of State races, too): they must divide and conquer the Republicans.
Reverse the Wedge-Driving Game
Republicans have spent vast monetary amounts that some nations will never accumulate driving wedges between coalitions on the left. Black vs. White. Citizen vs. Immigrant. Trans vs. CIS. Karen vs. The Manager. It’s time for Democrats to do the same.
To be clear, though: the last thing Democrats should try to divide is the mythical unicorn Conservatives who still love America from the white nationalist separatists who control the party to siphon off White voters. Instead, they need to pour salt into the wounds of the fractures that exist between the most MAGA of Republicans. And they need to attack with full force during the primaries.
There are a few reasons Democrats should pursue a divide and conquer strategy moving into the midterms. First, Democrats could identify and take control of narratives in key areas that Republicans will not be able to unite around. This will give them an advantage moving out of the primaries and into the elections. Second, in battleground races, they could use wedges to push out candidates they don’t want to run against and literally choose the winner of the Republican primaries themselves. Third, these wedges can sew seeds of division that can be grown and used in the 2024 Presidential election. Increasingly, even Trump himself would not be able to realign them.
According to the Washington Post, since 2020 Trump’s favorability rating has fallen 26 points among White people with no college degree, 18 points among GOP men, 17 points among GOP women and 23 points among Confederate voters over 65. He’s even lost 19 points among evangelicals. Trump’s clearly still the leading figure in the Republican Party - but only 63 percent of Republicans want to see him run again, 56 percent say they are for the party over Trump, and 36 percent say they are for Trump over the party.
This is a fantastic place to start from if you’re a Democratic strategist. Well, if you are a strategist that isn’t content on collecting paychecks to go on MSNBC and CNN ranting nonsense about how the Democrats should just sit back and let historical precedent ruin their chances at winning 2022. Otherwise, this is pretty exciting.
The problems for Republicans don’t stop there.
Issues to Divide On
Recently, a complete fracture within the party occurred when Trump drew ire from the party for giving his endorsement to Morgan Ortagus in the race for Tennessee’s 5th Congressional district seat. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green and Madison Cawthorn had already given their support to Robby Starbuck and show no signs of backing down. Pushback is also occurring against Trump’s endorsements in South Carolina and North Carolina.
And so the Republicans can’t guarantee that Trump is a uniting force in the 2022 primaries, and the Democrats should absolutely exploit that. How? They focus in on three or four key items, take control of their narratives, and use them to fore divisive and exhaustive debates on those issues and those issues alone. What are those issues?
They might surprise you.
The four main areas that the Republicans are now divided on are …
Foreign policy: Ukraine, Russia and China, specifically.
The global economy: Globalism vs Made in America
January 6th
Vaccines
According to Defense One:
… Rep. Tom Malinowski’s New Jersey office began fielding phone calls from constituents who argued that Russia is only seeking peace by massing forces on the Ukrainian border and that America should stay out of the conflict. Several callers mentioned Fox host Tucker Carlson, who has suggested that the United States should be supporting Moscow instead of Kyiv….
The calls demonstrate a split in how the Republican party is responding to Russia’s military buildup along Ukraine’s border. While many Republicans on Capitol Hill are criticizing Biden for being too weak on Russian leader Vladimir Putin, far-right members of the party are painting Russia as the victim and lambasting Biden for provoking Moscow. This evokes similar rhetoric to Trump, who has publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. government and said that he and the Russian leader get along.
For more moderate members of the GOP, it’s “uncomfortable” to address these pro-Russia views that are lingering after Trump is out of office…
Democrats, especially in light of the extreme right’s love affair with Communist authoritarian Russia, should absolutely capitalize on this divide, stick their finger in the wound, and force the GOP to battle this out. The Democrats need to take control of the narrative as it is. They can’t afford to lose it to bow-tie wearing slave holder apologist and American separatist Tucker Carlson. They must remind the populous why NATO exists in the first place. They need to ensure that the current contingencies of Russia puppets and sympathizers aren’t allowed to metastasize on American soil. But using Republican primaries as rhetorical battlegrounds for the debate surrounding the Ukraine they can hone their communications strategies while simultaneously turning the GOP against itself. Win-win.
Republicans are also divided on the topic of globalism. Older Republicans are far more likely than younger Republicans to believe that Trump’s nationalist call to put America First was a better economic strategy that engaging competitively in the global market. In other words, younger Republicans embrace globalism. Older Republicans reject it. The Democrats should seize on this divide in the 2022 Republican primaries, force the Republicans to reject each other’s visions of the American economy, and use these debates to hone their own communications strategies for the midterm elections.
Lesser divides, but divides still worth exploiting, are evident in the debates surrounding the 1.6 insurrection and vaccine mandates. As evidenced by former Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) recent rebuke of both Trump and the Republican National Committee over their January 6 coup attempt to overthrow the 2020 election specifically and the federal government in general, the Republicans are still split over the “insurrection.” Republicans in power are also split over whether or not the federal government should have the authority to ban businesses in the private sector from enforcing their own mask mandates. CBS News reports …
Some GOP governors would ban businesses from forcing employees and customers to receive vaccinations, while others refuse to interfere with those decisions. And that divide — a split over whether and when the government should involve itself in the private sector — highlights what could be a substantial difference in governing philosophies ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Two of the nation's most prominent Republican governors, Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, would prohibit private companies from imposing blanket vaccine requirements. They're joined by Alabama and Montana, which have also sought to ban such rules. However, Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota says she doesn't like vaccine requirements, but won't expand the role and scope of government by intervening in private business affairs. All three governors, who have been allies of former President Trump, are often mentioned as potential 2024 candidates.
The Democrats, as the only party that represents the Union, absolutely need to get a hold on the narratives surrounding the relationship between federal and state authority. Democracy cannot survive in the United States under an authoritarian and aprtheid Confederate Flag. The Democrats cannot allow the Republican disinformation machine to eliminate the barriers between the Union and the Confederacy. By forcing this debate in the Republican primaries, they can again, hone in on the most successful communications strategies to use in the midterm election, force divides in the Republican party, prevent them from talking about the issues they want to talk about, and potentially choose the candidate they want to run against. As representatives of the only party that hasn’t tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power or commit a violent coup, they should do the same with the narrative surrounding January 6th.
Make Them Talk Policy
Finally, while it isn’t a narrative to dominate, one final strategy the Democrats can deploy in the Republican primaries is to force discussions surrounding actual policy. That should gum up Republican works because if it’s one thing they hate, it’s having talks about policy. Trump Republicans are looking to make the election about Joe Biden. They have strategically decided that speaking about specific GOP policies will detract from their offensive against the Biden Administration. Other groups of Republicans aren’t so sure. As NBC News reports …
It’s the minimum that voters often expect of congressional candidates: Spell out what it is they would do if elected.
Yet inside the Republican Party, key leaders are split on whether to roll out any sort of governing agenda ahead of the midterm elections in November. With President Joe Biden’s approval rating tumbling, one GOP faction, headed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is betting that skewering the Democrats is all that’s needed to wrest control of the Senate. Another, led by House GOP chief Kevin McCarthy, is drawing up positions meant to persuade Americans that voting Republican might improve their lives.
If the Democrats played their cards right, they could force the McConnellists into policy discussions they don’t want to have and divert their attacks on the Biden Administration. So for example: instead of tapping out of the fake CRT debate and acquiescing to a few loud and obnoxious White suburban moms at school board meetings, they could easily clap back with “ok, let’s have a debate about how we fix a broken public school system plagued by underfunding, low reading and math scores and mass shootings.” They could also deflect the McCarthyists into debates surrounding those wedge issues in areas where they want to talk policy. More win-win.
The Democrats can keep and expand control of the House and the Senate if they 1) abandon historical precedent, 2) mobilize low income voters of color in low turn-out wards, and 3) apply a full press divide and conquer campaign against the Republicans in their 2022 primaries. They should and they must. We should all embrace the idea of completely demolishing the neo-Confederacy in 2022. And if we can’t, we will be forced to settle into the reality that the flag bearers of slavery will be one step closer to full controll the government.