To win back voters, Democrats should let Trump be Trump

WASHINGTON – In her moving concession speech, US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris urged her supporters not to give in to despair. “The light of America’s promise,” she said, “will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.” Other prominent Democrats, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, echoed her defiance. Senator Elizabeth Warren has already outlined a plan for Congressional Democrats to “slow or sometimes limit Trump’s destruction.”

But Democrats should do exactly the opposite. Instead of blocking President-elect Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) agenda, they should let it play out. Doing so just might be the surest way to put on full display the cruelty and recklessness of the MAGA agenda and win back the support of working-class Americans.

By exposing ordinary Americans to the harsh consequences of MAGA policies, the elimination of essential health-care protections, the erosion of the minimum wage, tax cuts for the rich, and the rollback of environmental and workplace-safety regulations, Democrats could underscore Trump’s anti-worker objectives. Without the Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as Obamacare), which Republicans aim to repeal, working-class voters in red states who have benefited greatly from its insurance mandate may come to realize that the Democratic Party is more aligned with their interests.

Play the long game

Democrats began their postmortem review immediately after Election Day, analysing the Harris campaign’s numerous missteps, messaging errors, and tactical miscalculations. But if the party’s leaders believe that merely refining their campaign strategies will enable them to reconnect with the American working class, they are deluding themselves.

Many Trump supporters, after all, are low-information voters, as evidenced by the fact that many people were still googling “Did Biden drop out of the presidential race?” on Election Day. In crucial battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, interest in this question spiked just hours before the polls were due to open.

While voters can choose to ignore information, they cannot ignore the impact of government actions, which tend to be of two kinds: the enactment of new policies and the repeal of existing ones. Repeal, in particular, presents Democrats with a unique political opportunity. The Trump-led GOP will likely dismantle the policy frameworks and rights that Democrats fought hard to establish, and that are popular, if taken for granted by voters.

Simply put, Democrats should play the long game. Their goal should be to defeat and permanently eliminate the toxic influence of MAGA on the American body politic. But the battle of ideas is not won through presidential debates or campaign speeches; it is won through real-world policy outcomes and lived experience. This helps explain why neither the inspiring rhetoric of Harris and former President Barack Obama nor the vast sum of money spent by Democrats on political ads succeeded in convincing the American electorate just how harmful and callous the MAGA GOP really is.

That is not to say that perceptions don’t matter, but perceptions are not simply shaped by policies. By any metric, President Joe Biden’s administration has been the most pro-labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, while Trump aligned himself with the moneyed class and billionaires like Elon Musk. Yet, paradoxically, it was Harris and the Democrats who faced accusations of being elitist and “out of touch” with American workers. The Teamsters, for example, declined to endorse Harris, despite Trump’s open disdain for labour unions.

The conclusion is clear: the most effective, and perhaps only, way for working-class Americans, now the bedrock of Trump’s coalition, to see who truly serves their interests is to feel the effects of the policies enacted by the president they voted for.

To be sure, Democrats would pay a steep price in the short term. If MAGA policies are allowed to prevail, people across the political spectrum will endure daily hardships. But given the existential threat that Trump’s movement poses to American democracy, the US economy, and global stability, Democrats must aim for more than a narrow victory in the next election, they must work to discredit the MAGA movement once and for all.

At the core of this strategy is the recognition that a politician’s brand often holds more weight with voters than policy specifics. In a blind test, respondents who did not know which candidate was behind each proposal overwhelmingly favoured Harris’s policies. Even on polarising issues like the economy and immigration, the gap between Democratic and Republican proposals was much narrower than candidate-based polling would suggest.

In other words, a significant portion of the electorate seemingly voted against its own interests. Democrats may attempt to address this disconnect by improving their voter-outreach strategies, but this ignores the underlying problem. Strong opposition mounted by Democratic lawmakers against GOP policies over the past decade has shielded voters from confronting the consequences of their choices.

This is particularly true of voters who are socially conservative yet tend to support progressive economic policies. Although they agree with Democrats on key issues like expanding access to health care, protecting Social Security, and reducing drug prices, they also value conservative principles held by the Republicans. By voting for Republican candidates, these voters effectively get to have their cake and eat it, expressing conservative moral preferences while relying on Democrats to fight for their basic economic security.

It is time for voters to come to terms with the reality of America’s political system, where each of the two major parties offers a distinct set of values, positions, and policies. Each party’s platform contains elements that will appeal to voters in different ways, and it is up to them to weigh these competing priorities. So far, working-class voters have largely avoided these tough decisions; now they must confront them head-on.

No good policy goes unpunished

Democrats must also face the reality that many voters are so deeply uninformed and entrenched in their beliefs that changing their views through persuasion and messaging alone is virtually impossible. Consider, for example, a 2009 town hall where a constituent told then-Republican Representative Robert Inglis, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Inglis tried to explain that Medicare is, in fact, a government program, but his interlocutor wasn’t “having any of it.”

One way to get this voter’s attention is to take government hands off his Medicare. During Trump’s first term, he and his allies in Congress repeatedly tried to repeal the ACA. The late Republican Senator John McCain famously blocked the effort with a dramatic thumbs-down gesture in 2017, earning thunderous applause from his Democratic peers. But by thwarting the MAGA GOP’s attempt to repeal Obamacare, McCain may have inadvertently helped it, preventing voters from seeing the full extent of Trump’s disregard for their needs.

Had Republicans succeeded in repealing Obamacare, millions of Americans would have lost their health insurance, sparking widespread outrage against the MAGA agenda and destroying its political credibility. Instead, millions of working-class Americans were spared the immediate harm of repeal, and the realisation that GOP policies are in direct opposition to their interests.

Consequently, Trump and his MAGA ideologues have returned to power stronger and more determined than ever. And although Trump himself may have only a vague “concept of a plan” to repeal Obamacare, the extremists within the GOP will have a concrete strategy to attack its core principles and provisions.

As Democrats brace for a second Trump presidency, the key lesson is that sometimes, the best way to fight your opponent is to let them overreach. While some may argue that this approach is callous, it is rooted in political reality and basic human psychology: people tend to feel losses more acutely than gains.

Obama learned this lesson the hard way. When he introduced the ACA in 2009, he expected it to garner support from working-class voters, especially in red states, which stood to benefit most from the program. But many Americans did not immediately recognize the benefit; they viewed expanded access to health care as a baseline expectation rather than a tangible gain. Similarly, despite creating jobs and spurring economic growth in red states, Democrats gained little from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Both Obama and Biden failed to grasp a fundamental truth: good economic policies do not translate into political support by themselves. Obama, for his part, believed that the ACA was not only sound public policy, which it was, but also a savvy political investment that would win Democrats lasting support from the American working class. He was wrong. Shortly after the passage of the ACA, the Democratic Party suffered a crushing defeat in the 2010 midterm elections. For the remainder of Obama’s presidency, Democrats never regained control of both houses of Congress, enabling a Republican majority to block many of his transformational initiatives on climate change, infrastructure, and immigration.

Biden made the same mistake. His pandemic rescue package and the IRA significantly benefited red states and materially (albeit incrementally) improved the lives of working Americans. Real wages increased, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution, an impressive feat given the inflationary surge triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the Democratic Party reaped no political rewards, leading to their most severe electoral shellacking in recent history.

By contrast, Republican missteps and overreach have been a boon for Democrats. In the 2022 midterm elections, the Democratic Party defied analysts’ expectations and the historical trend of incumbents losing Congressional seats, largely owing to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn women’s constitutional right to abortion. Despite high inflation, the anticipated “red wave” failed to materialize. For decades, Democrats had fought to protect women’s rights, but this political commitment yielded meaningful returns only after the GOP succeeded in taking away those rights.

The path back to the White House

In responding to the incoming Trump administration, Democrats should adopt a more strategic approach. They must fight relentlessly to protect democratic pillars like the rule of law and freedom of the press while focusing on critical issues that will shape our future, such as climate change and public health.

In short, Democrats must pick their battles wisely. On issues like identity politics, they should radically revamp their stance and then encourage Republicans to go to extremes and come across as bullies. When it comes to the ACA, tax policy, tariffs, manufacturing investments, and immigration, Democrats should consider tolerating some setbacks rather than blocking the GOP’s agenda. Elections have consequences and this is a way to reinforce that lesson.

The sooner the GOP enacts its agenda, the faster the damage to its credibility will accumulate. While this may seem like a Machiavellian strategy, now might be the ideal time to pursue it. With control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, MAGA Republicans are poised to overreach, leveraging their political dominance in ways that expose their policies’ inherent cruelty.

For Democrats, the political cost of a measured response to the GOP agenda will likely be minimal. In the best-case scenario, the damage caused by the GOP’s policies will be clear in time to affect the 2026 midterms. Just as the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling shaped the outcome of the 2022 midterms, Democrats could capitalize on dissatisfaction with MAGA’s radical agenda to regain control of Congress in 2026, positioning them to win back the White House in 2028.

If the Democrats can secure decisive electoral victories in 2026 and 2028, they could push through sweeping reforms such as eliminating the Senate filibuster, protecting voting rights, reproductive freedom, and the minimum wage, advancing universal health care, climate change, and infrastructure, and restoring policies that would likely be reversed under GOP control.

Admittedly, letting MAGA be MAGA and Trump be Trump will result in pain and suffering for many Americans. But this suffering will be inflicted by Republicans, and they should be held accountable for it. The task for Democrats is to ensure that the GOP’s radicalism and destructiveness are impossible to ignore.

Given the challenges ahead, Democrats must prepare for a long-term struggle. The goal should not be merely to raise more money, improve the party’s ground game, or craft a more effective messaging strategy. To defeat Trump’s MAGA GOP, Democrats should heed Winston Churchill’s advice: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Yasheng Huang, Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, is the author of The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline(Yale University Press, 2023).