Why Don’t Leftie Candidates Do Better Among Working-Class Voters?

The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class.

There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges.

Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why.

These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are.

Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here. In 1848, there were revolutions across Europe as citizens finally became restive enough about all those inbred monarchies to demand change. Initially, students and workers in Vienna, Prague, and other cities marched side by side. Before too long, however, divisions began to emerge. The students wanted things like political rights. The workers just wanted better factory conditions and more bread. Things didn’t end well in most places—like Paris, for example, where Napoleon’s nephew seized power and held it for more than two decades until he started a dumb war and the radical Paris Commune took over.

Today, we see the split in, say, certain aspects of the platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America. A national DSA co-chair has recently done two hugely embarrassing interviews, one with Fox News and the other with The New Yorker’s David Remnick, in which she touted prison abolition and border elimination and so on (and incredibly had no idea at what rate she would tax rich people). These are, to be sure, not ideas working-class people would get behind. They’re purely campus-left positions that aren’t going to get you very far in electoral politics.

The local DSA chapters, in contrast, are far more pragmatic. They emphasize housing and health care and economic things that actually matter in people’s lives. The difference between the more ideological national DSA and the more grounded local chapters was well and knowledgeably laid out by Nathan Newman in
a Substack post in early July.

But even that isn’t really the main reason why progressive candidates have trouble getting working-class votes. The main reason, in my view, is this.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. I say that not to praise or damn one group or the other. It’s just, I think, the reality. It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people. Working-class people’s lives in these last couple of decades have just gotten much harder, inching ever closer to the precipice of job loss, default, indignity. Working-class people live in regular if not constant fear of these things. Educated people, in an economy that leans more and more toward rewarding them, do not.

Therefore, educated voters and non-college voters hear politicians’ promises through very different ears. To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds. They hear promises about free health care for all, and they think yeah, right, that’s never gonna happen in this country. Their experience has taught them not to believe, and for the most part, you can’t blame them.

It’s true that it’s not fair that social democrats—and again, most of these candidates are really social democrats, not democratic socialists—should pay the electoral price for this. After all, it wasn’t they who’ve been screwing over the working class for four decades. But they’re stuck with the reality that the screwing has made working-class people extremely suspicious of those promising them big things.

So what’s the solution? Well, the only real solution is to win office in sufficient numbers to deliver on the promises to the point that working people do see genuine improvement in their material conditions. But that’s going to take a lot of time. A decade, maybe more.

In the meantime, I think the best progressive candidates can do is first and obviously, stay away from topics like prison abolition; but second and more importantly, really just explain things to working-class voters in a way that understands and assumes their skepticism. Aspirational rhetoric appeals to educated voters. To non-college voters, it just sounds like more fluff. Tell them, specifically and concretely, why their rent keeps going up, who’s doing it to them, and how you’re going to go after the people doing it. And explain clearly and specifically how your Republican opponent is on the side of the rent-raisers. Dot-connecting of that sort seems to me more likely to win working-class votes than lofty rhetoric and big promises.

The reaction so far among establishment Democrats to Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary has been surprisingly encouraging. Almost instantly after the race was called Wednesday morning, Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed El-Sayed, saying in a video, “Congratulations to [gubernatorial nominee] Jocelyn Benson, Abdul El-Sayed, and every Democrat who won up and down the ballot. They’ve got my support as we fight like hell together to win in November.” Centrist Senator Elissa Slotkin wrote a Facebook post expressing unequivocal support. Primary foe Haley Stevens backed El-Sayed instantly, and he spoke graciously of her at his first post-win speech, calling her a “friend.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had supported Stevens, praised El-Sayed’s “very, very strong campaign” and said, “I’m not looking back, I’m looking forward.”

This is good. It also may end up posing a challenge to El-Sayed over the course of this election, as he walks the tightrope between a progressive base that brought him to this point and the establishment that he’ll need to make peace with to win in November. But right now, we need to speed through some recent history and examine the conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party that, if unchecked, may be a bigger problem for El-Sayed than anything Republican Mike Rogers throws at him.

That conventional wisdom, for about 40 years, ever since the Reagan realignment that left liberalism discredited in the eyes of many Americans, has been simply that only centrist candidates can win general elections in swing states. Has it been right? Mostly, yes. It’s hard to think of many proud progressives who’ve won Senate seats in swing states in recent history. Paul Wellstone pops to mind. He was elected narrowly in 1990, when Minnesota was much swingier than it is now.

Interestingly, Schumer himself sort of qualifies in this category. He first won his New York Senate seat in 1998, in a race I covered closely. There were three candidates in that Democratic primary fighting for the right to challenge incumbent Al D’Amato. Mark Green was definitely the most liberal. But Geraldine Ferraro was without question the moderate candidate. Schumer was in-between, but, as a Jewish Brooklyn congressman whose big issue at the time was gun violence, he coded more liberal than not. I remember people laughing at me when I told them that summer that I thought Schumer would win the primary and could beat D’Amato. A gun-confiscating Brooklyn Jew, winning votes in Rochester and Schenectady? You’re nuts.

But it happened. Things change.

Things have been changing in the Democratic Party since, really, the wake of the 2008-09 Great Meltdown. First up was Occupy Wall Street. Then the Fight for 15. Then Senator Bernie Sanders’s run for president in 2016, and his groundswell of ferocious support that surprised a lot of people, me very much included. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s House win in 2018, along with a few others. Then Sanders’s second run. Then Joe Biden’s 2020 pivot to the left on economics, when he started speaking of the need for a new New Deal. And most of all, of course, the election, twice—the second time narrowly but unequivocally—of Donald Trump, which is about as much evidence of a furious electorate as one could ask for.

So the Democratic Party has been moving “to the left.” But it isn’t doing so because people are enraged about the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s because average, hardworking people are furious at a system that isn’t doing enough to keep them from falling behind. I could insert here a raft of statistics about wage stagnation, the explosion in economic inequality, and so on. Moderates and progressives argue about all that too, but what cannot be denied is what poll after poll after poll, and interview after interview after interview, tell us about what working people themselves feel. They feel screwed, and they feel no one is listening.

And today, this election cycle, rank-and-file Democrats are veritably crying out: We want you to do something about these billionaires getting obscenely richer and amassing all this power. We want reinvestment in us. We’re sick of getting nickel-and-dimed by corporations with all their hidden fees and price-gouging. We’re kind of freaked out that AI is going to further destroy our lives and towns. We hate these data centers the size of the Pentagon. We want people, goddammit, who’ll fight for us.

That’s why El-Sayed won Tuesday’s primary. Yes, Israel was a factor. El-Sayed spoke, again, graciously on Wednesday morning about fighting antisemitism arm in arm with his Jewish “sisters and brothers.” But he’s made other statements over the course of the campaign that have worried some Jews, even some whose politics are close to his, like his statement after a thwarted terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue in March. El-Sayed noted that the assailant’s niece and nephew had died recently in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.” El-Sayed had to know at the time that some would interpret this contextualization as an attempt to justify the assailant’s motivations. But when people—your would-be constituents, no less—almost get mass-murdered, just express sympathy.

It’s also a little demagogic to say things like, “Rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.” Historically, that’s how right-wing nativists talk. He needs to do better. Everyone expects him to criticize AIPAC and the Israeli government. He should just do so on the basis of the things they say and do. Lord knows there’s plenty to criticize, and I’d imagine most Michigan Democrats and independents would agree with him most of the time.

But Israel isn’t why he’s the Democratic nominee. He’s the Democratic nominee because he compellingly speaks the language of economic populism (why he, and all these lefties, don’t get more working-class votes is a question to which I have an answer, but that’s for a future column). And I cannot understand why anyone who calls themselves a Democrat or a liberal would oppose this.

We’ve sat here for decades watching the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent mushroom from 22 percent in 1990 to 32 percent now. We’ve seen CEO pay over roughly the same time go from 50 times the salary of the average worker to 300; we’ve seen employers try to (mostly successfully) get away with calling people “contractors” who are obviously employees; we’ve sat here powerless as free trade deals and mega-mergers have destroyed jobs, killed communities, and concentrated economic and political power to levels way beyond the Gilded Age.

If you’re a Democrat or a liberal (or a leftist), you’re against those things. So why would you be against a candidate who is himself against those things?

In any case, opposing all this at this point in history is like opposing the tides. Even if you sincerely and devoutly believe that this is a bad direction for the Democratic Party, it’s very hard to deny that this is happening. After a very long and dormant period, the left in the United States is awake again—as it was for most of the twentieth century. FDR and LBJ had to consider the leverage of the left. Roosevelt brought a number of socialists into his administration, and Johnson put the socialist Mike Harrington on his War on Poverty task force. It’s a pretty normal thing in American history, actually.

I have my own reservations about aspects of the left’s renaissance. “Defund the police” and “eliminate the border”—and sure, throw in “cancel Thanksgiving”—are disastrous stands for anyone seeking office to take. Big-D Democrats shouldn’t come within a mile of some of those national DSA platform positions.

But overall? Far and away the most important thing politicians can do in this country over the next 10 or 20 years is reverse the concentration of wealth and political power that has characterized this polity’s last four decades and make working people’s lives better and more hopeful. Any ally in that fight, however they want to fight it (within obvious lawful and constitutional limits) and under whatever label, should be welcomed.

So it’s dismaying, to put it mildly, to see Third Way announce in the wake of El-Sayed’s victory that they’re going to spend $15 million over the next two years to wage a “war” on democratic socialism. Guys: You are not going to win this war. Each coming decade will bring more and more young people into the electorate, and each of these cohorts will be more and more supportive of socialism, until such theoretical time as the socialists have had their chance to govern and have screwed things up on their own. But that’s a good ways away.

In the meantime, with respect to any Democrats or liberals who are against El-Sayed: Is securing the general-election defeat of El-Sayed—who, by the way, isn’t even a socialist and has been, in fact, extremely thoughtful and well-spoken about why he is a capitalist and what’s wrong with American capitalism today—a “win”? Really? Electing yet another Republican election denier to the Senate is victory? This I do not get. People can fight for a vision of the party they believe in without aiding and abetting the party of fascism. And I can imagine the righteous howls if the left submarined a moderate candidate in such a fashion.

Maybe you sincerely believe El-Sayed can’t win. I think that’s wrong. I think that if he’s skillful enough, he can keep the base energized, spend loads of time at Black churches, and maintain a cordial-enough relationship with the party establishment that he can win. He couldn’t have six or eight years ago. But as I saw as a young(er) reporter in New York in 1998, there comes a moment when things change.

But even if you’re a Democrat who doesn’t think El-Sayed can win—well, it’s one thing to express your honest opinion, but it’s quite another to say provocative things that help will his defeat into being. Schumer, Whitmer, and Stevens get the stakes. Their response to El-Sayed’s win was mature and big-picture. I wish Beltway moderates would just follow their cue.

The Todd Blanche nomination mess in the Senate is truly one of those pass-the-popcorn moments for Democrats and liberals. One can sense that John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, the two outgoing Republican senators who have suddenly developed the backbone to maybe vote against the attorney general nominee now that they’re not facing their voters again, represent a far more broadly (if privately) held view in the Senate GOP that the man is manifestly unqualified.

But this fracas is more than mere entertainment. It’s a full-blown scandal, as President Trump’s real interests here have become clearer, notably via a Truth Social message he posted late Thursday morning. It’s raw sewage even by his standards, and if the Democrats retake the House, this matter has now jumped to the top of my list of grounds for impeachment. It should provide the basis for the first article Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and his Judiciary Committee draw up.

It all has to do with the slush fund. The fund, you’ll recall, was the result of a settlement in a mind-bending legal proceeding in which Trump sued himself: That is, the president of the United States sued the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10 billion for the (admittedly illegal) leak of some of his tax returns back in 2019. In May, Trump’s Justice Department, led at the time by Blanche as the acting attorney general, settled the suit between Trump the president and Trump’s IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, whose moneys were to go to parties Trump deemed to have been wronged by the deep state—starting of course with Trump himself. It also included a shocking clause granting Trump, his family members, and his companies immunity from prosecution for any tax-related crimes they may have committed before the date of deal.

In other words: Blanche created a nearly $2 billion slush fund for Trump to steer money to anyone he wants—and granted him and his kids broad immunity from potential federal prosecution. One observer called it “a breathtaking abuse of the tax and legal system.” Raskin put out a 10-point memo on why the deal is “unconstitutional, illegal, and a fraud on the court.” In June, a federal judge blocked the fund’s creation, so it’s on hold for now and probably headed, one supposes, to the Supreme Court.

Around that time, amid the public outcry, Blanche said that the fund would not go forward. He told Congress that the department would put that in writing. But it never has. That’s the holdup with Cornyn and Tillis. If they get it in writing, presumably they would still vote for Blanche.

So that’s when Trump stepped in Thursday morning, when it looked like Blanche’s nomination might be dead, and “truthed” (and boy, it was the truth for once, all right): “Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it! He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time. However, John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, both of whom I refused to Endorse, and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this Great Nominee, who will remain, in any event, as Acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland, and others, too numerous to mention. I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”

What Trump is saying here is obvious. The slush fund and probably especially the immunity are far more important to him than Blanche is. And anyway, Blanche, whose servile lickspittleism makes predecessor Pam Bondi look like a paragon of independence, can stay in the job more or less indefinitely as acting A.G.

This morning, around 7 a.m., Trump “truthed” again. The fund isn’t for me, he insisted. Rather, it’s for the people who raided the Capitol and banged cops’ heads in; it’s for “the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration.… Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history.” He’s almost surely lying about himself. But even if he’s not, sending $1.8 billion in taxpayer dollars, received in the corrupt manner this money was received, to convicted January 6 insurrectionists is without question a high crime in and of itself.

Once again, as with so many other things Trump has done, it’s inconceivable to imagine any other modern American president even thinking this up, let alone doing it. Suing himself; then installing a spineless yes-man—his former personal lawyer, no less—as acting attorney general, who then agrees to a settlement including nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money plus an immunity grant; then being willing to sacrifice said A.G.’s confirmation in order to preserve the fund and the immunity claim. It defies belief.

It’s hard to say how many articles of impeachment the Democratic House might come up with. Indeed, Raskin and his committee’s biggest challenge will be deciding which high crimes and misdemeanors not to pursue. There’ve been dozens, hundreds, and they just can’t plausibly bring an indictment of 100-plus counts. They’re going to have to keep it to some number that the public can digest and buy into.

But the slush fund and immunity grant sure look like count number one to me. Unless of course five members of the you-know-what decide it’s all legal. If that happens, the House Judiciary Committee might look at impeaching them, too.

Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.

But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

And that’s how little wars grow. There’s a chance that he has enough sense to know that if he doesn’t get out of this soon, it could crescendo into a disaster that will spin out of his control. That’s what happened to LBJ—he knew every step of the way as he asked Congress for more money and troops that he was marching the country to defeat and destroying his own legacy, but he did it anyway. And he was much smarter than Trump will ever be.

I remember well when Syria’s Bashar Al Assad was massacring his own people by the thousands, dropping those cluster bombs on his own people. Some were screaming at Barack Obama: Do something! We’re the United States, how can we allow this to happen?

I think it would have been good if we’d been able to do something. On the other hand, I’m sure Obama thought that the last thing in the world he wanted was to go into a country we don’t really know with a sanguinary tyrant and ancient enmities and think we can smooth it all out before Americans lose their patience; Syria was not going to be his legacy. All those deaths were horribly tragic. But at least, against the charge of typical American hubris, Obama can plead not guilty.

Whatever happens in Iran, Trump is already guilty on that count. The launching of this completely unnecessary and unjustified war was an act of supreme hubris. Now it’s starting to really hit home with him that he may have been wrong. But he’s never wrong; incapable of shouldering blame, he will transfer it onto someone else. If that doesn’t worry you, you aren’t paying attention.

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First of all, I could barely stay awake. It was only a 25-minute speech, and it’s not like 9:25 p.m. is my bedtime, but President Donald Trump’s affect was so strained, his rhetoric so ploddingly predictable, and his “evidence” so vaporous that my mind started wandering at around 9:13. I wondered if it was only me, because I’m obviously not the most objective observer in the world when it comes to Trump, so afterward I flipped on Fox News for a few minutes, long enough to see that even Sean Hannity couldn’t rouse himself into a state of excitation.

So Trump’s much-ballyhooed (chiefly by him) speech Thursday night was a dud. So say I; so, in not so many words, said Hannity (perhaps lurking in the corners of his mind last night was the nearly $800 million his network paid out in a legal settlement after it was caught promoting Trump’s lies); so said Playbook this morning (“Trump’s anticlimax”); so said the gang on Morning Joe. That’s good. It tells us that that power he had over people and institutions a year or 15 months ago has evanesced.

More than that, it was just an embarrassing moment for the United States of America. When has a president ever done anything like that—commandeered the bully pulpit to spread poisonous half-truths and lies? Presidents often lie about this or that particular thing. But no one has ever pressed an obviously bogus case like that. Even the throwaway lines were poisonous lies (“We had transgender for everybody” before he returned to the White House). So it’s unlikely that most Americans are taking it very seriously.

Still: He’s the president, he’s backed by a couple hundred lapdogs on Capitol Hill who will repeat and endorse whatever he says, and of course he is reinforced by a propaganda network that reaches millions of Americans every day that will do the same. So the speech still matters, and it may set in train naked attempts to rig the election and prevent some Americans from voting.

But having seen the speech, and despite what everyone is saying, and indeed despite what I myself assumed going in, I’m not so sure that the main point here was to lay some kind of groundwork for November. Trump may be the most corrupt and furtive man ever to occupy the presidency, but in this one way he is achingly transparent: His motivations are always right out there. And his motivation last night wasn’t really November. It was just what he said. It was 2020.

This man-child with the emotional life of an 11-year-old and an ego that bruises more easily than a three-day-old banana will never stop being obsessed about 2020. In Trump’s mind, Trump can’t lose. It simply can’t happen. (Privately, he has admitted to more than one former aide that he lost, but let’s set that aside for now.) And nothing is ever his fault. Ergo, the election had to be stolen. And he has to “prove” it.

A normal person would let this go after a while and start focusing on the future. The broad interpretation that last night’s speech was really about 2026 and 2028 is a function of people making that assumption. But it’s a fatal assumption in this case. Trump is not normal. Trump is possessed.

His loss must be vindicated, whatever it takes. It might be vindicated by lies. He will know deep down that they are lies, but he won’t care. For Trump, the world is a jungle—eat or be eaten. It’s an authoritarian worldview, because if that’s what you believe, then any action is justified to avoid being the eaten. But he can’t drop it until the vindication is received.

Plenty of dangers lurk for the republic, despite his motivation being mainly retroactive, by the way. The sycophant he wants to install as attorney general, who referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer at his nomination hearing this week, has proven himself more than capable of filing charges against anyone Trump wants him to indict. And the sycophant he wants to install as director of national intelligence, who at his hearing this week couldn’t bring himself to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, will presumably gather intel on anyone Trump tells him to look into. So we have every reason on earth to fear that if Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton are confirmed in their respective positions, they’ll take a torch to the Constitution in an attempt to give Trump his vindication.

So picture it. Two and a half more years of sham indictments, destroyed reputations, phony charges repeated by state propagandists who call themselves journalists. And since none of it will work, because the 2020 election was not in fact stolen, it will continue until the day Trump leaves office. Beyond, actually. He’ll be on this jihad until the day that last well-done steak with ketchup arrests whatever’s left of his heart.

That’s bad enough. But yes, inevitably, the speech will have ramifications for this November. It’s hard to know right now what they will be. On the one hand, it seems that his cherished SAVE America Act will never become law. So he probably can’t do that.

Otherwise, though, saying what he said last night about 2020 tees it up for him to repeat as needed between now and November 3 that he—and Attorney General Blanche and DNI Clayton—have unearthed new evidence that the deep staters are up to their old 2020 tricks. Therefore, they have no choice but to deploy ICE agents to certain polling places. This is clearly against federal law. Blanche had said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March that such a move might be necessary; at his hearing, under questioning from Senator Amy Klobuchar, he said he’d “follow the law,” but his language was slippery.

In sum: Trump’s motivation may be retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice in this country and our electoral process.

At the same time, let’s conclude on a more positive note. The reaction to the speech is for the most part encouragingly negative and dismissive. The New York Times, well known for the cowardly equivocation of its homepage headlines regarding such matters, actually used the phrase “outlandish claims” in an early headline. For the Times, that’s a shot of Tabasco sauce.

Maybe this speech, combined with those Justice Department goons serving subpoenas to four Times reporters at their homes, will finally convince executive editor Joe Kahn that a newspaper’s job actually is to fight for democracy. The water’s fine, Joe; as Victor Laszlo said to Rick Blaine, it’s never too late to join the fight.   

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.