A nasty reality: Changing candidates will not fix it for Democrats | R. Bruce Anderson

Does it matter who the presidential candidate is? It might. But the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is not the heart of their problem.

System mechanics: A two-party system only works when both parties are healthy. As a party, the GOP went through a painful process of reinvention, taking the years since Mitt Romney's loss to do this. In campaign terms, the Democrats have held onto their past since 2012, with a long, ugly spiral downward since then.

It is time for this excruciating process to manifest among Democrats. How the next few weeks play out will tell us all whether they are ready; that they recognize the ill-health; the malignancy that has taken hold, and whether it is permanent.

It is disingenuous for Democrats to simply demonize their opponents, or even to take issue on how the GOP has changed. They need to look within their own ranks and root out the causes of this dismal state of affairs. If the judicial trials of the opposing candidate were an election plan, then the rot goes deeper than I thought.

You might not like what the GOP is selling, but an awful lot of people do, and that does not make them bad people. Democrats are not going to get those folks to switch.

The problem for Democrats is that there does not seem to be, for their own voters, a viable counter-narrative. Simply slamming your opponents does not work — the GOP discovered this in 2008, 2012 and in many elections since. You simply have to have a vision. The Republicans do, and that you do not like this vision is not a counterargument.

As long as the Democrats simply live in negation — in “no" — they will lose.

President Joe Biden’s Democrats have done a remarkable job in three and a half short years: the economy has recovered; the job market could not be better; we’re at peace in the world, and we’ve recovered some substantial standing with our allies. It’s been one of the most amazing repair jobs in political history.

Despite having a razor-thin margin in the Senate and a Republican House, Biden and the Democrats have managed to pass a massive infrastructure bill, led the country out of the pandemic and curbed and cooled the inflation that the plague years gave us, all without a crashing recession.

All this could be highlighted, and to some degree they have tried to do this. But there is a colossal, apparently paralyzing distraction in the way: Donald J. Trump.

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“Trump is awful,” they cry, “he is so much worse!”  “He is a credible, existential threat to the Republic!”

I’m not sold. We had four years of that cat, and the republic survived it. As of today, the Democrats talk about him more than he does himself (if that’s possible). On campaign, Trump could go silent.

Telling us who not to vote for is not the same as persuading us to vote for someone. It undersells the arguments for your candidates, ignores the achievements locked down since 2020 and hands the initiative to your opponent. It’s a loser.

This is why Mr. Trump seems puzzled by questions about real policymaking: There’s been no need to outline any detailed programs, generate any white papers or bother to tell us what he actually plans to do.

To paraphrase the famous campaign lesson, you have to give the citizens something to vote for instead of simply trying to scare them into the booth.  Mr. Trump is a master at fear, and he lost. Fear is a loser. Hope is a winner, and could, honestly, be generated by both sides.

But to bring it out, both candidates must break the cycle of threats, name-calling, and savaging us with fear.

The challenge for Democrats: Tell us why you are the best alternative, without using the words “Trump,” “fascism,” “authoritarian” or “dictatorship.”

R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay, Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.