Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jamison Foser: Thanks, Greg. Always happy to be on.
Foser: Well, my first reaction is that Fox, as a standard for them, loaded that question up for Republicans by asking them about sending troops to blue cities rather than about the crime-ridden areas run by Republicans in those red states. If you look at the national stats on murders and other violent crimes over the last two decades, you see a pretty consistent pattern of places with the highest murder rates are in red states run by Republican governors, and a lot of them are in red cities. That’s the fundamental lies at the heart of all this. And you might’ve gotten a little bit different response from Republicans there, but the bigger picture is striking and important and really horrifying how openly Republicans are talking about using the military against the opposing political party. And that’s really what this is about. It’s obviously not about crime, because they’re not focused on high-crime areas. They’re focused on Democratic-run cities. And you have an entire political party, not just Donald Trump, pretty eager to deploy the United States military to intimidate and harass and dominate Democratic voters in Democratic cities.
Foser: Yeah, I think they’re perfectly happy to suppress and harass and intimidate Democratic voters in red states as well as blue. That’s one thing they’re pretty consistent on: their willingness and even eagerness to do everything they can to make life miserable for and intimidate and harass any opposition they have anywhere.
Foser: Yeah. Basically, on one hand, you have some folks like David Shor who don’t want Democrats to talk about really, I guess, anything other than some narrowly defined economic issues and think everything else is politically perilous. And they’ve sent around a memo on this. And frankly, I didn’t find it a very persuasive memo. It recapped some message testing around some messages that it said did poorly and this means you should avoid these topics—but a lot of times if you read those messages, it’d be a 30-word message and the component that they were saying was toxic and people should stay away from was three words. So I think it’s a misuse of message testing in the first place. Then there’s a bigger question of whether we should really be obsessing this much about trying to test every syllable of every word we use. And I just don’t think that’s where we are right now.
Sargent: I want to get into that in a second, but first we should point out that actual polling on this suggests very strongly that this is not an issue that Democrats need to shy away from. Quinnipiac found recently that American voters oppose sending troops into D.C. by 56 percent to 41 percent, a 15-point margin. If we’re going to look at polling, then why don’t Democrats look at these numbers? Why don’t Democratic strategists look at these numbers and say, Hey, there’s a good one for us.
But then even given that and even if you ask a poll question, as Quinnipiac did, that explicitly frames Trump taking over police departments and sending in troops to D.C. as being about fighting crime, the American people still reject it by 15 points, by almost 30 points among independents. So that’s really a striking thing that I would think Democrats should notice and recognize. If the news coverage of this is this rigged against us and then the poll questions are rigged against us and we’re still in a situation where Donald Trump’s handling of crime generally is unpopular and his specific actions around militarizing American cities is unpopular, that’s something you can stand and fight on.
Foser: Yeah, exactly. And that was a big theme of my piece today as I saw all this news coverage over the last couple of weeks about crime and this specific phrase kept coming up in all these headlines—this idea that Donald Trump has set a “trap” for Democrats on crime and that Democrats would be foolish to engage on this issue and to oppose his militarization of American cities because this will play out politically well for Trump. And I saw this and I was like, Well, that’s nuts. And that’s for a couple reasons. One is the polling says Donald Trump’s unpopular on crime. People disagree with his approach to crime. People disagree with militarization of the American cities, which they seem to understand is not really about crime. But also, this isn’t how anything works. It’s true in politics that you generally don’t want to talk about things that are bad for you and good for your opponent. But that only works around the margins. That works on obscure things. You can avoid talking about an obscure House vote on some amendment if you don’t think it’s very good for you and maybe you get away with it.
Sargent: I would think so. It seems pretty clear to me. I think we should also highlight something else about this, which is that many of these news accounts that you’re talking about rely on a certain type of quote from Democratic strategists, which almost invariably run something like, My party can’t possibly engage in this debate. We’re a bunch of total losers on this debate. We can’t win this debate. And by the way, I’m very savvy. I’m here to tell you that anyone who says otherwise is completely delusional. But the thing about this is those Dem strategists are saying that stuff in order to get quoted in places like The New York Times. I don’t care what anyone says. That is exactly what they’re doing—and they know it and the reporters as well know it. Yet this is something that’s never stated openly or acknowledged openly. We all know that’s how it actually works. You’ve been around a long time, Jamo. So have I. Isn’t that how it works?
Sargent: What’s so baffling to me about this as well is I thought for the longest time that editors believed that bucking conventional wisdom is a good thing, right? We’re constantly told that this or that reporter or writer is a star because they take on conventional wisdom. And yet when it comes to certain things, the rush to parrot the conventional wisdom is almost comical. Why is it that when it comes to these particular topics, all of a sudden that desire to buck the CW just disappears?
Well, it just so happens that a week ago I wrote a piece on this very same topic about immigration, and it was about a Chris Cillizza column from early June saying Democrats shouldn’t fall under the trap on immigration because immigration is something Donald Trump’s so popular on. Well, from the day Cillizza published that column to the day I wrote about it last week, Trump’s net approval on immigration had dropped seven points. It was underwater. So that isn’t actually what happened on immigration. That actually should be a lesson for people saying, Don’t talk about crime. Run away from crime.
Foser: It’s a fundamentally dishonest charade here. One of the things that we’re seeing is that the very same people who two and three months ago were writing pieces saying Democrats shouldn’t fall into the trap by opposing Donald Trump on immigration, he’s super popular on immigration.… Well, what actually happened was Trump’s approval on immigration and overall have dropped since then significantly because people did oppose him on it. And those pundits and those journalists have not revisited that. They’re not saying, Oh, I was wrong. Instead, they’re just running the same columns over again and swapping out the word “immigration” for the word “crime.”
Foser: I think they’ll end up getting it more right than not. And we’ve both talked a little bit about some of the frustrating comments from some Democratic strategists on this. I will say that I think overall the duck-and-cover thing is a little bit more of a pundit and journalist theme than it is something you hear directly from actually prominent Democrats. And Pritzker this week was a tremendous example—not only of how you can forcefully denounce this very authoritarian and very inappropriate behavior but the reception that you’ll get from that. There was this outpouring of support for them. I think if people are wondering what can they do, well, the biggest thing they can do is encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. So if your local paper, the journalists you consume are peddling BS on this, call them out on it. If your elected officials are not standing up, urge them to do so. But when they are, people like J.B. Pritzker, express happiness about that. Politicians respond well to people responding well to the things that they do.
Sargent: Just to really underscore your point here, what that means is that the specifics are a little bit less important than the atmospherics. The intangible things in politics are what people take from your public conduct, your public demeanor. And it’s true that poll testing the shit out of everything just makes you look weak. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, make sure to check out Jamison Foser’s newsletter, Finding Gravity. Jamo, always a great pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Foser: Thanks so much, Greg. Always happy to be on.
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