Editor’s Note: Jeff Weaver, a long-time aide to Senator Bernie Sanders and campaign manager for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, is a leader of “America’s Progressive Promise PAC,” a pro-Democratic Super PAC working to engage progressive voters. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own. Read more opinion articles at CNN.
The first presidential debate this week was indisputably one of the ugliest in modern US history. President Donald Trump interrupted Joe Biden at nearly every turn, and CNN’s Chris Cuomo later described the event as a “shit show.”
After the debate, most of the commentators were favorable to Biden, with some Republican pundits going so far as to condemn Trump’s performance. But all the talking heads missed a key element of Trump’s strategy: he repeatedly tried to bait Biden into repudiating the left in an attempt to fracture the Democratic vote. Trump may be the most disastrous and destructive president in modern American history, but he is not an idiot and those who treat him like he is do so at their own peril.
This election is coming down to a game of inches. A few thousand votes in a handful of states will likely determine the next president, as they did in 2016. With the majority of voters already firmly decided, this election will come down to a fight on the margins. Can one candidate animate or suppress small segments of the electorate that will determine who wins Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa or Arizona?
Viewed through that lens, Trump entered the debate with a very intentional strategy and succeeded. Trump’s tepid response to the question about condemning white supremacists, for example, was revealing. In telling the far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” he sent a strong signal to the most disgusting bloc of voters that he wanted their support.
On the flip side, Trump was very intentional in trying to create a divide between Biden and the left. On the issues of health care, police reform and climate change, Trump baited Biden to repudiate the “radical left.” Trump’s goal may not have been to paint Biden as a leftist, although that seems to be something Biden’s campaign is concerned about. Instead, by associating Biden with policies like “socialized” medicine, defunding the police, and the Green New Deal, Trump managed to stoke fears of radical socialism for his base while creating numerous opportunities for Biden to alienate voters on the left. Whatever else can be said about Trump’s debate performance, this was so successfully executed that Trump repeatedly responded to Biden’s answers by saying his opponent “just lost the left.”
It’s not unfair to say that another candidate, faced with the same scenario, would have more deftly dealt with the moment. But Biden walked into the box canyon – basically re-articulating the “I beat the socialist” argument, and full-throatedly repudiating the Green New Deal. Lest one think I’m giving Trump too much credit, the President himself confirmed that this was precisely what he was up to in a tweet about the debate on Wednesday that read, “Radical Left is dumping Sleepy Joe.”
Division and deterrence are tried and true arrows in Trump’s electoral quiver. Recent reporting from the UK’s Channel 4 News reveals that Trump’s 2016 campaign targeted some 3.5 million African-Americans, whom the campaign called “deterrence” voters, with digital ads attacking Hillary Clinton. Voter turnout among African-Americans declined in 2016 for the first time in two decades, and a Washington Post analysis showed there was a significant increase in voters who pulled the lever for down-ballot candidates while leaving the presidential race blank (a practice known as undervoting). This was noted in Detroit, and the number of undervotes in Michigan and Florida ended up exceeding Trump’s margin of victory in both those states.
Understanding Trump’s strategy is critical. He wants undervotes. He wants third party and write-in votes. He wants to dissuade progressives from campaigning or voting for Biden. This helped him in 2016, and Trump is trying to disrupt the popular front arrayed against him – a coalition that spans the political spectrum from mainstream conservative Republicans to the progressive left.
Trump, in trying to split Joe Biden from the left, is also distracting voters from the enormously important points of agreement between the Democratic nominee and more progressive members of the party. Despite Biden’s insistence on hiding his light under a bushel, his economic program – not Bernie Sanders’ program, but Biden’s – calls for raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That policy alone would affect tens of millions of workers – a disproportionate number of whom are people of color and women. Biden’s plan also calls for creating paid family leave, which will not only help working people but also the suburban women that both candidates are so aggressively courting. They are the ones who so often bear the burden of not only raising young children but also caring for aging parents.
Biden is not Bernie Sanders – there’s no debate there. One only has to listen to Biden’s own words during the debate to know that is true. But a President Biden, adhering to his own economic agenda, could become a president, who in Bernie Sanders’ words, is “the most progressive … since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” That’s a prediction that Trump wants never to come to pass – if only he can demoralize America’s ascendant progressive left. We shouldn’t take the bait.