If you have watched a sporting event in the last month, you’ve probably been bombarded with Trump ads lambasting Kamala Harris for having endorsed free gender-transition surgery for prisoners and immigration detainees. The dead hand of her 2019 campaign continues to haunt her.
Next to her association with the deeply unpopular Biden presidency, the suite of left-wing stances Harris adopted in that ill-fated effort are still, five years later, the largest obstacles in the path of her presidency. What makes this all so maddening is that those obstacles were placed there by well-meaning progressives.
The Trump ad describes an answer Harris gave on an ACLU candidate questionnaire five years ago. (“As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?” Answer: yes.). I’m sure neither the ACLU nor the Harris staffers who cooperated in this response set out to seed Republican attack ads. Yet a large portion of the work of the progressive nonprofit complex is functionally dedicated to this very outcome. And these kinds of perverse outcomes will continue to occur unless Democrats get wise to the dynamic that continues to produce them.
The progressive movement is largely composed of thematic issue groups, dedicated to a cause or causes, such as climate change, women’s rights, economic justice, and so on. All of these groups, naturally, see their own issue as having special importance. Accordingly, they generally understand their role as pushing the Democratic Party to the left on their issue of concern.
An organization dedicated to changing the world on Issue X isn’t going to raise much money or inspire its staff if it takes the posture that Issue X is politically dicey and that the prudent course for Democrats would be to trim their sails. It’s standard for activist groups to insist their specific cause is highly popular (or, if that stance is too implausible for Democrats to believe, at least not unpopular). Many of these organizations commission their own polling designed to affirm that the American people share their priorities. Unlike straightforward election polling, which asks which candidate you intend to vote for, issue polling is extremely sensitive to small changes in wording, which makes it very easy to produce results that support whatever outcome the group funding the poll desires.
There’s no public polling on taxpayer-financed transition surgery for prisoners, but polling generally finds the public is broadly supportive of equal rights for trans people. That support does not quite extend to allowing trans athletes to compete in women’s sports, or to medicalizing transitions for children. But this would imply the need for political compromise on the part of trans-rights defenders, a point activist groups are generally loath to concede.
The point I’m making here is purely political. I have no moral problem with prisons giving properly run transition care to prisoners who wish to change their sex. I’d also agree that Trump is exploiting the issue in a way designed to spread hatred against all transgender people, rather than to question one small program. (It is so small, indeed, that it went on throughout Trump’s presidency without Trump noticing or caring.) The issue is that political candidates need to think practically about the existing electorate, and the progressive movement is currently designed to ignore pragmatism.
The groups in the coalition increasingly tend to define agreement with their cause in maximal terms. If you support equality and respect for trans people, but question, say, medicalizing young people, you’re anti-trans. If you support labor unions but oppose some positions they advocate, you’re a scab. Climate activists increasingly use the term “climate denier,” once reserved for those who refuse to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming, for any skeptic of any element of their preferred remedies. The rampant absolutism makes it difficult to acknowledge even the possibility that there are political risks attached to going too far in agreement with the movement.
Groups dedicated to pushing Democrats to adopt the most expansive pro-trans-rights position don’t admit getting candidates on the record endorsing free transition surgeries for prisoners and detained migrants might have been a mistake. In media accounts about Trump attacks, representatives of the groups dutifully insist the Trump campaign is stupidly wasting its money blasting out endless attacks on the issue. “This is a Hail Mary pass to get the most extreme and bigoted people that they think still exist out there and haven’t already come out and voted for Donald Trump,” said Sean Meloy of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund. “I don’t think, in the end, it’s going to work.”
Professional Democratic political operatives have a very different impression. Two party strategists told NBC News the issue was hurting Harris. “In all the polls, the trans stuff is bleak,” said one. “It’s a killer ad.” Likewise, the New York Times reported that Trump’s anti-trans ad “was rated as one of his campaign’s more effective in September in some Democratic testing.”
The same dynamic is on display in the frantic efforts by Harris and President Biden to allay voter concerns about immigration.
By the end of the Obama administration, immigration-rights groups had persuaded most Democrats to abandon Obama’s centrist positioning on the issue. The 2020 primary was a race to the left, with candidates outbidding each other to take the most permissive stance on immigration law enforcement. Biden declined to join the race to the left during the primary, but after he won the nomination, he moved left on a broad array of issues, including immigration, during the general election.
When he won, immigration activists, who claimed to represent the views of non-white voters, pushed him hard to reduce enforcement. Biden “faces enormous pressure from progressive circles to follow through on his promises to quickly undo Trump’s policies and be more welcoming to immigrants than former President Barack Obama, who was dubbed the ‘deporter in chief,’ reported Politico in 2020. “In the first 100 days, we believe he needs to be bold, swift and act without hesitation,” said Greisa Martinez, the executive director of United We Dream, “Black and Latinx people showed up for real change in November and gave him a real mandate.” Biden immediately signed half a dozen orders loosening enforcement, including a 100-day moratorium on deportations for immigrants in the U.S. facing removal, suspending the remain-in-Mexico policy, and other moves.
But the increases in border crossings, especially by migrants seeking asylum and exploiting Biden’s policy allowing them to stay in the United States until their case is adjudicated, has proven deeply unpopular. Record levels of Americans now want to decrease immigration levels. Even Latino voters now prefer Trump’s immigration policy to Biden’s. One of the most uncomfortable moments of the campaign came when 60 Minutes asked Harris three times why Biden had loosened border restrictions in the first place, only for her to dodge the question.
This episode ought to prompt deep self-reflection. Immigration-rights groups spent years convincing Democrats that the key to cementing the loyalty of Latino voters was to follow the immigration-rights agenda on border enforcement. I personally believed this as well. But those groups turn out to have imposed their own view, luring Democrats into adopting politically toxic policies that repelled them in the mistaken belief it would win them over.
But rather than concede error, the groups are continuing to attack the administration for its harsh enforcement approach, and — even now! — urging Harris to abandon her hard-line stance that is supposedly alienating Latinos. “While a measurable segment of the Hispanic electorate supports hardline approaches on immigration they tend to be ‘the voters who lean in the GOP direction in the first place,’” explains one immigration-rights supporter. “While mass deportation initially draws substantial public backing, support for the idea dwindles both among Hispanics and the broader population when people are informed that such a program could sweep up people who have been in the U.S. for years without breaking the law and may have U.S. citizen children,” says another.
This, however, is not how politics works. If political candidates could ensure all voters received only information they supplied that was favorable to their stance, moving public opinion in their direction would be easy. In the real world, the enemy gets a vote.
It is not only natural but wise for political parties to use their power to advance their ideological goals, and activists have a role in setting those goals. I enthusiastically supported some of the ambitious Biden administration policy objectives that backfired; if you never miss, you’re not taking enough shots.
The incentive for every group to push its own demands to the maximum is almost self-evident. (Imagine trying to raise money and organize for a cause when you concede that cause is the one politicians should put on the slow burner.)
The reason Democrats continue to field these data-impervious demands is that the progressive movement (much like the conservative movement, after which it was modeled) has a culture of affirming rather than questioning the predispositions of its core policy demanders.
This culture involves endlessly recycled evasions, such as — to pick one favorite — the claim that Republicans are going to accuse Democrats of advocating radical positions anyway, so they might as well endorse them. “Shaking ‘you’re for open borders & “transing” school kids’ doesn’t actually happen by ignoring the claims nor offering light support for draconian measures. Accusations will still come & stick,” argues progressive message guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, as if an ad fabricating an extreme position held by a Democratic candidate is no less effective than one using the Democrat’s own words.
There is, of course, a good reason why Trump’s campaign is pouring millions into ads tying Harris to a position she actually advocated rather than making other, even more unpopular positions, and also why those ads cite mainstream news sources vouching for the truth of the claim.
Progressives spent years deflecting questions about the party’s left turn into an abstruse debate over “popularism” (don’t ask — if you’re curious, you can read about it here) rather than concede the obvious reality that, all things being equal, adopting unpopular positions makes a candidate less likely to win.
We’re seeing the results of that mentality play out on the airwaves. Rather than continue the process that led to Harris being flayed alive, how about simply not doing that any more?
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