Lately, she has urged her liberal brethren to stop promoting the idea that the 2020 election will be rigged, stolen, or a coup as a fait accompli. Doing so, she wrote, feeds into Trump’s voter-suppression strategy, which forms the centerpiece of his reelection bid, and is counterproductive to turning out the low-propensity voters that Democrats need. Instead, they should make clear that Trump is attempting to sabotage the election but in the end the voters have the ultimate power to remove him from office, a subtle but critical distinction, she says.
She isn’t the only one worried about this negative echo chamber: Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, told New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg that the union’s polling data showed “we do Trump’s work for him when we respond to his threats rather than remind voters that they will decide who the next president will be if they vote.”
How should Joe Biden talk on the campaign trail? In the face of vicious voter intimidation and suppression, how do Democrats best mobilize their voters and persuade undecideds? I spoke twice by phone with Shenker-Osorio, who is based in Oakland, in the last week to try to answer these questions and understand why Democrats have such a persuasion problem.