The Democrats’ midterms performance shows how Trump – and his imitators – can be beaten | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/11/democrats-midterm-donald-trump-joe-biden-republican-right-labour
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The Democrats were much more focused, exhibiting “an incredible amount of message discipline”, as the party strategist David Shor put it to me, sticking to those issues where the American public agree with them and avoiding those where they are out of step. They refused to be drawn on to the terrain where Republicans wanted to fight – even leftwing candidates distanced themselves from the “defund the police” slogan – digging in instead on turf where Democrats enjoy public support, whether that be jobs, healthcare or abortion rights. The latter issue was especially galvanising, following the supreme court’s summer decision to overturn Roe v Wade and its constitutional protection of a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.
But Democrats also made a case that some feared would bring no electoral reward. They pressed the argument that Trumpist Republicans posed a threat to democracy itself, reminding voters that this was the first election since the attempted insurrection of 6 January 2021, an event that too many Republicans excused and for which all but a handful refused to hold the former president accountable. Above all, Democrats cast as dangerously extreme the majority of Republicans who perpetuate Trump’s big lie that the election of 2020 was stolen.