Too Many Democrats Don't Understand Voters At All

An opposition party in the grip of fatal delusions.

Photo by Ståle Grut / NRKbeta

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Internal caucus elections in Congress for leadership positions and committee chairs are often less about party strategy than more parochial factors, including personal friendships and who gave campaign money to who. Nevertheless, the choice House Democrats made to install Gerry Connolly as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this week is the cherry on top of weeks of disheartening comments and anticipatory cowering from the party, whose members once again seem to be learning all the wrong lessons from their recent election loss.

If you’re wondering why you should care about who the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is, stick around — this is about much more than that committee. It’s about how Republicans and Democrats think of the electorate, and what Democrats don’t understand about how you run an opposition.

Ocasio-Cortez made a bid for the position, but lost handily (131-84) to Connolly, who is a perfectly nice guy who has served ably on the committee for 15 years. However, he’s 74, was recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and was never anyone’s idea of a dynamo of charisma in tune with today’s fast-changing media environment.

AOC, on the other hand, is one of the party’s best communicators — she’s young, energetic, and has an enormous social media following (8 million followers on Instagram, 1 million on TikTok, 12.8 million on X, 1.2 million on Bluesky). She also happens to be precisely the kind of working-class Democrat — in her personal history, her constituency, and her inclinations and policy emphases — that other Democrats say they need right now. Yet she was passed over.

While House Democrats have indeed replaced some of their superannuated ranking members of other committees with merely middle-aged colleagues, the Oversight Committee is where a lot of the action in the next four years will take place, since its purpose is to monitor and police the administration. Having AOC act as the primary foil to the buffoonish committee chair James Comer would have been a terrific contrast for Democrats to display to the public as they try to build an argument against Trump and the GOP.

But I’m guessing more than a few Democrats think AOC isn’t quite the face they want to present to the country. She’s so partisan! And have you seen how they talk about her on Fox News? Boy, they really hate her! Best not to take a risk of alienating voters.

Tails between their legs

The emerging strategy for opposition to the coming nightmare of a Trump presidency and a GOP Congress seems to be one of utmost caution. Show the public that you’re eager to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans, and if you get rebuffed, you’ll be able to say you tried, as this ABC News story explains:

"People want to see government work, and we're going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they're willing to help move things forward for the American people. So, if they aren't, then absolutely, that will impact them at the ballot box," said Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who led House Democrats' campaign arm this year and will do so again for the 2026 midterms.

"I think we are telling them that we're here to govern," DelBene added. "And I guess the question is, are they serious about governing?"

“People want to see government work” is sort of true in the abstract, but not actually true in practice, at least when it comes to national politics. Here in the real world, most of the time voters have no idea whether government is working, and they certainly never think about whether some bill that passed was or wasn’t bipartisan. Ask Joe Biden, who signed a lot of really important legislation in his first two years and made the government work better in a hundred ways, and got precisely zero credit for it.

The standard line from Democrats right now is “our preference is to secure bipartisan solutions wherever possible and look for ways to collaborate with our Republican colleagues to help working families,” but “we will always stand up for our values.” That’s from Sen. Chuck Schumer, and the reason this is the talking point so many of them are repeating is that they think it’s what voters want to hear. The problem is that voters won’t hear it and don’t care. No one is going to go to the polls in 2026 saying “I really appreciate how Democrats in Congress made an effort to work together with Republicans on bipartisan solutions for the American people, so I’m voting for the Democrat in this House race.”

Let’s go back to that ABC News tory:

"I think this openness to working with them is less that you are going to see actual collaboration, I think it's that people are trying to set themselves up to have some credibility in other spaces to be against stuff that they're doing," said one former Democratic House aide. "It carries more weight and legitimacy if you're someone who's open minded to working with them, and then they take a hard right and you speak out."

“It carries more weight and legitimacy”? With who, precisely? The answer is, with an imaginary independent voter, one paying close attention to the goings-on in Congress and making their future voting decision on which side they believe operated in good faith.

But this voter does not exist.

“The fact that we work across the aisle really matters to people,” incoming Sen. Ruben Gallego told Semafor. “If we’re always just raising the alarms and fighting, we’re going to be seen as not being even-handed players.” I don’t doubt that some voters told him something like this. But they were lying.

Yes, it’s important to listen to what voters tell you, but it’s also important to pay close attention to what economists call revealed preferences — not what people say they want, but what they demonstrate they want with their behavior. While one may be able to find individual members of Congress who benefited from showing the voters back home that they were working hard to solve problems, voters’ feelings toward the opposition party as a whole have absolutely nothing to do with whether they perceive that party as bipartisan. Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch.

Look at the recent off-year elections in which the opposition scored sweeping victories: 2018, 2010, 2006, 1994. In every case, the out-party was as partisan as it could be, telling voters that the ruling party was a disaster and trying to make them look as bad as possible. They stood in the way of legislation, they tried to gin up administration scandals wherever they could, they pilloried administration figures, and they generally tried to create the impression that the administration was an unmitigated disaster.

And they did it knowing that the voters back home are never asking themselves, “What’s my opinion of the opposition party? Are they being fair, reasonable, and responsible?” That’s not how opposition works. People don’t have a well-formed, coherent opinion about the current congressional opposition, derived from an idealized conception of how such an opposition ought to act. The only relevant judgment voters are making is about the party in power. If they think that party is doing a good job, they’ll return them to office. If they don’t like what that party is doing, they’ll vote for the opposition. So the opposition’s job is to convince people that the party in power is doing a terrible job.

The imagined, and imaginary, prototypical voter

Most voters have clear ideas about the parties and relatively immovable partisan loyalties. Much of politics is about appealing to the rest of the electorate — people who might or might not vote, like some things and dislike other things about each party, and have weaker commitments to ideas and issue positions. Democrats and Republicans in Washington have strikingly different conceptions of who those people are and what motivates them.

Republicans assume those voters only occasionally pay attention to politics, have only the vaguest sense of what’s happening in Washington, respond in emotional ways to emotional appeals (especially appeals based on fear and anger), and make impulsive voting decisions with little regard to rationality. If you wanted to be crude, you could say that Republicans — especially Donald Trump — believe persuadable voters are basically ignorant morons, and treat them accordingly. It doesn’t always work, but it turns out to be a pretty effective starting point for crafting strategy. The prototypical persuadable voter in their mind is someone they can manipulate with the angry, bitter, scorched-earth politics that they prefer anyway.

Democrats, on the other hand, are terrified of what they believe the prototypical persuadable voter is. In their minds, that voter is someone who watches Fox News, has right-leaning social values, loathes the government, and thinks Democrats are a bunch of snooty anti-American elitists. Essentially, it’s a heartland conservative.

That’s why the appeal they want to carry to those people is so often some version of an apology: We know you hate us, but we’re trying our best to show that we have something to offer. Please be gentle. That imaginary voter is the one Democrats think reacts negatively to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Democrats need to discard their misconceived notion of who the persuadable voters are, and borrow some of what Republicans understand about them. Realize that persuadable voters aren’t paying close attention. They don’t have clear ideological beliefs, or even understand what goes into liberal and conservative ideology. They don’t grasp the nuances of conflict in Washington. They assimilate messages about politics — messages like “Donald Trump’s nominees are a bunch of grifters and sex pests” — without remembering where they heard those messages or who said them, and only if those messages are repeated over and over.

And two years from now, they’ll be inclined to throw the bums out, because that’s what they’re always inclined to do. But you have to remind them who the bums are, with the best messengers you’ve got. It shouldn’t be complicated.