Democrats need to look to how former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) approached politics to find their voice against President-elect Donald Trump, columnist Ryan Teague Beckwith wrote for MSNBC.
"McConnell played American politics like a cutthroat game in which the only goal was to win the next election," wrote Beckwith Thursday.
"His laser focus on undermining the Democratic opposition was generally not good for the American public, and it didn't always work. But his efforts did prove that a party in the minority can come back from a devastating defeat by simply refusing to cooperate."
Infamously, McConnell told his party after former President Barack Obama was elected, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
And following the midterms where the GOP won in a landslide, McConnell told The Atlantic that his disciplined obstruction of health care reform was part of how they achieved success: “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.
He added, "When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”
By contrast, many Democrats are searching at least for some areas of common ground to work with Trump and his most extreme Cabinet nominees on — which, Beckwith argued, is "understandable" as their voting base venerates compromise, but he wrote that it's a mistake.
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"Finding common ground with Trump means giving legitimacy to some of his unqualified and risky Cabinet picks," wrote Beckwith. "It undermines the election messaging that Trump was dangerous and a threat to democracy. And it will likely shift the Overton window in a more conservative direction in the long run, making it harder for Democrats to win in the future. After all, if Democrats are offering a light beer version of Republican policy, many voters will opt to just drink the strong stuff instead."
Nonetheless, Beckwith concluded, while Democrats could benefit from the McConnell strategy, their different vision for the country means they have to do something more than that.
"Apart from tax cuts, more Supreme Court justices and rolling back the previous Democratic president's policies, the elder statesman didn't have a vision for the future of the country, and Trump stepped in to fill in the blanks," he wrote. "Democrats don't have that luxury. If they want to win again, they need to come up with a game plan for the next election — and the one after that."
