The Democratic Party side of the asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

As a Sanders voter who is actively engaged for electing the Biden-Harris ticket, because of course even half-competent government would be a distinct improvement from the Bunker Boy fiasco, I'm not part of the main target audience for the current Democratic National Convention's daily infomercial blitz that counts as a convention this year.

But it's hard not to fear that the Democratic Party leadership isn't stuck in the same corporate-friendly, Woke approach to campaigning style of 2016: lots of talk about harmony and diversity ("Stronger Together"), take the actual voter base for granted, and assume that Donald Trump is such an obvious incompetent and such a narcissistic mess that he has to lose.

Political campaigns always have something of a sports event about them. And longtime Democrats are sorely tempted to focus the idea that as long as Democrats hold the White House, everything will basically be all right. That's especially true of relatively well-off Democratic voters over 60 or so. I suspect that part of it is that the closer one gets to the higher end of the average life span, people with some actual feelings of responsibility for society as a whole would find it nice to think that we're leaving behind a better world than the one we were born into. And for anyone with a broadly liberal outlook, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris come much closer to offering that assurance than the Trump-Pence ticket does.

The American oligarchs would find it very convenient if the election were seen by the public as really nothing more than a sports event. That way, the electoral part of politics could be reduced to a harmless reality show while the neoliberal principle of TINA (There Is No Alternative) held sway in in economic and social policy as well as foreign policy, economic elites could fight among themselves over who would get which piece of the pie. But they wouldn't have to suffer the annoyance of actual democratic rule in which a majority of the people might prefer policies like public education for all or pensions and health care for everyone that don't directly benefit the wealthiest 1% in an immediate, direct way.

Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic makes his case that the Democrats are stuck in their own past in The Democratic Convention Put the Party’s Contradictions Front and Center 08/18/2020, dated the day after the first day of the current DNC:

The first night of the 2020 DNC was a fitting event for a party that prefers defeat to change. After a humiliating and close to delegitimizing election loss in 2016, Democratic leadership refused to take stock of their own failings, and blamed an assortment of outside forces: Russia, Facebook, Jill Stein, James Comey, to name a few. With Biden at the helm — a candidate with all the same weaknesses as the one who lost four years ago, but even worse — they decided to rerun the exact same campaign as last time, from the all-consuming focus on Trump’s failings right down to the attempt to bring prominent and rank-and-file Republicans into the party fold.

Yet at the same time, the party understands the precarious position it’s in. Between Trump’s outright stated intent to cheat his way to victory, the yawning enthusiasm gap between his and Biden’s supporters, and a raging pandemic that will keep people physically away from the polls, the party elite are well aware low turnout from unenthusiastic sections of the base — voters who are either deeply suspicious or totally indifferent to its candidate — could sink their chances. But any alternative approach that might be more promising would likely involve policies alienating the two constituencies they truly prize: conservative voters and corporate donors. [my emphasis in bold]

One could easily make the same judgment is somewhat less categorical terms. The reason that Biden-Harris have a strong chance is the same reason Hillary Clinton did in 2016: that Trump is a malicious character who is obviously unfit for such a responsible job that can affect the lives of so many people in the world.

But Biden-Harris also face the same risk that previously active Democratic voters don't turn out to vote. With the added risk this time that aggressive voter-suppression efforts by the Republican are significantly more intensive than in 2016, which COVID-19 in play as a wild card with hard-to-predict effects on turnout. I'm concerned that the pandemic may limit the traditional kind of get-out-the-vote operations the Democrats need.

In an interview with Jon Wiener in 2018, Michael Moore talked about the Michigan turnout problem in 2016 (Michael Moore: How Democrats Paved the Way to Trump The Nation 09/21/2018):

We all know that more people vote in a general election than in a primary. But the Democratic primary in Flint in 2016 had a turnout much larger than the general a few months later. Nobody has bothered to look at that or ask why. I do, in this film [Fahrenheit 11/9]. And the reason isn’t because people in Flint decided there was no difference between Trump and Hillary. Nobody took that position. It was because the Democrats actively depressed the vote. First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.

Then one month after the debate, President Obama comes to Flint and drinks the water and says the water’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, and everybody knew it was still poisoned, and nobody could understand why he would do this. That was like a knife in the heart to the people of Flint. So on Election Day, the turnout was much lower than it had been in the primary. And Trump carried Michigan—by 10,000 votes. And it’s not just Flint. All over this country people felt that the party of the people has let them down. [my emphasis]

Michael Moore's Rumble talk of today (08/19/2020) on the election, Ep. 110: The Moment of Truth Is Here. But he expresses a partisan intensity that I'm afraid we many not hear from Biden and Harris.

Marcetic recalls a disappointing moment during the Obama Administration:

Unfortunately, the strategy of taking the party’s disaffected sections for granted and courting conservatives didn’t work out in 2016, while the party hectoring its own voters is often a precursor to its electoral defeat. Just look at Biden on the eve of Obama’s 2010 mid-term “shellacking,” admonishing “our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.” Two months later, the GOP took the House with the biggest win in seven decades and the Democrats lost their Senate supermajority, closing the door on whatever transformational aspirations Obama might have had for the rest of his eight years. [my emphasis]

And he reminds us, "The GOP takes care of its base; the Democratic elite dislikes theirs." (This is a variation on The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010) And Marcetic concludes, "And for all their hopes to the contrary this year, that might still make a difference."