Democrats’ conduct in confirmation hearings just starting for President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees reveals their strategy to restore their electoral fortunes and credibility.
Campaign guru James Carville admitted recently that Democrats “lapsed into stupidity” by focusing on their opponent and not on voter concerns. “We made it about Trump, and we didn’t make it about voters. … It is never a good idea. How could I, at 80 years old … lapse into that level of stupidity? … I think we did.”
This flipped on a light bulb over the heads of Senate Democrats who had lost their majority. In its light, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) ordered that the message to voters must be that he and his 46 colleagues work for citizens, not for themselves.
In a recent ad distributed on X, Senate Democrats intone, “We have differences and some disagreements, but Senate Democrats are fiercely united on this — we are not here because of who we are against. We are here because of who we are for. Every one of us was elected to fight for working Americans, for American families, for you, for you, for you.”
Voters might ask, “Who are you kidding?”
Just as one hears cogs turning and grinding inside an antique clock before it strikes the hour, so one hears the creaking of gears in Democrats’ brains as they arrive at this rather obvious strategy.
Trump focused on voters, and Democrats didn’t. Now, they must persuade citizens who shoved them to the sidelines in November that they’ve learned their lesson and will be worthy of power when elections arrive two years from now.
Democrats think one way is to use Cabinet confirmation hearings to undermine the MAGA concept, which means defeating the nominees. “Our approach will be [to] use these hearings to show the contrast between Donald Trump’s agenda of helping the special interests, especially of the very wealthy, and Democrats’ agenda to fight for working Americans,” Schumer said in a speech on Monday.
Schumer lacks many things, but not chutzpah. His claim reverses the truth, and the nation knows it. It was Trump whom “working Americans,” the hack phrase du jour of our politics, clearly recognized on Election Day as working for them. It was Democrats who were in the grip of special interests, green radicals, woke activists, teachers unions, and sundry other culture warriors and inflationary big spenders.
But Democrats must start repairs somewhere, and the nomination hearings are as good a place as anywhere. So they attacked the first Cabinet pick, Pete Hegseth, whose nomination for secretary of defense came up on Tuesday. No Democrat will vote for him, as Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed (D-RI) made plain.
Reed said, “Mr. Hegseth, I do not believe that you are qualified to meet the overwhelming demands of this job. … A variety of sources, including your own writings, implicate you in disregarding laws of war, financial mismanagement, racist and sexist remarks about men and women in uniform, alcohol abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other troubling issues. I have reviewed these allegations and find them extremely alarming.”
Those are the words — some outright false, such as the opening salvo on the laws of war, but some worthy of thorough investigation — of a man whose mind is already made up. Reed will lead all his Democratic troops into the nay lobby, as Schumer has ordered.
But Democrats have a problem. It is this: Just as the election taught them they must change strategy, so it taught Trump and his transition team to do again exactly what they did to win. That means getting the base to vote, and in the Senate, the base is the 53 Republican senators. The Trump transition team focused not on the impossible task of winning over Democrats but on shoring up every GOP vote. Hegseth met repeatedly with the one serious Republican skeptic, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), and she seems likely to side with him in the end.
Before the hearing, the only Democrat Hegseth talked with was Reed. The others complain, saying they cannot judge him if he refuses to meet them. But Hegseth says this is “simply untrue.” It appears he reached out to Democrats early, but they ignored him because a month ago, his nomination was in deep trouble. Only after the tide turned in his favor and Republicans seemed likely to confirm him without Democratic votes did the blue senators gripe about the need to meet and talk.
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In other words, Democrats overplayed their hand again. They dismissed the Republican pick when he was down, mistakenly thinking he was out, and only started playing catch-up after their votes became irrelevant.
The confirmation hearings are thus repeating the pattern of the election. Democrats fail to see the light until it is too late. Then, they scramble to catch up. But Trump proceeds more or less smoothly to victory.