A Message for Joe Biden

You did good. The economy is very strong. You passed an astonishingly large portion of your agenda under difficult conditions. You have written your name down in history as one of the most successful domestic policy presidents of all time. Against all odds, you have exceeded your Democratic predecessor, despite him entering office with large majorities you never had.

But it may never matter, because you are not winning in politics.

This is the thing I want you to understand more than anything. Elections are not won by policy success. They are not determined by the unemployment rate. Voters do not decide based on gas prices or the number of laws passed.

Elections are about hearts and minds, and hearts and minds are won by ideas, narratives, beliefs, feelings. And Joe, your Democratic Party, for all its triumphs, has never been quite able to figure this out. Many of you still seem to believe that there is some line on a graph somewhere that can be made to go up, and American voters will follow. This is wrong.

If you cannot induce the right feelings in voters, reality won’t matter. Voters need to feel good about you, they need to feel badly about your enemies. They need to fear Trump, dread him in their gut. They need to see you as a benevolent and familiar face. They need to lie sleepless at night, worried about the disaster that could befall them, and their families, and the whole of American democracy if Trump wins. They need to see your administration as a continuation of the United States they know and love; they need to see a new Trump term as portending its potential collapse.

Trump needs to stand for stripped rights, imprisoned dissidents, concentration camps, blood on the streets. He needs to stand for broken windows, and riots, and ancient democratic institutions smashed into splinters. He needs to stand for rapacious greed and repugnant corruption. He is an avatar of graft, anger, and stupidity. Against him, you are a bulwark of normality and decency. You are old, you may be tired, but Americans need to know you stand for the light of democracy marching on; he is a thousand screaming and screeching foreign despots embodied in a single twisted soul.

I know that for many years Democrats hoped to beat Trump’s authoritarianism by hiding from it. “Do popular things, pass good laws, get stuff done, and the voters will abandon Trump’s cheap thrills and come on board with us.” It’s never quite worked as hoped. And now the final failure of this strategy seems clear: your administration has accomplished so much, and it has helped you so little.

There is no way to win this battle by hiding from it. You have to fight, head on, with the full stakes in plain view. This will not be fun, for politicians or voters; of course it won’t. There is no nuance here, no careful maneuvering. It’s good and evil standing up and slugging it out until one side collapses. Certainly Trump is holding nothing back, so neither can we, and that’s exhausting.

But that struggle, the conflict, the emotions it evokes, the fear it produces, that’s what draws people in, makes them pay attention, and makes them choose. The good news is that throughout the past eight years, most Americans, when forced to choose between democracy and dictatorship, have always picked democracy. There is a silent majority of patriots in your corner. Find them, make them vote, and win.