When Donald Trump defied polls and expectations to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House in the November 2016 election, millions of people across the U.S. reacted with shock and disbelief. The confused and angry emotions that followed Trump’s Electoral College victory and popular vote defeat, attracted many to find catharsis in joining the Jan. 21 Women’s March, the day following Trump’s inauguration. In fact, the Women’s March, where more than 4 million rallied in over 650 cities across the U.S., has become the largest national political protest in U.S. history.
One year after Trump took office, and with his popularity plummeting due to his administration’s unpopular right-wing policies, erratic behavior, and the ongoing investigation into Russia’s involvement in his 2016 campaign, another set of women’s march events succeeded in attracting upwards of 2 million participants in hundreds of cities and towns across the globe. However, this year’s actions reflected the success of local organizing efforts that brought together people working on a variety of issues over the past 12 months, including groups organizing for racial justice, immigration, healthcare, disability, reproductive and LGBTQ rights, gender equality and the environment.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, who examines the strength and potential of the national resistance movement opposing Donald Trump’s presidency and the Republican Party agenda, as the nation prepares for the critical 2018 midterm elections. [Rush transcript.]
ROBERT BOROSAGE: Well, I think it’s a kind of wonderful outpouring of citizen energy and of obviously, the energy of women. But not just women – men as well. I think you’ve seen it reflected in these kind of elections we’ve had, where the Trump victory and this very extreme right-wing Republican Congress and its distorted priorities has now sparked not just a resistance, I think, but an energy for taking back the country and changing the direction of it that is very hopeful at this point and I hope continues to build. One of the things about this recent shutdown and the DACA dispute is, I would hope, the Democrat party and independent people put real resources into helping Latinos get registered to vote and organized and mobilized to vote in the fall.
These people have to pay a price for these politics and that comes from people of conscience; it comes from the people who are the direct targets as with women and people of color and young people and that mobilization is really vital this fall. Historically, it is exactly that part of the Democratic vote. Young people, people of color, single women tend to fall off and not vote in large numbers in off-year elections when there’s not a president at the top of the ticket. And if they come out in large numbers this fall, Democrats have a decent chance of taking back the House and even a distant chance of taking back the Senate. And that will make a huge difference in the kind of next years we’ll see the horrors of the Trump years.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Robert, since the 2016 presidential election, there’s been a lot of concern about the divisions within the Democratic party between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wing, between the progressive activists and the establishment tied to corporate money and such. Where do you see the Democrats now? And does it really matter in terms of electoral politics and the energy that’s out there with these new groups that have been organizing coast to coast. Does what happens in the Democratic National Committee matter much in terms of how well opponents of Trump and the Republican agenda do in the midterm elections?
ROBERT BOROSAGE: Well, the Democrats desperately need a huge debate about what the party is for and what it stands for. The Sanders-Clinton debate in the primaries was an example of that. And essentially, the establishment of the party has failed. It’s failed in policy terms; eight years of Obama and we have the most extreme inequality. We’re still involved in seven wars. This economy has not worked for the vast majority of Americans, and it’s failed in political terms with Democrats losing a thousand offices in state legislatures and control of the House and the Senate. And eventually the presidency.
This is the time when Democrats ought to be voting and progressives ought to be demanding a change in direction, a change in control and be challenging sitting Democrats who are not with the change. And so, I think that insurgency is not only necessary, but it’s inevitable and important. What’s interesting about all of the hand-wringing, the establishment immediately starts hand-wringing about division “because divisions will weaken us in relationship to Trump,” etc.
But the reality that we’ve seen with our own eyes over the last year is the Democratic House and Senate, because of the mobilization has been more unified than one would have ever expected in resistance to Trump in defending Obamacare, and fighting against the tax cuts, and fighting and unified and standing up for the DACA kids, and that wouldn’t have happened without the kind of mobilization we’ve had.
And then the reality is that primary fights and a real mobilization of energy in insurgent candidacies – sure, it sometimes leads to upset victories and oddball candidates that put seats at risk that might otherwise be won. But in fact, for the most part, it mobilizes new energy and gets people out to vote.
BETWEEN THE LINES: A lot of political observers talk about how Democrats, in opposition to Donald Trump and the Republican party, need more than opposition to Trump and his agenda to have an effective electoral strategy – that they have to be “for” something and not just “against” something. If you were to take a stab at a unified message that really could work to attract a lot of different people to opposition candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, what would it look?
ROBERT BOROSAGE: Well, I think that the kind of core question that too seldom gets addressed is “What’s the agenda that makes this economy work for working people? How do we empower workers to capture a fair share of the profits that their companies make? How do we limit the shipping of jobs abroad? How do we crack down on these tax havens and scams that are skewing our economy? How do we create shared security programs that in fact give people the ability to go through their lives and take risks and build secure families. And that agenda has to be more populist in the face of Trump. It has to be more hard-hitting. It has to take on the Big Money that has corrupted the Democratic party. Yeah, I think Democrats ought to have a message that makes it clear they are the party of reform. The other piece of that is, we can’t continue to pretend we’re going to police the entire world. We need a defense policy that keeps us secure but doesn’t keep us involved in endless wars without victories.
For more information, visit Campaign for America’s Future at ourfuture.org.
