Why calling Trump 'fascist' closes the deal

Image via Creative Commons/Business World.
John Stoehr
October 24, 2024

I think the clearest evidence that being called a fascist is hurting Donald Trump is the reaction by “independent” and GOP talking heads who foolishly defend him against the allegations or deflect them.

Their thinking goes something like this:

Yes, yes. It was bad when Trump said, as president, that he wanted “Hitler’s generals.” It was also bad when his former chief of staff said he fits the profile of a fascist. And OK, it was really bad when the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he’s “a fascist to the core.”

But we’re used to all that, they say. That’s just Trump being Trump. The real question is how will Kamala Harris appeal to undecided voters.

I’ll tell you how she’s going to do that.

By calling him a fascist.

Among these talking heads, there is a working assumption – that undecided voters are not moved by politics but only by policy. If Harris hopes to win them over, they say, the question is what policies are they looking for and how is she going to sell those policies to them.

There is a second assumption layered on top of the first – that Harris can’t reach them with policy if she’s focused on politics. Conclusion: calling Donald Trump a fascist is going to alienate undecided voters.

These assumptions were implicit in Republican pollster Frank Lutz’s commentary last night after the CNN town hall, in which the vice president put the word “fascist” in her own mouth for the first time.

“The pivot to the ‘threat to democracy’ messaging also coincides” with her drop in polls, Luntz said on Twitter Wednesday. “Nearly all forecasts now give Trump a higher chance of winning in November.”

That’s not quite right. Trump’s lead, if you want to call it that, is within the margin of error in polls that shows him a bit ahead of Harris. You can call it “a higher chance of winning” or you can call it a dead heat.

Point is, Luntz assumes cause and effect. He assumes that the more she says Trump is a threat to democracy, the lower her polling will go. Conversely, he assumes that the more she talks about policy, the higher it will go. This interpretation is based on conventional wisdom since the 1990s. It says openly attacking your opponent backfires.

I think there’s something to this conventional wisdom about undecided voters. Obviously, Kamala Harris does, too. That’s why she has spent so much time on the campaign talking about popular government policies that will improve the lives and lift the fortunes of ordinary Americans.

But I also think this conventional wisdom largely gets undecided voters wrong. Policy and politics are not necessarily two distinct things to them. They can be two things, but they are not always. What’s more is that undecided voters very often don’t care about policy. What they care about is often something murkier, like character or vibes.

You could say calling Trump a fascist doesn’t “close the deal.”

But you could say it does.

Given what we know, I think the second one is right.

I’m not alone. CNN’s John King asked a panel of undecided voters for their thoughts after watching Harris call Trump a fascist for the first time while characterizing him as unstable and unfit. She said that while he has an “enemies list,” she has a “to-do list.” King asked the panel if anyone is more likely to vote for Trump. No hands. King confirmed that everyone was either open to Harris or committed.

This is just one TV panel, but it seems to represent a meaningful correction to the conventional wisdom, especially the idea that voters are so inured to Trump’s villainy that nothing he says or does will make a difference. We heard that after he was convicted on 34 felony counts. We heard it again after two former generals said that he’s a fascist.

And yet, when a CNN panel of undecided voters heard Harris’ case for herself and against Trump, they were not prone to giving the former president a second chance. They were not alienated by the vice president’s arguments. They were open to her or committed.

Given all that, the panel’s pro-Harris reaction could be interpreted as if they had learned about the details in the case against Trump for the first time or had finally understood those details with sufficient clarity. In other words, there’s another, third assumption – that undecided voters have heard it all and what they really want to know is policy.

No, they have not heard it all, and Harris knows it.

“I don’t necessarily think that everyone has heard what you and I have heard repeatedly,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, before explaining to the audience what many of them might not know, which is that:

“The people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans … who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, former national security advisor, former secretaries of defense and his vice president, have all called him unfit and dangerous.”

She went on: “They have said explicitly that he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said that he should never again serve as president of the United States. We know that’s why Mike Pence is not running with him, why the job was empty. And today, we learned that John Kelly, a four-star Marine general, who was his longest-serving chief of staff, gave an interview recently in the last two weeks of this election talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is.”

She added: “Why is he telling the American people now? I think of it as if he’s putting out a 911 call to the American people. Understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House. This time, we must take seriously: those folks who knew him best and who were career people are not going to be there to hold him back.”

How is she going to convince millions of people who already know all this? Cooper had asked. Her answer was they don’t already know.

They need to be told. Once they are told, they will be convinced.

That’s been her campaign from the start. It’s not about the odds, but the stakes, with basic faith in the people to make the right choice.