WASHINGTON — For prominent Democrats around the country, the message to Georgia voters about January’s runoff elections couldn’t be more clear: Voting for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will keep Mitch McConnell from running the U.S. Senate.
But the candidates themselves have embraced a more balanced approach, forming most of their pitches around policy proposals and character attacks on their GOP opponents without focusing solely on villainizing the Republican leader from Kentucky.
The strategic divide reveals a broader debate now taking place inside the Democratic Party that revolves around McConnell and how the party should campaign in an era when Donald Trump is no longer president — one certain to simmer long after the Georgia races end and Joe Biden assumes office.
“We have to make some messaging choices,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama who advocates for putting McConnell front and center in the Democrats’ message. “Do you focus on Trump, or do you focus no someone else? You need an embodiment of that message.”
It’s a debate that elicits a spirited reaction from many Democrats, pitting those who finally see a chance to push a broader indictment of the GOP against those who think dwelling on a congressional leader will never move voters like the outgoing president.
And it sits near the center of the party’s post-Trump political future, taking place most urgently — if privately — in the Georgia Senate elections.
“There’s a school of thought Democrats should be making this more a national argument, the way Republicans are,” said a Democratic consultant familiar with discussions around the Georgia campaigns. “McConnell’s not popular anywhere. The question is, is he the right message?”
A second Democratic aide who worked on the Biden campaign and confirmed internal disagreements between operatives said he believed Ossoff and Warnock should do more to drive the point to voters that continued GOP control of the Senate would result in an inability to move beyond the Trump years. If they don’t, the aide fears, they are likely to lose.
“Keeping GOP leadership means Trump retains a foothold in everyone’s life,” the aide said. “He can send a tweet and kill a bill. They have been accomplices this whole time. Lay it all at their feet and talk about the way forward with the majority.”
For the most part, the Democratic candidates in Georgia have chosen to frame their races about tangible benefits to their state’s residents, like coronavirus relief and health care access, while castigating their rivals as personally corrupt for questionable stock trades amid a pandemic.
But there’s a less noticed difference between the mindsets of the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns. Ossoff hasn’t shied away from tagging McConnell as the problem. Just this week, he sent a pair of tweets aimed at McConnell, and he regularly brings up McConnell’s name in TV interviews. Ossoff is also running a radio spot that warns, “Republicans will block everything Joe and Kamala try to do,” but doesn’t mention McConnell by name.
“From the start of this runoff election, Jon has made the stakes of this election very clear. If Mitch McConnell keeps his grasp on the Senate, he will stand in the way of the work President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect (Kamala) Harris were elected to do,” said Miryam Lipper, Ossoff’s spokeswoman.
While GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler invoked the name of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer nine times in their debate on Sunday, Warnock never mentioned McConnell at all. Warnock’s ads are designed to present him as a moral leader grounded in his biographical pastoral roots.
As the least known candidate when the runoffs started, Warnock appears content to run a race that’s a referendum on Loeffler’s limited record.
“The message from the reverend from the beginning is: This is about Georgia, what Georgia needs and what he’s hearing from Georgians,” said an aide to Warnock.
Whereas the Georgia Republican ticket and their allies rarely miss a chance to link their opponents to the most liberal and polarizing members of their party — like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — there is some trepidation among Democrats that nationalizing the contests could backfire with voters who chose to get rid of Trump, but remain ideologically to the right of the Democratic Party.
After an election, political parties always look for a new message to promote or an opponent to vilify. But that process might be different now because of the unique way Trump dominated the political landscape during his time in office — and the prospect that unlike other former presidents, he might remain a force in politics for years to come.
For years, Democrats used Trump — a figure more reviled among Democrats than any GOP leader in memory — to motivate their base in fundraising pitches and ads.
The temptation to continue doing so is irresistible, according to some strategists, especially as he promises to maintain a visible presence in American politics and even publicly contemplate a repeat run for the White House in 2024.
“This will be unprecedented for American politics. There is going to be an opposition White House and somebody who will command attention,” said Eric Johnson, a Florida Democratic consultant and former Capitol Hill chief of staff. “[Biden’s] going to get to run against Trump again in two years and that’s unusual. And that might just give Democrats a break. Trump is going to be even more off the rails.”
But to some operatives, the chance to move on from a Trump-focused message satisfies a long-held belief that Democrats’ fixation on him has come at the expense of a larger critique of the whole Republican Party, one they argue helped the GOP make down-ballot gains this year despite the president’s defeat.
Even if Trump is holding rallies and hinting at a future White House bid, they say, Democrats would be better served making McConnell the symbol for an out-of-touch and extreme party because it implicates all Republican candidates on the ballot. In many red-tinted states, in fact, they argue that McConnell is far less popular than Trump, especially with white working-class votes, because many see the Senate leader as just a typical politician.
“Picking someone other than Trump will lead to less enthusiasm and lower turnout among some of the base, and even give Democrats a chance to win over some voters who supported Trump, some of the Obama-Trump voters,” Pfeiffer said.
Vilifying McConnell, the argument goes, might also be a matter of necessity ahead of a series of looming legislative fights between congressional Republicans and an incoming Democratic administration.
Late last month, a group of activist liberal groups issued a memo urging Democrats to aggressively confront McConnell in their messaging, arguing that he has hoodwinked Democrats before by promising bipartisan negotiations before withdrawing support entirely.
“He is not a guardian of decorum or civility,” read the memo, issued by liberal groups Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, Data for Progress, and New Deal Strategies. “And it’s time Democrats end the illusion that he is someone who will be moved to do what is right.”
The memo urged Democrats to run against McConnell from “day one.”
Running against an unpopular congressional leader isn’t a novel strategy. It’s just one that the GOP has proven to be more effective and consistent at deploying. House Republicans have spent a decade running ads that link Democratic candidates to Pelosi, often making connections to her the centerpiece of their campaigns.
Democrats considered doing the same to former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan at the start of the Trump presidency, and McConnell himself has been a regular punching bag for Democrats for years — though hardly at the same frequency in paid media as Pelosi.
Polling shows that McConnell is deeply unpopular nationally: 48% of Americans viewed the Kentucky lawmaker unfavorably, according to a Gallup survey taken earlier this year, compared to just 33% who viewed him favorably. By comparison, 55% of Americans viewed Pelosi unfavorably, while 39% viewed her unfavorably.
Still, in Georgia, McConnell remains at the periphery of the Democratic message.
Biden’s visit to Georgia next week will shed light on how forcefully Democrats plan to elevate the stakes of Senate control. But given that the president-elect is seeking a working relationship with McConnell, at least at the outset of his administration, Biden seems more likely to highlight policies he’d like to enact with a Democratic Senate.
“He can’t say, ‘I want to work with Mitch McConnell’ and tell Georgia Democrats to vote for Ossoff and Warnock,” said Eric Johnson, a Republican consultant in Georgia informally advising the Loeffler campaign. “It’ll be, ‘Help us pass our agenda.”
Other Democrats argue that emphasizing either Trump or McConnell might be misguided.
Faiz Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, said talking up McConnell plays right into the hands of the senator, who relishes the chance to absorb all of the Democratic attacks to take the onus off his Republican colleagues.
“If you start obsessing over him individually, you lose the fact that everybody else in his caucus is getting more of a free ride in their election,” Shakir said. “Because they are not associated with his toxicity and his unpopularity.”
The party would be better off, he added, highlighting the vulnerabilities of individual senators in the 2022 Senate races and offering a broader indictment of the GOP’s policy agenda, which he said would avoid making politics a contest of personalities. To many voters in swing states, McConnell is a “distant figure,” he said.
