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How Democrats can win (Part 1)
I'm tired of being frustrated all the time. Looking ahead, I'll start to focus on where Democrats have opportunities in '26.
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As someone who pays close attention to the news, I thought this past week was exhausting. I’m not going to relitigate all of it,¹ because it’s too easy to become a fatalist or a nihilist if you’re only paying attention to the bad news.
So, for the next couple of posts, I’m going to focus instead on the positive, namely where I think Democrats have opportunities to change the narrative and win (or win back) voters.²
What I’ll talk through in this post: the Trump administration is using the might of the federal government to come down hard on free speech. This is dangerous for America—and an opportunity for Democrats, if they choose to take it.
Article summary:
Americans across the board feel less comfortable sharing their opinions and worry that the government is threatening their rights to free speech.
That fear is especially present for Republicans and young men—creating an opportunity for Democrats to win back a demographic that’s moving away from them.
Democrats can own the issue of free speech, but it’ll require them to have difficult conversations in uncomfortable spaces. They haven’t always done that well.
Free speech had a rough week
In case you need a reminder, here’s why this is salient:
Trump threatened to pull broadcast licenses for networks that are “against” him.
Jimmy Kimmel, after making a joke related to Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, had his show suspended by ABC. (It returned last night.)
Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested that the government would pressure Disney (which owns ABC) to pull the show: “Frankly, when you see stuff like this—I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.”³
Americans worry about losing their free speech
All of this is notable because Americans, for a while now, have become increasingly worried about their freedom of speech.⁴
In 2020, 46% of Americans felt that they were less free to speak their mind than they once were. For context, only 13% of Americans felt that way during the height of McCarthyism, a period famous for its suppression of free speech.
Five years on, people—especially men and Republicans—worry that they can’t freely express their opinions.⁵
54% of Americans say that “the biggest threat to free speech is the government” vs. 25% who say that’s not the case—and this poll was done back in February. A more recent survey (from Sept. 19) finds that Americans believe the government is by far the biggest threat to free speech.
59% of Americans say that “freedom of speech has become more limited during my lifetime,” vs. 24% who say that’s not the case. 63% of men (vs. 55% of women) agree that free speech has become more limited, and 29% of men in college say that they’re not comfortable sharing their political opinions (vs. 22% of women).⁶
Let’s look more at that February poll, specifically focusing on partisan and gender divides. 60% of Republicans, vs. 48% of Democrats, say that the government is the biggest threat to free speech.⁷ 69% of Republicans, vs. 48% of Democrats, say that free speech has become more limited in their lifetime.
All of this is an opportunity for Democrats to create a wedge issue—especially for young men, a group that moved hard towards Republicans in the last election.⁸
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Ted Cruz is right (?!)
I’d seen the reporting that Ted Cruz forcefully came out against FCC Chairman Carr’s “the easy way or the hard way” comment, but I wanted to listen for myself. Here’s the segment from his podcast, from the 21:11 mark.⁹
Jimmy Kimmel Fired-Was it Right & Should the FCC have Gotten Involved plus Trump Designates ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization Premiere Networks |
Cruz’s logic for being against Carr’s comment isn’t necessarily mine. His take, basically, is that if Republicans weaponize the FCC now, just imagine what the Democrats will do when they’re in power!
But the broader point—that it’s a very dangerous precedent for the government to threaten the revocation of broadcast licenses for stations whose programming they don’t like—is a good one, and one where I agree with what Cruz is saying.
Ted Cruz here isn’t alone among Republicans, by the way, and there are lots of elected Republicans and right-leaning media personalities who are coming out and saying the same.
Some of this, I’m sure, is driven by the genuine philosophical belief that this is wrong. But these people (usually) aren’t fools, and I think they see that the Trump administration is creating an opening for Democrats that wasn’t there before.
The left needs to own up to its mistakes on this issue
During the Biden years, a well-worn Republican talking point—one that Ted Cruz himself used—is that the Democrats, in cahoots with the largest tech companies, were censoring free speech. That’s a bit of a different conversation, because tech companies aren’t part of the government,¹⁰ but the point was clearly resonant.
Either way, in this context, Democrats need to reckon with the fact that things were taken too far in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020 and into the early years of the Biden presidency.
As I noted earlier, it was a heated moment, and almost half of Americans in 2020 felt less free to speak their minds than they’d felt before.
The New York Times apologized for publishing an op-ed from a sitting United States Senator, which was crazy then and seems crazier in hindsight. It ultimately led to opinion editor James Bennet’s resignation and the persistent accusation—not without reason—that the NYT had become too activist.
Fair or not, Democrats became—and are still labelled—as the party of the “woke” and all that entails, something Democrats began addressing way too late.
Universities, which should be the home of open debate and discourse, were often hostile to speakers, students, and professors from the political right.
For a while, there was a real sense that saying the wrong thing (at work, on social media, etc.) could cost you your job.
Does that last point sound familiar? We’re seeing something very similar happen now after Charlie Kirk’s assassination—with the explicit encouragement of the Vice President, I’ll note.¹¹
There was also a sense, a few years ago, that Big Tech was in the pocket of the left. Just looking at who went to Trump’s inauguration, and looking at who kisses the ring today, it’s impossible to make that argument anymore.
Here’s the opportunity for Democrats
This is where I see an opening:
The perceived crackdown on language and open discourse, especially once it accelerated in 2020, was unpopular and led to pushback from voters. Here’s a chance to reshape the narrative.
Tech companies, which Republicans have seen as stifling free speech,¹² are squarely in the pocket of the President now. Big Tech is also unpopular and trusted by few people; Democrats can and should flip that narrative too.
People worry their free speech is under attack—with good reason. The President and his administration are very explicitly using government power to attack our right to free speech.
Democrats should lean in hard on this issue. Go after Republicans who have rolled over (and call out their hypocrisy). Go on Republican talk shows and podcasts.¹³ Don’t worry about placating the annoying Democrats of Twitter, who don’t represent the average Democrat, much less the average voter.
There’s a chance to make inroads here with voters of all stripes, especially Republicans and young men. But that requires showing that Democrats can put their money where their mouth is, and have uncomfortable conversations in unfamiliar spaces. Standing up for free speech is only hard when you’re talking to people whose views you find objectionable.
Address the dangers of Big Tech and the perils of FCC overreach on Fox News and conservative talk radio; talk to Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly about policy proposals to depoliticize the FCC (to protect against the excesses of either party).¹⁴ This is an issue where calling out Republican hypocrisy would bolster the argument that Democrats are making—especially if Democrats can honestly acknowledge their own issues in the past.
I hope our elected officials and candidates are up to that challenge.
Feel free to share this post with someone who will find this interesting. If you’re reading this email because someone sent it to you, please consider subscribing.
By the way, I really believe satire and comedy is critical now more than ever. Here’s what I wrote a couple of weeks ago; it might be even more resonant this week:
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Between attacks on free speech and on the Fed and on H1B visa holders, to say nothing of a looming government shutdown, there was way too much happening.
After all, Trump isn’t particularly popular. Moreover, when you look at how he’s handling different issues (immigration, inflation, etc.), voters generally don’t think he’s doing a good job.
Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, used Disney’s muted response to Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws a few years ago to knife then-CEO Bob Chapek and claw his way back to power.
The story is an interesting one, but in its shortest version: Bob Iger was the CEO of Disney and picked Bob Chapek to be his successor; after Iger left, he immediately regretted it; the two fought extensively, publicly and privately; Iger eventually got Chapek ousted and came back as CEO.
So there’s a fun irony to Iger finding himself in the position of having a former Disney CEO publicly criticize his approach to delicate political issues.
My research into this was inspired by a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago, when I was hanging out with a friend of mine and his 23-year-old younger brother (who I’ll call “Grant”).
We ended up talking about politics, and not knowing anything about how Grant votes, I asked him a more general question: what’s the political issue that you care most about?
Grant’s answer: he felt like people weren’t able to have a civil conversation anymore. He and his friends were worried that anything they said would ostracize friends, or get them cancelled. (Even if he recognized that “cancellation” is a pretty amorphous concept.) He’s never lived in a pre-social media world and has the sense, right or wrong, that people used to more freely debate and more civilly disagree in the past.
Data is not the plural of anecdote, but Grant clearly isn’t alone here.
The two things are correlated these days—i.e., men are more likely to be Republicans—so it’s a little hard to disentangle that in the polling. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting trend.
Very much related to all of this (and related to the footnote above, about how much Republican-leaning demographics care about free speech), here’s additional data on people ages 18-34:
Free speech is a more important issue for people who didn’t go to college than people who did.
It’s a more important issue for white people than non-white people.
It’s a more important issue for men than women.
(Here’s the source for all of this data.)
Polling done at this exact moment might find a different answer—I suspect this fear has spiked among Democrats. But this is the best data that we have to work off of.
My perspective: this move young men are making towards Republicans may be a long-term trend, but it isn’t necessarily so. If we want to change that, it’s incumbent upon Democrats to reach out to young men and share a resonant message with them.
Defending free speech is part of that outreach, I think. But the problem is certainly much larger than just one policy issue.
A few other notes here:
If you’ve ever wondered, “does Ted Cruz do a good impression of a Goodfellas-era Italian-American mobster,” the answer is a pretty emphatic no. But I (genuinely) respect that he went for it and committed to the bit.
Cruz references Adam Carolla’s partnership with Kimmel (on The Man Show) as a golden era of Kimmel’s comedy. Set aside any views you have of Kimmel (as a political figure or as a comedian), Carolla is the one who’s become really unwatchable. His performance at the Alec Baldwin roast a few years ago was just brutal.
Albeit ones with vast reach and control over public discourse.
There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to this crackdown! And frighteningly, there’s no shortage of content to fill the page.
In case there was any ambiguity here about how Republicans feel, that link comes from the America First Policy Institute.
It’s clichéd to talk about Bernie Sanders going on Joe Rogan, but in the sense that people watch, it works! (In any event, I think it’s overly simplistic to say that Joe Rogan is cleanly part of the right-wing media.)
This is clearly part of Pete Buttigieg’s strategy, looking ahead to 2028, and I think it’s a good one.
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