Connecting is inherently a two-way relationship because the politician needs the electorate to turn out at the ballot box. Trump is able to connect in the way that gets folks to take action on his behalf. Since 2015, so many other Republicans, both mainstream and Trump imitators, have failed to be able to move the right-wing electorate in the way that Trump has. And that is the challenge that faces the Republican Party in about 3 more years unless they intend to run Trump again for an unconstitutional 3rd term.
I'm not overlooking the ways in which Trump gets his supporters to take action on his behalf, I'm simply taking it for granted for the sake of this discussion.
Dems did fail at "getting their voters to the polls" in 2024...in what was the most outlier POTUS election in modern history with the presumptive nominee dropping out mere months before the general election and a replacement nominee being chosen by current office/general acclimation without a primary. The main lesson that can be taken from the 2024 election is not be sure your nominee can see the election season through to the general election. Once it became obvious that Biden wasn't up to being the nominee, the race was Trump's to lose. Taking almost anything else from solely from that race says more about the person making the proclamations than it does the race itself.
Finally, my take you quoted is completely devoid of substantive ideas for how Dems should engage or compete on cultural and economic terrain...because I made no efforts to address that topic. That it is "pablum" or "all defensive, reactive, and minimalist" is completely in your head because it doesn't exist and you're projecting your own issues with the mainstream of the Democratic Party onto my completely nonexistent argument.
Snoop, I get that you weren’t trying to offer a full strategy in your original post. But when someone says Democrats shouldn’t try to win over right-leaning voters and should just focus on “getting their people to the polls plus a few folks from the middle,” it implies a strategic posture; one that is, frankly, reactive and defensive. That’s what I was responding to.
You say I’m projecting my frustrations with the mainstream Democratic Party onto your post. Maybe. But your analysis does mirror the kind of minimalist thinking that dominates institutional Democratic politics: treat elections as turnout operations, ignore the cultural terrain, avoid confronting hard questions about economic messaging, and hope the other side flames out.
My assumption was that anyone talking seriously about 2028 would need to wrestle with the deeper political forces reshaping the electorate. If you’re writing off the right-wing base and limiting the battleground to base + middle, you’re reinforcing the same failed 2024 framework. That wasn’t just a fluke of Biden dropping out. It was a systemic failure of message, meaning, and connection. The outcome revealed just how brittle the mainstream approach had become.
Regarding the “connection” piece: you keep shifting what you mean by “connection,” which makes your argument hard to follow and less convincing.
At first, you framed connection as a deep, emotional, two-way bond. Something Trump uniquely maintains by constantly affirming his supporters’ identity and grievances. You said others like Vance only have a one-way relationship, telling voters what they want to hear but lacking real connection.
But then you pivot to saying connection means getting voters to turn out and act on a candidate’s behalf, which is a much looser, instrumental definition that any politician can achieve if they motivate turnout.
These two definitions are very different. If connection is just about turnout and political action, then why do you insist Trump has it uniquely while others don’t?
As I’ve said, voters don’t need a genuine emotional bond to be moved by a candidate: they need a credible signal that their concerns and identity are understood and represented. That’s how political power is built.
Overall, you’re right that not all political “connection” (in the original, emotional sense) is deep or lasting. But that’s the point. Most politicians don’t even try to forge the kind of symbolic, identity-rooted connection that makes voters feel seen. Trump does/did, and now others on the right are learning how to copy it. Unless Democrats stop thinking like managers of coalitions and start thinking like builders of political meaning, they’ll keep playing catch-up in this landscape.
