Yes, Dems can make things even worse for themselves

If you're like most Americans, you don't think Joe Biden is doing well as president. Inflation is out of control. His administration appears to lack any viable plan to control border crossing. The president's gaffes alternate between the amusing and the alarming. The Democratic Party seems headed for a pasting this November.

But things could always be worse — and they would be if Biden listened to his left-wing critics.

They look at Democrats' low poll numbers and think the way to raise them is to go even further left and to be even more partisan. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx Democrat, recently said that Biden and other Democrats have erred by clinging to the outdated belief that bipartisan deals are possible. They are in danger of losing seats this fall, she claims, because they have catered to a dwindling group of independent voters rather than delivered for the party's base.

That means they should play hardball with centrist Democrats such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Ocasio-Cortez thinks that the failure of the Democrats' "Build Back Better" initiative vindicated the legislative strategy that she and other progressives pursued: holding up passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill the moderates wanted to pressure them to support the social spending bonanza in Build Back Better.

It's a triply strange conclusion. First, the strategy failed: Progressives could not maintain the blockade against the infrastructure compromise. Second, a number of moderates indicated they were prepared to see both bills die rather than cave to the progressives. If the blockade had held, then, the result might have been no bills passed instead of one.

Third, the fact that the infrastructure bill became law, with Republicans providing the margin of victory in the House, invalidates Ocasio-Cortez's premise that bipartisan deals are no longer possible. So does the passage of bipartisan bills to tackle COVID throughout 2020 and the recent passage of a federal anti-lynching law.

The progressives' electoral strategy is not based on reality, either. It's true that since June Biden has lost 11 points among Democrats in Gallup's polling. But he has lost 17 points among independents. Moving middle-of-the-road voters from the Republicans to the Democrats was crucial to Democratic victories in both 2018 and 2020. In Arizona, independents went for Trump in 2016 but for Biden in 2020. That's why the state flipped to the Democrats last time.

Ocasio-Cortez herself has benefited from the suburban swing to the Democrats during the Trump presidency. It's the reason she has spent her entire tenure in the House in the majority.

But she doesn't have firsthand experience with appealing to voters in the center, or needing to. She won a low-turnout primary for an extremely safe Democratic seat in 2018 and has never had a tough race since.

Some of the Democrats who have cooled toward Biden, meanwhile, consider themselves moderate or conservative. What has disappointed them about him probably isn't insufficient progressivism.

But the left wing of the party has a tendency to assume it speaks for all Democratic voters. Writing for CNN.com, Jill Filipovic says that Biden is putting congressional Democrats at risk by proposing a "timid moderate" budget. Among its sins: proposing more money for policing. When Biden spoke up for funding the police in his State of the Union address, some left-wing activists expressed outrage.

A lot of Democratic voters feel differently. Last fall, Pew Research found that more than a third of Democrats want more police funding. Only a quarter want less. A slightly higher percentage of black adults than of Democrats favored increased funding. And all the numbers have been shifting rapidly in favor of more money.

In the overall population, the more-money side outnumbers the less-money side by 47% to 15%. A new NBC poll finds that 75% of all Americans, and 59% of Democrats, would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports "funding the police and providing them the resources and training they need."

It would be political malpractice for Biden not to respond to this public sentiment. But many on the left are shutting the ears against anything the electorate is trying to say. In the American Prospect, a progressive magazine, Robert Kuttner supplemented the familiar advice that Democrats need to do more to mobilize the left with the suggestion that they make Donald Trump the issue in their races this fall. That idea was of course central to last fall's campaign by Terry McAuliffe, who is not the governor of Virginia.

If the elections go as expected, Democrats will suffer deep losses. But Ocasio-Cortez will still be in her dark-blue seat. And she'll still be explaining that everything would have gone better if only the rest of the Democrats were just like her.

If Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, it's already obvious what one of the main Democratic lines of attack will be: He's just like Donald Trump, only worse.

"He increasingly acts like his role model, the tyrannical Donald Trump," the Orlando Sun-Sentinel editorialized last year. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote at CNN's website that he has a "mini-Trump brand" (and also reminds her a bit of Mussolini). Molly Jong-Fast, in a newsletter for The Atlantic, concluded her tour of press clips about the governor with this conclusion: "DeSantis may prove to be the Trojan Trump who finally brings down American democracy."

What makes DeSantis, or any other Republican, "too Trumpy"? The critics offer a wide variety of answers. Jong-Fast is willing to put the label on anyone who opposes either mask mandates in schools or abortion. Charlie Sykes, in the Bulwark, claims that DeSantis is hostile to civil liberties, quoting a report that he signed a bill that "grants civil immunity to people who decide to drive their cars into protesters who are blocking a road."

The Guardian quotes an academic likening DeSantis to Trump because both have an "in-your-face style." Thomas Edsall conducted an informal survey for a New York Times column on DeSantis as "the Man Out-Trumping Trump." Respondents cited his eagerness to "own the libs" (Democratic strategist Paul Begala), his "right-wing agenda" (Democratic pollster Geoff Garin), and his being "a creature of power" (another academic). An earlier Times article said his combative relations with the press are modeled on Trump's.

Many of these criticisms apply to nearly all Republicans, including pre-Trump and anti-Trump ones. Some of them apply to Democrats, too: Aren't all politicians "creatures of power"? Other resemblances are real but faint. There's a difference between calling out a reporter for repeating a slogan of his opponents, as DeSantis recently did, and dismissing critical or inconvenient coverage as "fake news," which was Trump's M.O.

Some of the charges are simply false. Floridians who drive into protesters will not have civil immunity even if judges let that DeSantis-signed bill go into effect. They have the ability to raise a defense in court if, for example, they inflicted damage because a violent public disturbance was using the threat of force to impede their safe movement.

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Edsall concedes that DeSantis lacks Trump's "impulsiveness and preference for chaos," but says that just makes him a more fearsome opponent for liberals. In important respects, though, that means the country should have less to fear from him.

Consider some of the lowlights of Trump's presidency. DeSantis opposed Trump's policy of mass family separation. He has nothing like Trump's record of praising dictators. And while DeSantis has not been a profile in courage in calling out Trump's lie that he won the 2020 election, he also has not broadcast that lie himself.

The accusation that DeSantis is an enemy of democracy rests heavily on exaggerated claims about an election law he signed; a "sweeping voter suppression law," the liberal Brennan Center calls it. It's true that the law includes new restrictions, such as requiring that county employees oversee ballot drop-boxes. But it's also true that the law leaves Floridians with greater ballot access, in key respects, than a lot of states run by Democrats. Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, unlike Delaware and New York.

Finally, there's the matter of DeSantis's lib-owning style. He is obviously happy to annoy liberals for no reason other than pleasing conservatives, as when he smirked his way through a bill-signing in Brandon, Florida. But it's absurd to take DeSantis to illustrate that Republicans now think smiting the left "matters more than achieving policy objectives," as one journalist put it.

Even the "culture-war" legislation DeSantis has backed, regulating classroom instruction on sexual orientation and on race relations, has been about more than upsetting his political opponents. Agree or disagree with those bills, they are a response to concerns some parents have about contemporary educational trends. And his administration has an extensive policy record beyond those issues. He has cut taxes, expanded school choice, spent money on protecting the Everglades and legalized medical marijuana.

It's not a record that appeals to most Democrats, of course, and they are entitled to make their case against both the substance and the style of DeSantis. They may find, though, that the Trump-clone attack falls flat — and that not every voter who disliked Trump disliked him for the same reasons they do.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Ramesh Ponnuru has covered national politics and public policy for 18 years. He is an author and Bloomberg View columnist.