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The “Vote Blue” Myth

Democrats are rehashing the failed approach of the Obama era to avoid confronting the Supreme Court.

Jess Coleman
6 min readJun 29, 2022

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When President Obama entered office, he did so with an ambitious progressive agenda stretching from foreign policy to health care to immigration and more. To translate the energy generated by Obama’s historic victory into actual legislative success, many activists on the left committed to a grassroots approach to power — they would keep the pressure on. As Christopher Beam wrote in Slate at the time:

Everyone on the left wants to see Obama succeed. But they can’t expect him to have the courage of their convictions. If they want a public option, gays in the military, an end to indefinite detentions, they can’t expect him to do it on his own — they need to make him do it.

The “make me do it” approach to power became a sort of meme of the Obama years, repeated over and over and over again by activists and writers encouraging the left to sustain the political power built during the 2008 election. As the story is often told, the phrase came from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who responded to a group of activists calling on the president to support bold progressive change, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.”

It’s an inspiring tale that illustrates a largely uncontroversial view of political power: in a democracy, our leaders only act — and only should act — with a mandate from their voters. All power is bottom-up. But the story, as chronicled in Dissent, isn’t true. There’s no record that President Roosevelt ever uttered these words, and the story changes based on who you ask. While the sentiment is admirable in the abstract, it provides little help in describing how political power works in this country, because it simply misrepresents history. As argued in Dissent:

Far from welcoming outsider pressure, politicians committed to insider dealmaking have a long track record of dismissing and disparaging critics who push them to do better — and they have often preferred to demobilize the supporters who got them elected rather than face heat from potentially unruly movements. Organizers committed to stopping such demobilization must accept that it will likely earn them the ire of the White House.

This isn’t a surprising outcome. The “make me do it” framework is especially appealing to politicians because it allows them to indefinitely sideline those pushing leadership for more aggressive action. It assumes a status quo of inaction, and places all responsibility for change on those who do not wield any formal power. Most importantly, the “make me do it” strategy is incomplete. It fails to provide any answer for what happens next: how do we know when we have “made them do it,” and what happens when our leaders still refuse to act?

“Vote Blue” is the new “Make Me Do It”

Much like the Iraq War and the Great Recession spurred a shock to our political system that led to the election of Obama, the Trump presidency, the right’s brazen attacks on democracy, and most recently, the Supreme Court’s assault on women’s fundamental human rights has generated an enormous amount of outrage on the left that has quickly translated into demands for action. Specifically, following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe, activists and elected representatives on the left called for a slew of reforms, from packing the court to abolishing the filibuster to opening federal lands to abortion services.

Democratic leaders, however, quickly threw cold water on any aggressive response. President Biden delivered a short speech that failed to even mention the many proposals offered by progressives. Jim Clyburn, a top House Democrat, merely called the decision “anticlimactic.” Vice President Harris, in an interview with CNN, refused to even address filibuster reform to protect abortion rights nationwide because “the votes aren’t there.” Her solution? “Change the balance” in Congress.

In other words, go back to the drawing board. Vote for Democrats. “Make me do it.”

In one sense, Harris’s plea makes total sense. Democrats do not have the votes to abolish the filibuster or expand the court. But apart from ignoring the fact that Democrats do have the power — through the branch of government in which Harris herself serves — to, for example, open federal lands to abortion providers (another proposal shot down by Harris), the “Vote Blue” solution ignores that Democratic voters have been applying this very same pressure for years. Progressives have spent the past decade warning about the Supreme Court, the right’s attacks on democracy and, specifically, the threats to abortion rights. Democrats — despite controlling the White House and Congress for relatively significant periods of time since 2008 — never bothered to do anything about it.

While Harris is technically right that Democrats require two more Senate seats to implement the reforms with the most impact, she fails to explain why that means the Biden Administration can’t preemptively support court packing, or make filibuster reform a party-wide priority, or publicly pressure centrist Senators to follow along. What is the point of voting for Democrats if existing leaders of the party are unwilling to commit to or communicate what they will do if given the power they seek? Will Biden suddenly support court reform if the votes exist in Congress? If not, how many votes is sufficient? Harris doesn’t provide an answer. By entirely offloading responsibility to voters, Democratic leaders have created a Kafkaesque political reality where it is increasingly impossible to discern what avenues exist to achieve change.

Ever since the proliferation of the reductionist political doctrine, “it’s the economy, stupid,” Democratic leaders have essentially viewed politics as a static exercise. Voters, we’re told, only care about a narrow set of “real issues” — gas prices, inflation, jobs — and electoral success is achieved by carefully following public opinion and letting the results fall in line based on an immovable economic and political environment. There is, under this view, no role for those in power to play in shaping public opinion or elevating certain issues to salience. It is entirely up to voters to speak with their votes, to “make them do it.”

And there is, of course, another glaring problem with an approach to politics that rejects virtually any role for those wielding power. Entrenched white minority rule is increasingly the definitive feature of American government. Democrats cannot, simply as a matter of math, win control of government with a majority — or even a super majority — of the vote. The Senate is skewed towards conservative states. The Electoral College is as well. The Supreme Court is an antidemocratic tool for exercising right-wing power. Even in the incredible situation where Democrats can achieve control of the White House and Congress — as they have now — the filibuster provides a final fail safe for protecting right-wing, minority rule.

Where are Democratic voters supposed to turn when the system is stacked against them, and when their leaders respond to every call to action with one more hurdle that must be cleared?

There is always work to be done: there are always Senate seats to flip, elections to win, coalitions to build. Democrats seem to view progress as a destination, a magic set of political occurrences that must take place in the first instance, at which time the leaders can fulfill their role of signing the bills and achieving the goal all at once. But progress is a journey, one in which our leaders must play a constant role, even if it is (ideally) secondary to the role played by activists and voters. Where would we be, for example, if Democrats had used the Obama trifecta to codify Roe? Or if Democrats had mounted a more aggressive opposition to the nominations of Justices Barrett and Gorsuch? Or if Biden began his presidency by calling for filibuster reform and court expansion, rather than wasting months prioritizing bipartisanship? What if, in other words, Democratic leaders had responded to a shift in public opinion and major electoral victories by building formal power and working towards greater progress one step at a time? We simply don’t know, because no one ever tried. To now claim with certainty that those efforts would have been hopeless, that we were destined for this era of obstruction and stagnation, is beyond disingenuous, a circular and nihilistic reasoning that fundamentally rejects politics as an avenue for bettering people’s lives.

Democratic voters have never rejected their role. Women and minorities propelled Biden to victory. Black voters handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Progressive activists have succeeded in moving public opinion dramatically on abortion, gay marriage and court reform. Democrats have voted blue, they have applied pressure and built public support. But in terms of results, they find themselves further away from progress than any point in the past several decades.

Our leaders are right that power must be built from the bottom. It will only work if those at the top are willing to grab it once it’s offered.

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Jess Coleman

I’m a lawyer and a writer focusing on politics, democracy and the courts. Published in The New Republic, NY Daily News and HuffPost. Twitter: @jesskcoleman.