Democrats need to oppose Trump on issues McCain doesn’t talk about. Since the election, the Center for American Progress, Priorities USA and other progressive/pro-Democratic groups have conducted polling and focus groups to find out why voters bailed on them. The answer has been mind-blogging — voters in key states came to see Trump as the candidate who would smash “special interests,” and the Hillary Clinton-led Democrats as the party of the elites.
Many Democrats now see that problem as a creation of a misguided Clinton campaign, which chased after soft suburban Republican voters who could be convinced to dump Trump. Clinton herself sometimes separated Trump from the larger GOP. “This is not a normal election,” she said last August. “The debates are not the normal disagreements between Republicans and Democrats.” The problem, as some Democrats worried at the time, was that Clinton was basically saying that the GOP led by Paul D. Ryan — whose economic policies had been decisively rejected by voters when he was the party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee — was mainstream.
Ryan, right now, is critical of Trump’s wilder comments, but generally happy with the opportunity for a “unified Republican government” to pass his agenda. Progressives and Democratic strategists alike now think the way to discredit Trump and Republicans is to argue that his Cabinet picks and agenda reveal are selling out working-class voters. “This guy ran for president of the United States saying, ‘I, Donald Trump, I’m going to take on Wall Street — these guys are getting away with murder,'” Bernie Sanders said earlier this month on CNN. “Then suddenly, he appoints all these billionaires.”
McCain has voted to confirm every Trump Cabinet pick save one — Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
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