Politics is a Zero-Sum Game

And the media's preemptive Kneel Before Zod moment

Programming Note

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Winning is a Zero-sum Game

Democrats need to win. That’s it. That’s the whole equation. Republicans do whatever it takes to win, whether calling into question free and fair elections, stacking the courts to make it harder for traditional Democratic constituencies to vote, breaking ranks with longstanding party dogma — anything.

Democrats win when the environment favors us — but we don’t bend the environment to help us win. Since 2020, we have not been winning much. On our way to regaining the presidency that year, we lost a net dozen House seats to preside over a very narrow majority. During the midterms two years later, we avoided a blowout but lost an additional nine net seats and the House majority. And this November, we lost it all — the White House, the senate and the House. Needless to say, the Supreme Court is already gone to us and will be for the foreseeable future.

We are out of practice when it comes to winning, even when we manage to pull off a victory because of a once-in-a-century pandemic or a Supreme Court ruling that came like manna from heaven.

Democrats have fallen prey to a rigid mindset that polices virtue at the expense of victory. But if we are serious about being permanently competitive and not just when the other side screws up, we need to acknowledge that winning often means holding your nose, swallowing your ideals and electing the lesser of two evils.

That’s not inspirational, I know. It’s not what Aaron Sorkin raised a generation of Democrats to believe. It doesn’t comport with Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric, which came along just as the West Wing was winding down. But it’s the truth and it’s what a better future is predicated upon.

So yes, Rashida Tlaib, you might be really pissed off at how Joe Biden keeps shaking a stick at Benjamin Netanyahu while giving him all the weapons he wants, no strings attached. But urging your supporters to vote “uncommitted” during the Michigan primaries got them in the habit of voting against the Democratic ticket, so that they either stayed home or voted for someone other than Kamala Harris in November. In Dearborn, which Tlaib represents, Donald Trump beat Harris, with Jill Stein (I-Kremlin) receiving a significant share of the vote.

Tlaib declined to endorse Harris and slammed both Trump and Biden before the election. “Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn't stand for peace,” she Tweeted. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn't have to be close.”

Actually, it’s a wake-up call for Tlaib’s constituents. Almost thirty percent of the children in her district live in poverty. Trump will not be thinking about them as he is passing tax breaks for Elon Musk, abolishing the Department of Education and putting Robert F. Kennedy in charge of their healthcare.

Oh, and by the way, Trump just appointed Mike Huckabee as his ambassador to Israel. How will Tlaib’s grandmother, who lives in the West Bank — or, as Huckabee calls it, Judea and Samaria — feel after Trump gives Netanyahu the green light to annex all of it?

I don’t mean to signal out Tlaib. She is just emblematic of a one-issue voter, no matter how important the issue. For all the talk about “intersectionality” (a word that no one in the real world uses), Democrats too often fall prey to rigidity. If you are not with me on My One Thing, I won’t be with you on anything. And I will punish you by withholding my support, even if it means electing someone who will be ten times worse on My One Thing and on everything else I profess to care about.

“But, but,” you might say, “why should I sacrifice my values to reward a politician who supports policies I find morally offensive?” To which I respectfully say: grow up. Seriously.

Life is about hard choices. I have incredibly strong feelings about New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, whose lawyers spent years telling me to keep my mouth shut about the toxicity I witnessed on his campaign — even if it meant preventing me from helping a young Murphy volunteer who alleged that she was sexually assaulted by one of his senior aides. I was so offended by Murphy’s behavior that I launched a national non-profit to end the use of non-disclosure agreements to cover up toxic workplace behavior. I spent years fighting for and then passing a federal bill that would preclude Murphy or anyone else from doing to anyone what he did to me.

So you know I am serious when I say that Murphy and I have values that are very far apart — but not so far apart that if he ran against Trump, I would not vote for him.

This is not because I am a blind partisan who will always vote for a Democrat. It is because I am an adult who understands that even someone with whom I disagree 60% of the time is better than someone with whom I disagree 80% of the time. Yes, even if he is terrible on My One Thing — because I don’t have just one thing I care about. I have many things I care about, some more than others. Holistically, they determine who I vote for.

Here is the conversation I would have with people who either voted for Trump, third-party or did not vote at all as a way to send a signal to Joe Biden and Harris: Don’t complain about your poor choices, rather than vote. If a Republican comes along who would be markedly better on the issues you care about, vote for that Republican. But I don’t think even Tlaib would say that Trump is better on the issues near and dear to her heart than Harris would have been.

At the end, elections are not about rewarding or punishing politicians. They are about rewarding or punishing yourself.

Politics is a zero-sum game. Every election has a winner and a loser but regardless of how you voted, and even if you did not vote at all, we all live with the consequences. You do not get the luxury of saying that you don’t want to engage, that you are disgusted by both sides and are removing yourself from the process.

Every single element of your day, from the price of the orange juice you drink for breakfast to the quality of the roads on which you drive to work to the kind of medicine you take when you fall ill is dictated by winners and losers on any given election day. Even if you go live off the grid in a forrest somewhere, government policies will dictate whether the tree you have made your home gets cut down to make way for a road or a pipeline. You don't get to ignore that, even if you want to.

So get back in the game. Understand that life is about a series of choices — many of them unpleasant. It’s not about whether you have filet mignon or cat food for dinner. Often, it’s about whether you have Spam or cat food for dinner. Neither is particularly tasty but I know which one I’d like to eat in order to survive.

Odds and Ends:

Kneel Before Zod

For years, I have been begging the Democratic Party to come off as less condescending towards Trump voters. Yes, there is a MAGA base that will literally stick by Trump even if he made good on shooting someone on Fifth Avenue but many of his supporters in 2016 and 2024 are persuadable — which is how Democrats converted them in 2018, 2020 and 2022. We just have to speak with them respectfully and try to convert them, rather than scold them for not seeing things that are so damn obvious to us.

I’ll give you an example: I am a staunch believer in a woman’s right to choose. But if you believe that life begins at conception, as many people do, I understand why you would oppose abortion at any stage of pregnancy. To those people, abortion is murder and it is incumbent on them, as it would be morally incumbent on any of us, to prevent a murder from taking place. So if I were to speak with them about this subject (and I have), I would not tell them that they oppose a woman’s right to choose because they support the patriarchy and want to keep women down. There are better ways to make them come around to my viewpoint — or maybe not. Scolding them for hating women is not the way to get them to see the light.

For that reason, I am a big proponent of how Pete Buttigieg engages the Fox News audience. Chances are, he will not convert 99% of them to his views. But if he converts even 1%, that’s better than nothing — and that’s how you begin to win elections. As I keep saying, voters are a lot less rigid than politicians.

And the most rigid politician of all is Donald Trump, which means that no one who has a platform should be in the business of normalizing Trump himself. Trump is unpersuadable for reasons that a psychiatrist would have an easier time explaining than I can. He is wholly transactional, which means that individuals who transact with him can persuade him to treat them differently. But as a whole, no one is suddenly going to get him to act differently, especially now that he has run his last race and could not care less about the historical legacy he leaves behind.

This is why I was so disgusted to see Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski hightailing it to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to meet with Trump. To be clear, this was not an interview with the former and soon-to-be president of the United States that would have aired on MSNBC. That would have had journalistic value. This was, Scarborough and Brzezinski claimed, so that the two of them could talk to Trump about the issues on which they disagreed, from abortion to the media. What did Trump say? Scarborough and Brzezinski would not tell us. They did, however, assure us that Trump “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”

This is how normalizing Trump happens, my friends. It starts with opinion leaders refusing to provide details about conversations with the incoming president of the United States to their own viewers, while assuring those same viewers that Trump — just like any normal politician — is “interested in finding common ground” with the opposing party. The same Trump who recently sued The New York Times and Penguin Random House for $10 billion because he does not like facts that those two outlets published about him. The same Trump who called CNN and MSNBC “the enemy camp” during his victory speech. That guy doesn’t even want to find common ground with non-MAGA media, never mind with political opponents.

If you are of a certain age, you know the scene in Superman II when the arch-villain Zod and his minions invade the White House and instruct the president to “kneel before Zod” as a way to humiliate and show their supremacy over the most powerful man on earth. The president does it, reluctantly, in order to save humanity. But some of our media leaders, from Jeff Bezos to Scarborough and Brzezinski — are doing it preemptively, not to save humanity but to save their own access to the corridors of power. This would be fine if they used that access to report on their conversations with him. No one is suggesting that the press cut off the president. But that’s not what is happening here.

Speaking with Trump voters is critical to converting them. But what is happening in some quarters, from The Washington Post editorial board to MSNBC’s flagship morning show, is not furthering a free and independent media. It is bending the knee to Zod even before he instructs you to kneel.

Look, either some of us will continue to write and say things that are oppositional to Trump or we will all be locked up in the gulag, like anyone opposing Vladimir Putin is today. Time will tell. It is not hysterical to suggest that it might happen, unlikely as it seems. Many things about Trump at first appeared unlikely, until they became normalized and then accepted as “Trump being Trump.” When the journalists and pundits preemptively bend the knee, they ensure that this normalization happens a lot faster.