Barney Frank, the co-author of Dodd-Frank, the most important banking legislation since the New Deal, died yesterday. In 1987, he was also the first gay member of the House to come out as gay voluntarily. Frank was famously witty. After pointing out the right’s stingy social policies, he once quipped that the moral majority believed “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”
Because of his liberal record, I was gratified to learn from an Atlantic interview published just before his death that Frank fundamentally agrees with my own political views, as you will read in this post.
By refusing to repudiate far-left ideas, Frank said, Democrats “allowed the impression that we agree with them.” The previous post emphasized the danger of the Democrats appearing to agree with far-left extremists. This time you’ll meet the motto of strategic defense:
Democrats should conspicuously reject far-left extremism.
“I know most Democrats agree with me,” Frank told The Atlantic, “But they’ve been intimidated out of saying so.” Again, that’s one of the most central points of both books — his subtitle says it all: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy (out Sept. 15).
Now, as the book continues, I’ll keep my promise to you last time and explain the Super PAC that Got “They/Them” Backward and
What Charlamagne Tha God Had to Do with It
This is the second installment of a serialized book. Installment one is here.
Learning from mistakes. I know what some of you are thinking: With Republicans in power and Trump back in office, why are we criticizing Democrats? That feels disloyal. I get it.
But here’s what every sports team knows: you’ve got to watch the game footage—not to mock or blame the other side, but to assess your own mistakes. That’s painful. The natural reaction is to make excuses or just focus on what the other team did wrong. But mocking “them” and making excuses will not win games.
Looking at our mistakes isn’t disloyal—it’s the only way to win. The Republicans aren’t going to fix this for us. We have to learn from what we’ve done wrong, or we’ll keep losing easily winnable elections.
So we are going to watch some game footage that I’ve spooled up for you. We’ll examine real plays—some catastrophic, some successful—to understand what defense looks like in practice. Our goal: learn the kind of defense that wins championships.
I’ve been learning defense since seeing what happened in 1972. It was painful, but it taught me that, as much as I liked Dick Gregory, that was not the way to win. Running our most far-left presidential candidate ever had just cost the Democrats 20 million votes. Back then, that meant 40% of the base that the Democrats had acquired by 1964. We still have not completely recovered, but it’s time to look at the most relevant mistake we can find.
When Trump played offense with his most powerful attack ad—” Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you,” Harris had no defense. None at all? Consider what California’s Governor Gavin Newsom said on his first podcast: the issue concerned people who are “illegal, incarcerated individuals getting taxpayer-funded, gender reassignment surgery.” That, he said, “is a 90/10” (90% against Harris).{}
Law-abiding Americans have no such right to government-funded surgeries. Understandably, many Americans saw Harris as favoring “illegal, incarcerated individuals” over Americans, just because they were trans.
And, as Newsom pointed out, “She didn’t even react to [Trump’s ad], which was even more devastating.” She had boxed herself in by taking far-left positions during the 2019 primaries, and there may have been no escape. But here’s what she should have done back in 2019 and 2020. This is the strategy I’ve been building toward—the one that wins elections and depolarizes the country at the same time.
The Rejection Defense is simple to explain but almost impossible to use. It blocks the other side from successfully labeling us as extremists—as socialists, Marxists, police defunders, or “no borders” advocates. The goal is not to attack the far left, but to prove that loyal Democrats are not them. Here it is:
Democrats should conspicuously reject far-left extremism.
That’s it. And if you’re thinking “I already understood that from your examples”—you’re right. The strategy isn’t complicated. What’s complicated is finding the courage to use it when you know the far left will come after you for doing so.
That’s why “conspicuously” is the hard part—and why this defense works. It’s not easy for Democrats to prove they’re not controlled by the far left, because far-left activists operate within the Democratic Party. In the bluest states, they win by championing ideas that sound reasonable until you examine them closely. You’ll see a dramatic example of this in the next section.
Other difficulties are easier to handle by keeping certain facts in mind. The Rejection Defense does not mean “Cut back on our offense!” It does not mean rejecting everything the far left believes. And it does not mean rejecting people. Most on the far left are dedicated idealists—we’re rejecting their harmful ideas, not the idealists themselves.
The Super PAC that Got it Backward. The main super PAC behind Harris’s campaign, Future Forward, spent over $900 million{} on ads based almost entirely on Blue Rose Research, run by David Shor, whom I’ve mentioned. In March 2025, he published a graph as part of what was supposed to be an autopsy of the 2024 election. Blue Rose is where Harris got most of her advice up until the final three weeks.
One data point on that Blue Rose graph shows LGBTQ as the issue of least interest to voters out of 35 issues. “Pay no attention to LGBTQ issues,” was the Blue Rose message. Just focus on the highest-interest issues—the three purely economic issues. Trump’s team must have seen roughly the same ranking of issues according to public interest—and did the exact opposite of the Blue Rose advice. They spent more than $200 million on their LGBTQ-focused ad, “Kamala is for they/them.”
In late September, Charlamagne Tha God, host of the popular radio show The Breakfast Club and a strong Harris supporter, saw Trump’s “they/them” ad while watching NFL football. He reacted on air, saying, “That ad was effective. … That ad was impactful.”{} With Shor’s focus on high-public-interest issues, it would never have occurred to him to run a defensive LGBTQ ad or any ad on an issue with such low-interest statistics.
By mid October, a new version of the ad, featuring Charlamagne’s comments on the Breakfast Club, was being aired against his wishes. It worked even better. Shor had assumed public interest was fixed. That ad showed it could be changed in 30 seconds.
After the election, someone at Blue Rose leaked to the NY Times that “The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective 30-second spots.”{}
In December, the Progressive Policy Institute revealed that Blue Rose had tested the ad and “After watching the ad, 2.7% of voters shifted to Trump.”{} That may not sound like much, but Shor himself said, “Imagine you say 70 words to someone and there’s a 2.5% chance they changed their mind? I think that’s incredible and a big deal.”{} Although he wasn’t referring to Trump’s LGBTQ ad when he said that, he was implicitly admitting that the impossible had happened. Trump’s ad had scored better than what Shor called “incredible and a big deal.”
Shor likes to say, “People who answer surveys are really weird.” Well, people who analyze surveys are even weirder. Blue Rose should’ve hired Charlamagne Tha God; he’s the kind of person they wish they understood.
The disturbing end of this story is that the Democrats permanently buried their 2024 Election autopsy on December 18, 2025. That’s like a sports team burying their game footage so their players won’t have to see their mistakes. It might make them feel better—until the next game.
Back to depolarization. I advertised a double benefit for the Rejection Defense, but you might have noticed the depolarization benefit seemed half missing—we only depolarize Republicans. And you might think: If the Republicans won’t depolarize the Democrats, what’s the use—the country will still be half polarized?
But Republican polarization is what we fear most—not the polarization of Democrats against Republicans. Of course, the Rejection Defense won’t eliminate inter-party disagreements, so some polarization will remain. However, as I’ll document when I discuss the practicalities of implementing the Rejection Defense, research since 2020 has discovered that the Rejection Defense targets the most dangerous type of polarization.
Rachel Kleinfeld, writing for the Carnegie Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, documents this major breakthrough. She explains that political violence stems from fear, not merely dislike or even hatred.{} And the fear targeted by our Rejection Defense—that the radical left will utterly change life as Republicans know it—is the fear that’s most dangerous. Although we may only be reducing polarization in half the population, we would be eliminating most of what we fear about polarization—acceptance by Republicans of political violence and other anti-democratic behavior.
So why do we keep fighting with one hand tied behind our back—playing offense, but not defense? Two problems make defense hard to use: First, rejecting far-left ideas feels wrong—like abandoning our allies. And second, those who try to play defense get punished. Let’s start with the first concern by looking closely at some left extremism that you’ll feel good about rejecting.
Next: The hero who dared to say, ““Don’t call me nigga” in Madison.