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David Frum: 4 reasons to doubt Mitch McConnells power

The Republican Party knows how to use polarizing rhetoric to split people along tribal lines. Donald Trump spent most of the 2018 midterm campaign talking up the caravan, the Central American refugees who were marching toward the U.S. border seeking asylum. Their numbers were small to begin with, and they dwindled further as they neared the border. Nonetheless, they made a useful talking point for Republicans, who wanted to remind their base on which side of the ideological divide they belonged. When Trump sent the U.S. military to the border, the subsequent outrage was justified, but it was also a trap: It drew attention away from real-life issues and encouraged voters to think they had to make a false choice between the caravan, crime, and illegal immigration on the one hand, and tradition, safety, and law and order on the other.

In a few key states, that gimmick worked. The caravan helped him, former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri bluntly said after she lost to Josh Hawley, a Republican. She noted that her opponent was also helped by the Kavanaugh thing, meaning the story, presented by Republican media, of an upright conservativea man trying to protect familiessmeared by dangerous liberals.

Inciting a culture war didnt work everywhere. And in places where it didntin all those suburban House seats won by centrist Democrats, for examplethat was often not because candidates loudly denounced the presidents use of troops at the border, but because they changed the subject. When undecided voters were thinking about jobs and health care, they were prepared to break their habits and vote for Democrats.

Read: What Ruth Bader Ginsburgs death means for America

Politicians in other parts of the world also use culture wars to their advantage. In 2018, I wrote about the Philippines, a country whose president, Rodrigo Duterte, managed to keep voters minds on his shocking policy of murdering drug dealers. Rather than thinking about poverty or illiteracy, his electorate argued about whether they were for him (and thus for law and order) or against him (and thusas he would put itin favor of crime and drugs). A recent study I helped design also showed, among other things, how the Italian populist Matteo Salvini gained traction by keeping Italians focused on the polarizing subject of migrants, even as the number of actual migrants dropped dramatically. Polarization is a well-known authoritarian tactic, too. Russian President Vladimir Putin has his state-controlled media cover the perfidy of the West rather than the countrys declining living standards. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has used anti-Greek rhetoric in the run-up to elections to avoid discussing his own countrys economic mess.

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Don't Make the Election About the Court - The Atlantic