Yes, the end game of every election is to defeat the opposition.  Yet according to a recent NPR / PBS NewsHour / Marist poll , 58 percent of Democrats now say ousting Trump is “more important than whether a candidate shares their position on most issues.”  That’s a 12 percentage point increase since June. 

Democrats may not yet agree on which presidential candidate to support or where they stand on Medicare for All, but a majority have reached a consensus on what they now see as the most important issue for the 2020 election:

Black people always understood this.  That’s why they’re largely supporting former Vice President Joe Biden.  It’s not that they believe Biden is the best candidate or that Senators Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris wouldn’t make fine presidents.  Yet they recognize America as more racist and sexist than America will ever see itself.  They don’t trust that this nation will support a woman for its highest office.  Biden is a pragmatic choice.  While it’s still early and subject to change, right now a majority of black Democrats are backing the person they believe stands the best chance of kicking Trump out. 

As for the rest of the Democrats, they’re catching up to openly admitting that beating Trump needs to be their focus. 


Leading up to last year’s midterms, the Democratic leadership all but scolded anyone who claimed they were campaigning against the president above all else.  Months before the crucial 2018 elections, Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s minority leader, warned that focusing only on Trump would be “a mistake” and that “you cannot just run against Donald Trump.” 

Every election since Nov. 8, 2016, has been about Trump.  That won’t change until he’s out of office.  He was the primary reason the midterms had the highest voter turnout in a century, and why Democrats reclaimed the House in an overwhelming fashion. 


Anti-Trump ire, which grows deeper and wider every day, could propel a Democrat back into the White House next year. 

Perhaps it was Trump’s self-inflicted season of hell between July 4 and Labor Day — what the Washington Post characterized as the president’s “lost summer” — that convinced more Democrats than ever to say out loud what they’ve known for months: All that matters is beating Trump. 

And that was before Trump’s Sharpie scribble on NOAA’s Hurricane Dorian map, reminiscent of a child changing failing grades on a report card, followed by reports that agency employees who contradicted Trump’s false claims about the storm’s path toward Alabama were threatened with termination. 

This is one thing Biden has gotten right from the beginning.  This election, he says, “is a battle for the soul of this nation.”  If Trump gets a second term, everything crumbles to dust.  Debating how to improve health care coverage is fine, but under Trump, the number of insured Americans declined for the first time since passage of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010.  In part, that’s because Trump has worked to undermine its efficacy. 

This nation can’t afford four more years of this malicious, calamitous griftocracy. 

Several times a week, I’ll get an e-mail from an angry Trump supporter claiming that slamming the president will all but ensure his re-election.  That’s a nonsense tactic meant to stifle the president’s critics. 


They bellow as if Republicans weren’t just as focused on beating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton three years ago.  It was certainly enough for many to overlook Trump’s racism, misogyny, disdain for a decorated war hero, mendacity, disparaging of a Gold Star family, and mocking of a disabled journalist.  Even if they had to hold their nose — and I suspect it wasn’t a struggle for most — they still voted for Trump, and will likely do so again. 

Now the Democrats are getting in formation.  After Trump dumped John Bolton as national security adviser, Warren, who is surging in the polls, tweeted that “the American people are better off” without Bolton in the White House.  She added, “The world will be better off when the man who hired him in the first place is out too.” 

Sounds like the start of a pithy campaign slogan: Dump Trump. 

There’s no time for half-stepping, or stepping around the fact that one term of Trump is already one term too many.  More than anything else this election season, Trump is the issue.  He has always been the issue.  It’s about time that Democrats finally own it. 

Renée Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.  Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.