Opinion by
Greg Sargent
Columnist
Yesterday at 5:18 p.m. EDT
You may have forgotten about this, but the last president of the United States incited a mob to descend on the Capitol in an effort to overturn his election loss through intimidation and violence. Much of his party has tried to erase and rewrite that history, and to kill a real accounting into it.
One reason all this has receded from memory is that Democrats have largely stopped talking about it, for some reasons that are understandable and others that are less so.
Now, one Democrat is trying to not only keep this alive in the minds of Americans, but also to turn it into an issue that motivates voters. Abby Finkenauer, a former congresswoman who is running to unseat Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley in Iowa, is talking about the insurrection in many settings, in a way that just about no other Democrat is doing.
Finkenauer, to be sure, faces an uphill battle. The Des Moines Register recently suggested that if the 87-year-old Grassley retires it could spark a “messy and chaotic” GOP primary, giving Democrats “an opening.” But the Cook Political Report rates the seat “Solid Republican.” In 2020, President Donald Trump won the state by eight points.
Nonetheless, this race is emerging as an interesting experiment in how Democrats might go about making Republicans pay a real political price for their ongoing abandonment of democracy.
Finkenauer regularly discusses the Capitol riot in highly personal terms. As she told the Des Moines Register, on Jan. 6 she watched her “former colleagues and my friends get attacked,” with the result that “the world changed and so did I.” And during her announcement video, she ripped Republicans: “Since the Capitol was attacked, they turned their backs on democracy, and on us.”
Not too many Democrats have talked about the violence and its rupturing of our illusions about democracy in such human terms. Perhaps more should.
Grassley recently defended Trump’s corrupt effort to get the Justice Department to cast doubt on his loss. Grassley actually argued that Trump “has every right to discuss ideas and strategies with his closest advisers,” as though Trump casually discussed data and ad imagery with a pollster rather than trying to enlist law enforcement into a corrupt scheme to overturn a U.S. presidential election.
And Grassley has said positive things about that sham “audit” of voting in Arizona, which is basically a test run at raising fake doubts about election outcomes — one that signals worse to come.
Wherever any particular Republican sits on the spectrum of this ongoing betrayal of democracy, you’d think Democrats could make them pay a political price for it.
Finkenauer is not the only Democrat trying to do this. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee just announced a new billboard campaign in Iowa targeting two GOP members of Congress who voted against an accounting into Jan. 6. But what’s striking is how rare this kind of thing truly is.
One problem is that the House will be decided in no small part on whether a host of Democratic incumbents survive, and the Senate will be decided in part via a slew of open seats. That means the outcome won’t necessarily turn on the fate of too many Republican incumbents, making it harder to make the conduct of Trump-protecting Republicans an issue.
But Grassley, presumably if he runs, is one such incumbent. However difficult unseating him will be, it’s good to see at least one Democrat trying to keep the insurrection from sliding down the memory hole, and trying to make Republicans pay a price for it.
