As a student, I was taught that politics is a contest of ideas. Experience has shown me otherwise.
In a recent New York Times interview with Ezra Klein, conservative activist Chris Rufo captured this reality succinctly: “While we should have the facts on our side, and while we should use logic, by itself, it’s insufficient. Politics operates on a deeper level, an emotional level. Politics occurs on the field of sentiment and public opinion much more than on the field of abstract argumentation.”
That conclusion may unsettle many Democrats. Yet, stripped of ideology, it aligns with decades of research in political psychology. Voters rarely decide by weighing policy papers or fact-checking speeches. They respond to stories about who they are, what threatens them, and where the country is headed.
This insight helps explain one of the Democratic Party’s central challenges in the Trump era. For years, Democrats have assumed elections are won through better evidence and more detailed plans. Donald Trump has operated differently. With the instincts of an entertainer, he leads with narrative on issues from immigration to national decline, treating facts as optional and subordinate to the story he wants to tell.
This is not a call for Democrats to abandon facts or embrace demagoguery. Quite the opposite. Facts are essential for governing. But campaigning is a different task. Governing demands evidence, expertise, and compromise. Campaigns require something more fundamental: a story that convinces people their lives can change.
Facts do not interpret themselves. A number can describe a problem, but it cannot tell voters why that problem matters, who is responsible, or what kind of future is possible. For that, politics requires narrative.
Trump’s political strength has never been policy detail. It has been narrative compression. “Build the wall,” “drain the swamp,” and “Make America Great Again” each reduced complex problems to a story voters could grasp instantly: someone took something from you, corrupt elites let it happen, and only a strong leader can restore what was lost.
These stories were often false, inflammatory, and cruel. But they were emotionally clear. They identified villains. They named victims. They promised restoration. They turned politics into a drama in which Trump alone could punish the guilty and redeem the nation.
Democrats too often answered those stories with fact-checks, program descriptions, and warnings about norms. Those responses were necessary, but they were not enough. A correction is not a counter-story. Telling voters that Trump is wrong does not automatically tell them what Democrats believe, whom they are fighting for, or what kind of country they want to build.
The recent Democratic primary in New York City offered a different example of the same underlying lesson. The candidates who broke through did not win because voters had studied every line of their platforms. They won because they connected policy to lived experience.
Affordability was not presented as a spreadsheet problem. It was a moral problem: people who teach the children, staff the hospitals, serve the food, clean the offices, and ride the trains can no longer afford to live in the city they sustain. That is a story. It gives policy emotional weight without abandoning reality.
Successful candidates make voters feel seen before asking them to accept a program. They connect public policy to private anxiety. They make government visible in the places where people actually live.
A democratic politics worthy of the name must be factual without being bloodless, emotional without being dishonest, and institutional without being abstract. That means changing how Democrats talk about the issues they already claim to care about. Democracy cannot be only about norms, courts, and constitutional principles, important as those are. It must also be about whether one person in the White House can disrupt a school, threaten a city’s budget, politicize the civil service, or turn public programs into instruments of personal power.
Economic policy cannot be only about growth rates, job numbers, or inflation statistics. It must be about whether people who work hard can afford a home, raise children, care for aging parents, and retire without fear. Education policy cannot be only about funding formulas or test scores. It must be about whether children are being prepared for freedom, citizenship, and a future larger than their parents’ anxieties.
The same applies to immigration, health care, climate, crime, and the cost of living. Democrats have policies on all of these issues. What they often lack is a common story that ties them together.
Trump’s story is dark but clear: the country has been stolen from you, and only I can take it back. Democrats need an answer that is just as emotionally intelligible but far more honest: the country belongs to all of us, and government should help people build lives of dignity, security, and possibility.
Rufo is right about one thing. Politics does not occur mainly on the field of abstract argument. It occurs where people feel fear, hope, anger, pride, resentment, and belonging. But facts still matter. They matter enormously. Facts alone do not win elections. Stories do. The party that learns to tell a truthful story about the lives people are actually living will have the best chance not only to win power, but to govern with purpose once it has it.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
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