President Biden’s video announcing his reelection campaign last week began with images of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.), in announcing his run for the Senate on Wednesday, led with images of the attack in his video, too. So did Missouri Senate candidate Lucas Kunce (D), who even launched his campaign on the anniversary of the attack.
These early indications suggest that Jan. 6 could feature prominently in Democrats’ 2024 campaign efforts in a way it didn’t late in the 2022 campaign.
“I took off my jacket and got ready to take on anyone who came through that door,” Allred says of Jan. 6 in his video. “Ted Cruz? He cheered on the mob … then hid in the supply closet.”
Kunce’s video features an actor impersonating a running Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who was shown in surveillance footage on Jan. 6 fleeing rioters shortly after raising his fist to those assembled before the day turned violent. “I swear this coward’s always running from something,” Kunce says in the video.
It’s not clear how much the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol contributed to Democrats’ better-than-expected 2022 election — versus, say Roe v. Wade being overturned — and some were surprised at how little it featured late in that campaign. But Democrats have signaled early in the 2024 cycle that they are hardly content to drop the subject.
And importantly, that comes as Donald Trump appears intent on re-litigating that fateful day and even embracing its participants in ways that make Republican officials queasy.
As for how that will play?
There is no question that views of Jan. 6 have evolved over time, particularly on the right. Despite the initial bipartisan condemnation of what transpired that day, Republicans have gradually embraced the idea that the situation was overblown and even that participants have been persecuted.
They’re more likely to view it as a legitimate protest than an insurrection or even a riot. And a new poll this week even showed more Republicans want a 2024 candidate who supports those who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 than one who criticizes them. Efforts to retcon that day’s events by Trump and the likes of Tucker Carlson have clearly borne fruit.
But convincing Republicans isn’t the ballgame. There is evidence that Jan. 6 remains something that alienates and could mobilize independent voters in particular:
- In a Fox News poll after the 2022 election, 7 in 10 independents said it was at least “somewhat important” for Congress and the Justice Department to investigate Jan. 6, and about half said it was “very important.”
- In a Quinnipiac poll around the same time, 53 percent of independents said Jan. 6 was an “attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” while 40 percent said too much was made of it and that it was time to move on.
- A Monmouth poll showed independents saying by a similar margin (53 percent to 41 percent) that it was indeed an insurrection. Another poll showed a similar margin saying it was an “insurrection and a threat to democracy.”
- In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, 53 percent of independents said they strongly disapproved of the Jan. 6 participants, and 67 percent at least somewhat disapproved, compared to just 13 percent who approved.
That last result gets at an important point. While many Republicans have warmed to the Trump narrative that Jan. 6 was overblown or that the people involved have been persecuted, that’s not the same as their embracing the actions of that day. The same poll shows that even Republicans disapproved of those who entered the Capitol by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.
That might seem discordant next to the poll showing that more Republicans want a candidate who supports those people than criticizes them. But that poll showed that 60 percent of Republicans preferred a candidate who didn’t talk about it at all.
It’s clear there remains plenty of discomfort, even as the apologists are ascendant on the right. To the extent Republicans and independents don’t care to focus on the issue, it’s not really because they think it was a good thing.
But Trump is approaching it as if it is something worth commemorating and defending.
At a March campaign rally, he not only played a song by the “J6 Prison choir” — a choir The Washington Post reported Thursday features at least four people accused of assaulting police — but he showed highly misleading video of that day. The video omitted violence by his supporters while including examples suggesting it was the police who were the aggressors.
Combined with Trump’s literal embrace of a Jan. 6 convict last week — he called her a patriot and signed the backpack she said she took to the Capitol that day — it’s clear where this is headed.
Trump wasn’t on the ballot in 2022; it was left to Democrats to keep the issue salient. But because that was challenging, nearly two years after the fact, and because abortion rights emerged as a pressing issue, they didn’t really drive home the matter of Jan. 6. Polls suggested that Americans didn’t generally see the GOP as more of a threat to democracy than Democrats.
What 2024 presents is a chance to point at what Trump is doing and saying on the campaign trail with this. There also remains the prospect that he and those around him could be criminally charged in the matter, giving the issue new relevance.
That doesn’t mean it will be a hugely potent issue. Putting something in your announcement video doesn’t mean it’ll be a centerpiece of your campaign. Democrats might be featuring it because of its effect as a fundraising tool as much as anything, and Cruz and Hawley were at the forefront of contesting the election on Trump’s behalf.
But also pay attention to the states these Jan. 6-invoking Democrats are running in. Both Missouri and Texas are red states. The idea is apparently that this kind of issue could be an effective wedge, peeling away crucial Republican-leaning independents who might not be comfortable with Republican lawmakers assisting in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and Trump’s increasingly embracing Jan. 6 figures.
Both Allred and Kunce are long shots. But it’s worth watching to see how they do and how many other Democrats emulate their approach — and how much Trump hands this issue to them on a platter.
