This Does Not Seem Like the Best Way to Respond to Trump’s National Guard Deployments

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Bad news: Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to the District of Columbia, a stunt that may soon be replicated in Chicago and other cities, has generated one of the most harrowing, full-blown cases of Strategist Brain that this writer has ever seen.

In a nutshell, Strategist Brain is the misapplication of the kind of data that is gathered by people who create campaign advertising. Democratic operatives and elected officials who suffer from terminal manifestations of the disease take microtested information about which sound bites appeal marginally more than other sound bites to undecided voters—data that can be useful in its own limited context—and use it to guide the governing decisions and institutional goals of the entire party in a manner that is, ironically, ultimately detrimental to its electoral chances.

In this instance, the brain in question belongs to David Shor, a message-testing consultant who is invited every month or so to speak to party leaders at a luxury hotel about how to “win back the working class.” Shor’s firm, Blue Rose Research, has circulated a memo about Trump’s D.C. takeover that concludes, “unfortunately,” that describing the military deployment as a “violation of Democratic norms” or an example of “rising authoritarianism” is not effective. Instead, the memo advises Democrats to “pivot” the subject of the deployment to a discussion of, for some reason, tariffs. Here’s the text it suggests for making that delicate turn:

Donald Trump’s takeover of D.C. is a stunt to distract from the pain his tariffs are causing families. Trump’s tariffs are driving up prices on groceries, cars, and everyday goods, hitting working people hardest. Instead of fixing the economy he’s hurting, he’s picking political fights to change the subject. Americans deserve lower costs, not more chaos.

It seems far-fetched that the best way for the opposition to respond to a ruling strongman’s domestic deployment of the military—which he’s doing while promising that “politics” will no longer be necessary once he eliminates voting machines and adds 100 seats to his party’s majority in the legislature—is to say, “Americans deserve lower costs.” If you asked someone in your life about the National Guard deployment and they replied by talking about the price of cars, you would probably think there was something medically wrong with them, which is incidentally how most Americans view the Democratic Party. (Let’s not even get into the barely-English phrase “instead of fixing the economy he’s hurting.” Is Blue Rose Research having a stroke?)

This is the kind of data that some researchers might take a second look at because it fails the common-sense test. It was generated, per the memo, by measuring the extent to which 21 sound bites—taking both pro- and anti-deployment positions—affected Trump’s approval rating among a group of people surveyed online. If you think that sounds like a convoluted way to figure out whether voters like something or not, trust that other actual experts in the field of polling and marketing feel the same way—and consider that when you simply ask voters directly whether they approve of the deployment or the job that Donald Trump is doing right now as president, they generally say they don’t.

This is especially true of swing voters. Forty-five percent of independent U.S. adults surveyed by YouGov were somewhat or strongly against the D.C. deployment, while only 26 percent supported it. Data for Progress identified a smaller split among “likely voters” but still found that 52 percent of independents opposed the deployment, as opposed to 41 percent who supported it. More broadly, YouGov found that 53 percent of independents “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s overall job performance, against only 14 percent who “strongly approve.”

Relatedly, one of the least popular sound bites in Blue Rose’s test consisted of the words Trump himself used to justify the deployment. (Which were: “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs, bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore.” At least it’s good writing.) If you pull your head out of the weeds a little, this does not particularly look like an issue Democrats need to wriggle out of talking about.

Thinking more broadly—and I will put this in the language of a memo, in case someone wants to circulate it—the party’s odds in the 2026 midterms could also be affected by whether urban voting centers are occupied by armed soldiers under the command of an administration that calls the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.“ Downplaying the issue of the deployment, that is, could have “second-order” consequences that can’t be measured by Shor’s tests—however potent it might be in the abstract to remind voters that a president should be fixing the economy he’s hurting. It might, you’d say, be bad strategy.

All considered, it would have been interesting if Shor had tested a more matter-of-fact message, like Having to walk by a guy with a machine gun while you are just trying to take your goddamn kids to school is a violation of your goddamn rights as an American, and Democrats are against it. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said something like that on Monday, though at a speech in Chicago:

Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against, and it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances.

What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.

Pritzker’s remarks went on for well over 30 seconds, as risky as that might be, but that does not appear to have prevented them from getting noticed. In a way, he’s set up a nice A/B test in the field of persuasion science—an experimental trial, if you will, to compare against the Shor-influenced control group in which his party’s senior figures usually place themselves. If it has the ancillary benefit of scaring the president out of invading Illinois, all the better.

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