Why Democrats Keep Losing to Monsters That Don’t Exist

The modern propaganda rule is that you don’t need truth. You just need repetition.

Illustration by Abdelafatah Mukhtar

A long time ago, one of my old girlfriends told me she’d promised her sister she’d babysit for the weekend. No problem, I said. A few hours later, her sister dropped off a little girl named Rose — tiny, polite, and hopped up on the kind of joy that only pizza and sugar can buy. We took her to the trampoline park, let her jump herself dizzy, and capped the day with a marathon of The Princess and the Frog and The Little Mermaid.

She laughed, she sang along, and everything was going great … until bedtime. Suddenly, Rose refused to sleep. She was terrified. She said Ursula and the Shadow Man were coming to get her. My girlfriend tried everything — songs, stories, logic — but nothing worked. The crying kept going like a broken smoke alarm.

Finally, I said, “Can she just sleep in the room with us?”

My girlfriend said no — her sister was trying to get her to sleep alone “like a big girl.”

I sighed. “All right. Let me handle this.”

I went to Rose’s room and crouched down by her bed. “Rose, what’s the matter? Are those monsters still messing with you?” She hiccuped and nodded. “Okay — where are they?” I asked. She pointed at the closet. I said, “Stay right here.” Then I opened the closet and called out, “Alright, Shadow Man and Ursula — you think you can mess with my little niece and get away with it?” I made fake punching noises, stumbled a little, threw in a few dramatic grunts, and then announced, “Alright, Rose. I beat them both up. They’re gone now.”

She laughed, said thank you, and finally went to sleep. I wasn’t trying to win an Oscar; I just needed some quiet. I had a bartending shift early the next morning and knew I’d be useless if I didn’t get at least a few hours of rest.

The monsters in Rose’s closet weren’t real. But until somebody dealt with them, they might as well have been. I wasn’t fighting actual villains — I was fighting her imagination. Still, she needed that reassurance to sleep.

Politics, especially Democratic politics, works the same way. The monsters aren’t real — but they control the room until someone finally confronts them.

Every election cycle has its own bedtime story. This last one, the 2024 showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, was no different. It was a close race, and Trump won it on the margins — those tight, swingy counties where a few thousand votes make democracy feel like a coin toss.

And once again, MAGA’s favorite bedtime story was about the monster in the closet. This time, it wasn’t immigrants or caravans or Critical Race Theory — it was transgender Americans.

Anti-transgender political ads flooded the airwaves, built on the same fear-based architecture Republicans have been refining since Nixon. Trump’s campaign made them a centerpiece, hammering the claim that trans athletes were destroying women’s sports and sneaking into bathrooms to terrorize little girls.

Then came the infamous Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you ad — a masterclass in emotional manipulation disguised as plainspoken truth. It worked not because it was honest, but because it was simple. Fear always is.

When asked why the Harris campaign didn’t push back harder, her campaign manager said the issue “wasn’t polling significantly.” That sentence alone explains how Democrats keep losing elections they should win.

David Plouffe’s data-driven worldview — that you can focus-group your way to victory — makes sense in a laboratory. But politics doesn’t happen in a lab; it happens in a living room, a feed, a whisper, a meme. Trump didn’t need 51%. He needed just enough scared voters to flip three counties and declare divine victory. That’s the Southern Strategy 2.0: Rebrand hate as “common sense,” then sell it as protection.

In the age of digital permanence, once a lie escapes into the wild, it’s immortal.

Charlamagne Tha God learned that the hard way. He filed a cease-and-desist against Trump’s campaign for using a chopped-up soundbite of his voice in an ad that made it sound like he was on board with Trump’s anti-trans rhetoric and endorsing him.

But the damage was already done. The clip had spread across social media faster than lawyers could type. What Lennard (his real name) didn’t realize is that cease-and-desist letters don’t matter in the algorithmic jungle. Once a soundbite is online, it’s no longer a statement — it’s a ghost. You can’t kill it. You can only watch it get remixed, re-uploaded, and weaponized.

The infamous Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you ad was a masterclass in emotional manipulation disguised as plainspoken truth. It worked not because it was honest, but because it was simple. Fear always is.

That’s the modern propaganda rule: You don’t need truth; you need repetition.

I’ve written extensively about this cycle of Democratic self-blame. The Monday-morning quarterbacks who act like Harris fumbled a wide-open game never understood the field she was playing on. In What Kamala Harris Actually Got Right, I argued that even if she had run a flawless campaign, she could still have lost — and I still stand by that.

But when you start dissecting where she lost, the picture becomes clearer. Millions of dollars in targeted anti-trans messaging didn’t need to move a majority — just enough voters in just the right ZIP codes.

Does that mean Harris should’ve distanced herself from the trans community? Of course not. But it does mean Democrats still haven’t figured out how to confront political fear before it metastasizes. The boogeyman doesn’t disappear just because you ignore him. He gets louder.

To understand why, you have to look back to where this all started: the Southern Strategy.

Every semester, when I show my students Hip Hughes’s History video explaining the Southern Strategy, someone always challenges it. Even after listening to Lee Atwater explain it himself — on tape, in his own words — some students refuse to believe it.

I’ll never forget one from Fall 2018. Midway through my American Government lecture, a student stood up and said, “That’s bullshit, Professor Ealy.”

Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been his cue to exit. But I could tell I’d struck a nerve, and sometimes, nerves are where learning hides.

So I said, “Okay. Let’s test that theory. When you hear the word immigration, what group comes to mind?”

The class hesitated — then one Latina student said, “Mexicans.”

“When you hear terrorism on the news?”

Another replied, “Brown people.”

“More specific?” I asked.

“People from the Middle East.”

“And when someone mentions ‘welfare queens’ or when Trump calls football players who take a knee ‘sons of bitches’ — who’s he talking about?”

The original student exhaled and said quietly, “I get the point.”

“Do you?” I asked the class. “Because the fact that you all answered so quickly should send your critical thinking into overdrive.”

This is how the Southern Strategy evolved. It didn’t just teach politicians what to say — it taught Americans how to think in shorthand. The dog whistles are baked into our reflexes.

Atwater himself once admitted the evolution out loud: “You start out in 1954 by saying n****, n*****, n*****,”* he said. “By 1968, you can’t say n**** — that hurts you. It backfires. So you start saying stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”*

That wasn’t a slip. It was a strategy. The racism didn’t disappear; it just learned better grammar.

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That’s social identity theory in action — the reflex to divide the world into us and them. Certain words trigger instant pictures: immigrant, terrorist, criminal. Those images aren’t reasoned — they’re conditioned. Once fear bonds a group together, logic doesn’t even get a seat at the table.

A new strain of the boogeyman threat is emerging: the “monster protection program.” Trump has started deploying agents supposedly meant to “protect people” from threats that don’t exist, the latest act in his never-ending fear pageant. He’s now sending National Guard units into Chicago as if the city were a war zone rather than a functioning metropolis. It’s the same logic that powers ICE—an agency I’ve written about extensively and described for what it is: a trash organization that rarely deals with actual threats but loves showing up at Home Depots and sporting events to hassle working-class immigrants who’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve also covered how that same culture of fear turns washed-up celebrities into self-appointed crime fighters — Dean Cain trading his cape for cuffs being the saddest sequel of all. These aren’t guardians of safety; they’re hall monitors for hysteria, keeping America “safe” from the very people who make it work.

And the media, always hungry for conflict, amplifies it. They repeat conservative talking points under the guise of “balance,” giving life to ideas that should’ve died in committee decades ago.

What Republicans did with trans people isn’t new — it’s just the latest remix. They didn’t merely highlight a social issue; they attached trans identity to a sense of crisis.

They pointed to athletes like Lia Thomas, a transgender woman and former collegiate swimmer who followed NCAA rules and competed within the existing framework.

I can admit that Lia Thomas is at least worthy of a discussion. There are legitimate conversations to be had about fairness, inclusion, and biology — the kind that require data, nuance, and compassion. But the right didn’t want a discussion. They wanted a villain.

They framed Thomas as if she were the ringleader of a vast movement of trans women stealing podiums and scholarships from cisgender women, a kind of athletic apocalypse that never existed. The story wasn’t about sports; it was about fear. And the media, desperate to look “balanced,” aired the panic without ever questioning the premise.

This is the machinery of moral panic — the cycle where political elites and media exaggerate isolated incidents until the public believes civilization itself is at risk. The panic becomes a loyalty test: if you question it, you risk being labeled part of the problem. That’s where preference falsification kicks in—people pretend to agree with the outrage to avoid being ostracized. Millions of voters privately rolled their eyes at the hysteria but publicly nodded along to avoid being seen as “against women.”

And then there’s Candace Owens, who, much like the late Charlie Kirk, is not a serious debater — she’s a provocateur playing pretend. Her job isn’t to inform; it’s to inflame. She deals in volume, not validity.

Owens recently lied about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, claiming she was “born a man.” Khelif is a cisgender woman — period — yet that lie spread faster than any correction ever could. It’s the kind of smear that sticks to its target long after the truth has cleared its throat. Khelif continues to deal with the fallout to this day, her name dragged through comment sections and conspiracy channels because Owens decided a falsehood was good for engagement.

In a fair and just world, Owens would have been silenced the minute she started spreading that lie. But in this one, she gets rewarded for it — more clicks, more followers, more booking fees. It’s not debate. It’s digital arson dressed up as free speech.

That’s the trap of obedience optics — the performance of loyalty, something I explored more deeply in Break Constitution in Case of Emergency. People don’t share lies because they believe them; they share them to show which side they’re on. Truth becomes secondary to identity, and that’s how democracy drowns in applause.

Democrats, meanwhile, are still out here trying to reason with shadows. They keep treating fear as a debate, not a disease. And every time they hesitate, the monster grows.

The abortion boogeyman followed the same pattern. Once upon a time, abortion wasn’t even a partisan issue. It was a moral question, yes, but not a political one. That changed when conservatives realized they could turn it into a loyalty test.

As the Organization of American Historians details, abortion didn’t become a right-wing rallying cry until it proved to be an effective one. It wasn’t about saving babies — it was about saving seats. The issue became a perfect emotional trap: unresolvable, endless, profitable.

That’s the pattern with all political boogeymen. They start as moral concerns, get repackaged as cultural crises, and end as campaign slogans. It’s groupthink in motion — the need for harmony outweighing the need for truth. When everyone inside the room is nodding, dissent feels like betrayal. And betrayal, in politics, is worse than being wrong.

The most frustrating part, as a political scientist, is that none of this is new. The fear formula hasn’t changed since Nixon’s time. Only the characters have.

Replace “law and order” with “protect our kids.” Replace “busing” with “bathrooms.” Swap “welfare queens” for “woke indoctrination.” It’s all the same monster — just a new costume every decade.

Republicans understand fear as psychology, not policy. They’ve mastered how to trigger the in-group loyalty switch, the same neural wiring that convinces people they’re protecting family when they’re really defending fiction. Democrats, by contrast, keep trying to reason with emotion. They keep writing white papers to fight nightmares.

But fear isn’t rational — it’s social. It spreads because it connects. Until Democrats learn that, they’ll keep losing to monsters that don’t exist.

When Rose finally fell asleep that night, it wasn’t because I convinced her monsters weren’t real. It was because I walked into the closet and fought them.

That’s what Democrats have to learn to do. Not fight the people — but fight the stories.

Because every time the right invents a new boogeyman, and the left ignores it, the lie hardens into a truth.

The monsters in the closet have changed names — Black criminals, welfare queens, terrorists, immigrants, drag queens, trans athletes — but the playbook never changes: scare, simplify, and scapegoat.

The difference between Republicans and Democrats isn’t ideology — it’s imagination. One side knows how to tell a scary story. The other side keeps insisting that facts are enough.

They’re not. Not in America. Not anymore.

And if Democrats don’t start confronting these political boogeymen the way I confronted Rose’s — directly, loudly, theatrically — they’ll keep losing sleep and elections.

The monsters were never real. But the fear always was.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons.