January 6 Is Over

J anuary 6 is over. It’s history. It’s done as a political issue. Four years after a mob stormed the Capitol, it doesn’t matter anymore in our politics.

This is not a normative statement: I’m not saying that it shouldn’t matter. Quite the contrary. Trump’s course of conduct in rejecting the legitimacy of his defeat in 2020, up to and including his speech on January 6, should have disqualified him from further service in public office and resulted in casting him into the outer darkness of our political culture. There were two procedurally proper ways to do this: The Senate could have convicted him after his second impeachment and barred him from holding office again, and Republican primary voters could have rejected him and turned the page rather than leaving him as the only alternative to continuing the ruinous governance of the Democrats. I argued for both at the time. But in each case, our system chose to honor the small-d democratic value of Trump’s continuing popularity with Republican voters rather than honoring the virtues of good statesmanship and good citizenship.

For Democrats, it was a good run for a while. They made January 6 the centerpiece of their midterm campaign in 2022, lavishing vast ad buys on the topic and spending millions to elevate Republican primary candidates they could tie to it and to 2020 stolen-election theories so they could beat them in the general election. In the midterms, it worked. But two things went wrong for them in 2024. One was that voters turned out to be less concerned with an event in Washington three and a half years earlier than with their own ongoing lives and futures. The Democrats, as the party in power, couldn’t get away from the election being a referendum on their disastrous governance. The other is that Democrats overplayed their hand: Once impeachment failed, instead of just making the case about Trump to the voters, they tried to get him thrown off the ballot and buried him under a blizzard of dubious to completely bogus criminal charges.

That effort to have the election decided in the courts left a lot of voters worried that the Democrats were as dangerous to our democratic system as Trump is. Exit polls found that 39 percent of voters described democracy in the United States as “very threatened,” and Trump won a majority of voters who said so, 52 percent to 47 percent. Seventy-three percent described democracy as either “very threatened” or “somewhat threatened,” and Trump won the combined group, 50 percent to 48 percent. Trump lost by 14 points among the 70 percent of voters who said that they were concerned that the 2024 election would result in violence, but he still got 42 percent of those voters. The Democratic base may have internalized the “democracy is on the ballot” argument, but even among the 34 percent of voters who identified “democracy” as their top voting issue, nearly a fifth voted for Trump. Meanwhile, 48 percent of the voters picked the economy, immigration, or foreign policy as their top issue, and Trump won those voters by a whopping 63-point margin (81 percent to 18 percent).

When Kamala Harris gave a big speech at the Ellipse in D.C. about democracy, it landed without a splash. It had been said too many times, to the exclusion of too many things that Harris and Joe Biden had failed to address.

For that reason, I expect that very high on the list of lessons that Democrats will learn by 2026 is that their ads will drop most of the ubiquitous references to January 6, unless they are facing some fresh candidate personally tied to the riot. While there are still anti-Trump voters who care a lot about it, they plainly are only at the margins, and at this point, they hardly need reminding. Meanwhile, a lot of persuadable voters will need convincing that Democrats have a message on the economy, the border, or crime that doesn’t consist of “but January 6!”

Trump will likely kick the beehive by issuing overbroad pardons of January 6 defendants, but even to the extent that he isn’t already immunized by Joe Biden’s abuses of the pardon power, most Americans have accepted (even if they don’t agree with it) that Trump intends to even the score for what he frames as a one-sided approach taken by the criminal justice system to political violence and politically tinged offenses. As much as I still believe in the uses of exemplary punishment, after four years, there’s not much public appetite left to keep going, and there is a case to be made that the point of throwing the book at January 6 defendants (at least the non-violent ones) has, by now, been made. If Trump really goes overboard in initiating new prosecutions, that may be another matter; it will look like something new, not the mop-up of something old.

Otherwise, all of this is in the past now. One of the hard lessons of American politics is that once voters elect a president, they tend not to care anymore what he did before he got elected. As I’ve previously argued: “In the history of American presidential elections (with the arguable exception of 1828), parties and candidates never win by challenging how an incumbent won his office or what he did before then — whether that ‘before’ is Barack Obama’s birthplace or George W. Bush’s National Guard service. You beat an incumbent by focusing on what he has done in office.”

Another hard lesson: Quite a lot of voters, probably more now than in our lifetimes, think national politics is a crooked racket and are much more interested in whether they get good results than in how the sausage is made, or by whom. Poor and working class voters have long been more inclined in this direction than middle class, upper middle class, or wealthy voters. Democrats used to brag about this when they could point to supporters who thought Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades — including the federal felonies he committed to cover them up — were gross and unethical but also unimportant compared with prosperity and peace. Those are, disproportionately, the same voters or types of voters who have since migrated from Clinton to Trump.

Trump, to an extent extreme even among American politicians, is judged on results. That does not mean Beltway results such as bills passed, executive policies enacted, court cases won, the fiscal health of the government, compliance with the law, avoidance of scandal, or the winning of news cycles. It means whether or not people can pay their bills and walk their streets safely. It’s a two-track approach to politics, in which the Trump Train needs to make its headway on the lower level. It’s dangerous to the long-term health of our system when voters just tune out questions of civics, law, and public virtue, but there’s also an element of rational ignorance among voters who don’t think it’s worth investing their time to tell who is lying to them and who has better economic or legal theories, they just want results in their own lives.

If “shut up about January 6” is the lesson for Democrats, that’s the lesson for Trump and his movement: All of the vindication and bragging rights that came from the 2024 election, and all of the talk of a new, long-term, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-jurisdiction working class Republican coalition will just go up in a puff of smoke if Trump doesn’t deliver a better standard of living and a safer America over the next four years.