Democrats are, if the political media is to be believed, in a soul-searching phase right now, deciding what exactly the party stands for and what they should run their next campaign on. They are deeply divided, the pundits tell us, between the "far left" and the pragmatists who don't want to win the primaries only to lose the general election. They can't even agree on which demographic will be the key one to delivering victory in 2020.

In reality, Democrats are actually a pretty united bunch right now, laser-focused on one overriding shared goal: defeating Donald Trump and his Trumpist Republicans. This singleminded dedication to defeating a sitting president is nothing new in American politics, of course, and goes back (at the very least) to the formation of the Whig Party in response to Andrew Jackson's perceived monarchical rule (the party's name was even a continuation of this theme, as the British Whigs were anti-royalist). Democratic politicians and rank-and-file voters all largely agree that the 2020 campaign should primarily be about booting Trump out of the Oval Office, and everything else is secondary to that larger goal. This was so apparent in the 2018 midterm elections that Democratic politicians barely even had to mention Trump, because it simply was not necessary -- Democratic voters were already fully on board with that goal to such an extent that it didn't even need to be said by the candidates, which freed them up to campaign on more concrete issues.

Party unity, however, doesn't sell newspapers. Which is why, throughout the 2018 campaign season, the mainstream media desperately tried to convince Democratic candidates that the real election issue they should be debating was whether to immediately impeach Trump or not. Thankfully, Democrats refused to take this bait and ran their campaigns on protecting Obamacare and people with pre-existing conditions. To great effect.

This time around, the inside-the-Beltway media chorus will whip itself into even more of a frenzy over non-issues within the party. So here's a novel idea: why not push back against all the false equivalencies and false dichotomies in the press? Democrats should steal a page from the Republican playbook which they've been using (with various degrees of success) for the past three or four decades. In short, Democrats need to learn how to "work the refs" better.

False dichotomies

The most obvious first candidate for some Democratic pushback is debunking all the false dichotomies the media loves to draw within the Democratic Party itself. How many articles have been written on the theme: "Democrats struggle to decide whether to run a campaign targeting minority voter concerns or one which appeals primarily to Midwestern blue-collar white voters" so far in this election cycle? Whatever the qualitative answer to that question is, it can be summed up as "far too many." Democratic pushback on this one is pretty easy, because it could easily fit on a tweet: "Why can't we focus on both?"

Attacking economic injustice and inequality just is not mutually exclusive with championing minority voters' concerns. Does the media really think black and Latino families don't worry about making ends meet? Economic injustice and the rigged nature of American capitalism aren't solely the concern of white people in states touching the Great Lakes, after all. Focusing on creating a fairer playing field is important to all, and it's time to call the media out for always acting like it is a racially-exclusive issue. Kitchen table issues affect everyone's kitchen table.

Democrats should also call out the Republican-led false dichotomy of whether the party stands for capitalism versus socialism. The media is already running with this one, to the delight of Republican strategists everywhere. Democrats need to point out that everything they have achieved over the last century -- back to F.D.R.'s New Deal and beyond -- was called "socialism" by Republicans in an effort to demonize popular ideas like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There is a big difference between textbook socialism and creating a much more level playing field, and Democrats should point this out -- with historical examples -- as much as possible. Basic fairness isn't socialism. Adding some more rules to the game so Main Street is on a more level playing field with Wall Street is actually quite popular, and will not instantly transform America into Venezuela. It just won't, no matter what Republicans say. The socialism label is already a big campaign theme for Trump and the Republicans, so Democrats need to push back against the media getting swept up into this false dichotomy.

False equivalencies

Democrats also need to fight hard against lazy media tropes about how the two parties are essentially equal when they most certainly are not. This, in fact, should be an ongoing effort by Democrats, because it is the result of all those years of Republicans working the media refs in their favor. If the Republican Party as a whole is getting away with murder, equating it to one Democrat who had one verbal stumble is simply wrong, period. This "whataboutism" must be strongly pushed back against, if only for the fact that it has become so pervasive.

Take but one example -- Elizabeth Warren's DNA test. How much media ink has been spilled endlessly obsessing over the ramifications of this event? How many articles have been written on the theme of: "Warren has absolutely disqualified herself from the presidential race due to her handling of her DNA test"? This test, it is seldom actually reported, proved exactly the claim Warren has been making all along. It vindicated her oral family history of a Native American ancestor in her distant past.

But let's just pretend for a moment that it hadn't. Say her test had come back showing zero Native American DNA. Then, perhaps, some of those stories might have had a shred of justification. But only a shred. Because the basic media premise still would have been that Warren had disqualified herself from the running for telling a story she had been told as a child and believing it, while Donald Trump has gotten a gigantic free pass on over 8,000 blatant lies he has told while president. This would be a textbook definition of false equivalency in the media -- if it had turned out that Warren wasn't telling the truth. Of course, she was, so it doesn't even qualify as such.

That's just one discrete example, but the problem is much bigger than one Democrat's candidacy. When a Republican politician is caught saying blatantly racist or sexist things, the rest of their party essentially shrugs their shoulders and sweeps it under the rug. When Democrats are caught in such situations, the entire party is called to account by the media -- every member of Congress that can be tracked down is asked what their reaction is, and every one of these quotes is pored over for significance by the media. Why does the Republican Party get such a free pass? Because Democrats don't point out the false equivalence hard enough.

Republicans have perfected their answers to such scandals within their own party, which is why political wonks now know the term "whataboutism." A Republican is quoted saying something odious and other Republicans respond with: "But what about that time when [Bill Clinton / Hillary Clinton / Al Franken / Al Sharpton / etc.] said or did this?" The media happily goes chasing after this red herring and writes yet another "both parties are to blame" story. Meanwhile, journalists never seem to get around to getting a quote from Mitch McConnell or other GOP leaders reacting to the odious Republican gaffe which prompted the subject in the first place.

Donald Trump, of course, is a master of such red herrings. One tweet from him and the pack of media hounds is easily distracted by whatever squirrelly subject he tosses out. The initial scandal is all but forgotten in the rush to cover the Trumpian tweet. Democrats need to point out how the parties themselves react to scandal within their ranks, because the difference between the two parties is anything but equivalent.

Work the refs

Democrats should not shy away from directly taking on the media's laziness and willingness to use Republican frames when writing their articles and opinion pieces. Bernie Sanders just brilliantly showed how to do this in one of his first interviews after announcing his second run for the presidency. When asked about the possible independent candidacy of Howard Schultz, Bernie immediately reframed the issue and threw it back at CBS interviewer John Dickerson:

Oh, isn't that nice? Why is Howard Schultz on every television station in this country? Why are you quoting Howard Schultz? Because he's a billionaire. There are a lot of people I know personally who work hard for a living and make 40 or 50 thousand dollars a year who know a lot more about politics than, with all due respect, does Mr. Schultz. But because we have a corrupt system, anybody who is a billionaire and can throw a lot of TV ads around on television suddenly becomes very, very credible.

Dickerson was visibly taken aback by this answer, because he (and plenty of other journalists) are just not used to such pushback from Democrats. Bernie correctly pointed out why Schultz was getting so much free airtime -- without even declaring a run for the White House, mind you -- and the thought had quite obviously never crossed Dickerson's mind, or at the least not framed quite so bluntly.

Again, this is just one example. Bernie's certainly not the only Democrat pushing back in such a fashion, on multiple issues. But they need to get better at it because Republicans have had so much success in working the refs up to this point.

The most obvious candidate for some pushback is the GOP talking point that progressive Democrats are the "far left" or the "extreme" of the Democratic Party -- and, by extension, of American politics as a whole. You hear this trope in just about any story about the Democratic presidential candidates or Democratic Party politics in general.

The reality, however, is that what both the GOP and many in the media label "far left" is actually solidly mainstream among nationwide voters. Democrats need to point this out as forcefully as possible:

"You call the issues Democratic progressives are running on 'far left,' but that's just using the Republicans' false language to describe what is really going on out there. On progressive issue after progressive issue -- from raising the minimum wage to Medicare-for-all to taxing the wealthiest Americans far more than we do now -- a majority of the American public agrees with what progressives are proposing. Let me repeat that term, because it is the one you should be using: a majority. Check the polling if you don't believe me. Taxing the rich more polls at anywhere from 50 percent to as high as 80 percent. Ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage have passed in some very deep red states in the past few years. Progressives are not some species of radical or extremist, they are in fact responding to what the public actually wants from politicians. A clear majority of the public, in fact, and sometimes very large majorities. This means that all of these ideas are not 'far left' or 'radical' or any other Republican scare word, but in fact they are where the mainstream of American politics is right now. Calling it anything but mainstream is simply fearmongering from the right over issues their own base actually wants to see happen, and I really wish you'd call it what it actually is rather than buying into their fearmongering."

The media as a whole is oversensitive to accusations that they are biased. They try to remain as neutral as possible, but for the past three decades (at the very least) this has been defined as: "let's give the Republican position some deference so we aren't labelled the 'liberal media'." This is because conservatives have been so successful at working the media refs. It doesn't matter how false the equivalencies are, they are always trotted out to "provide balance."

It's high time Democrats started playing this game too. Call out the false dichotomies and equivalencies when faced with them! Strongly reject the inside-the-Beltway "conventional wisdom" when it is so patently wrong. Taunt the journalists for being "out of touch with real Americans," because they are always extra-sensitive that they are somehow missing the larger picture (now even more so, after the 2016 election coverage fiasco). "You and your cocktail-party buddies all may think that, but the actual polls show that the voters think very differently" is a powerful goad, especially when backed up with solid poll numbers. Conventional media wisdom is often wrong, and Democrats need to leverage the doubts mainstream media pundits may have about such facile thinking by directly challenging it as nothing short of lazy political journalism. There's an easy way to point this out, and that is:

"Nobody in the political chattering class saw Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders coming. Nobody thought Bernie had even a prayer of beating Hillary Clinton, and yet he came very close to doing so, because he tapped into something that all of you people missed. Likewise with Trump -- all the pundits sneered at him and sneered at his popularity for far too long. Maybe this time around you'll make the effort to get out of Washington and New York and talk to some actual heartland voters before you start acting so dismissively of things you personally consider too radical or too unlikely to happen. Maybe then you'll stop parroting Republican talking points and start reporting on what the electorate actually wants from politics these days. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen, personally, because just regurgitating inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom is so much easier to do, isn't it?"

It's certainly worth a try.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant