APOCALYPSE NOW: Dems going dark over midterm message.

With a tough midterm election about six weeks away, many Democrats have largely settled on a campaign message, and it’s not one that simply emphasizes their accomplishments. Instead, it amounts to a stark warning: If Republicans take power, they will establish a dystopia that cripples democracy and eviscerates abortion rights and other freedoms.

“When you are the in-party in the midterms – like the Democrats are now – and the wind is blowing against you, you have to ride every advantageous breeze you can find,” former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said. “And the Democrats have found those breezes in the Dobbs decision and in Donald Trump.”

For months leading Democrats, starting with President Biden, signaled that they would campaign on having helped Americans, from fixing bridges to cutting drug costs. Biden suggested that attacking Republicans too harshly would divide the country and alienate potential supporters.

But with Donald Trump’s reemergence, the proliferation of Republican nominees who reject fair elections, and the Supreme Court’s overturning abortion rights, the calculus has starkly changed. Biden now all but admits his initial approach no longer works.

“I remember I got beat up in the campaign by saying that I wanted to unify the country and unify the parties,” he recently told a Democratic gathering. “You used to be able to do that. But things have changed a whole bunch.”

Republicans have adopted their own apocalyptic rhetoric, warning that Biden and the Democrats are taking the country down a path of soaring crime, raging inflation and uncontrolled immigration. That has created a midterm arena marked by dueling dystopias, as the parties vie to outdo each other in describing the hellscape that lies ahead if the other side wins.

CTL-F “2020” returns zero results in this column by the WaPo’s Yasmeen Abutaleb (republished at Jewish World Review). Which is odd, since voters got to personally experience the Democrats’ dystopian hellscape that year. The most diehard of Democratic Party voters reacted by a forming a massively psychotic response (there must be a more concise phrase for this somewhere), in response to Red State voters who by and large remained much calmer — in large part because of their governors were calmer.

Incidentally, that “unexpectedly” passive phrase, “Donald Trump’s reemergence,” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Abutaleb’s column. Flashback: Biden White House Directly Involved in Conspiracy to Entrap Trump in Criminal FBI Probe.

Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

As Glenn likes to point out, “Remember, Biden’s own press secretary says that if you disagree with the majority, you’re an extremist!”