There’s a reason Adam Kinzinger defended Democrats’ patriotism

Recognizing that the audience for Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech would probably draw in a broader, less heavily Democratic audience, the lineup of speakers at the Democratic convention Thursday evening included a number of validators from outside the party.

Among them was former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger. He was speaking not because he’s a Democrat — he isn’t — but because his tenure in the House brought him into conflict with then-President Donald Trump. Kinzinger, like other speakers and like many Americans, was not pro-Harris, as such, but anti-Trump.

This is a tough sell for Republican voters who’ve spent nine years immersed in Trump’s framing of his critics as immoral or idiotic (regardless of party). The former president has repeatedly mocked Kinzinger, one of only a few elected Republicans who tried to hold Trump to account for his effort to retain power after the 2020 election. Kinzinger, in Trump’s estimation, is a disloyal, unethical actor — someone motivated, he seems to suggest, purely out of malice to Trump.

It’s never really clear how Trump’s supporters are supposed to reconcile this idea. Why would Kinzinger just suddenly turn on Trump? What’s the value for him? Getting a contributor gig with CNN? Generally, it’s safe to assume, there isn’t much thought given to it at all. Kinzinger just got slotted into the anti-Trump camp and that was that.

Kinzinger’s response is simple: He criticized Trump because Trump attempted to subvert an election and, with it, the American democratic system. This isn’t compelling to Republicans who support Trump, in part because they think criticisms of the former president, including on the aftermath of 2020, are offered in bad faith. So, given the opportunity to address the nation Thursday night, Kinzinger insisted that those in his party acknowledge a simple, obvious point.

“I’ve learned something about the Democratic Party, and I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret: The Democrats are as patriotic as us,” Kinzinger said after acknowledging that he’d never expected to speak at a Democratic convention. “They love this country just as much as we do. And they are as eager to defend American values at home and abroad as we conservatives have ever been.”

There’s been a lot of commentary about the extent to which the Democratic convention embraced patriotic messages and imagery. But Kinzinger’s speech distilled the point: Democrats are seen as unpatriotic by Republicans, if not worse.

In June, YouGov released polling evaluating how Americans viewed each of the two major political parties. Respondents were given a list of traits and asked if the terms applied to the parties. Among the terms were “patriotic” and “anti-American.”

One in 5 Americans said they thought the Democratic Party was patriotic, compared with a third who said the same of the Republican Party. Independents were twice as likely to describe the Republican Party as “patriotic” as they were to say the same of the Democratic Party. Democrats were less likely to describe their own party as “patriotic” than Republicans were theirs.

The patterns on “anti-American” were inverted. A majority of Republicans said that this described the Democratic Party — compared with 2 percent of Republicans who said that the Democratic Party was patriotic.

This is the perception that Kinzinger was hoping to combat. But part of it, clearly, is that Republicans have a different perception of what constitutes patriotism.

Gallup has regularly asked Americans how proud they are to be American. Over time, the percentage of respondents saying they’re “extremely” or “very” proud to be American has declined. Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the percentage of Americans saying they’re extremely proud to be American dropped from about 50 percent to about 40 percent.

That’s in part because of a decline in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as extremely proud to be American. But the percentage among Republicans slipped, too.

What’s noteworthy when looking at the responses to this question is how much of an outlier Republicans are. Independents and Democrats are about equally likely to say they’re extremely proud to be American, after a big dip among Democrats when Trump took office. Republicans, though, are consistently far more likely than Americans overall to express that opinion.

We understand this intuitively, that Republican perceptions of patriotism don’t comport with Democratic perceptions. Democrats make room for criticism of the country with an eye toward improvement or addressing problems. Republicans are more likely to focus on America’s international primacy — except, as is often the case with Trump, when amplifying America’s perceived shortcomings is a useful political argument.

Kinzinger’s fight was an uphill one. But it’s easy to see the intent. If he could get Republicans to admit that Democrats are motivated by patriotism and by love of county, he could erode the idea that their criticisms of Trump’s 2020 response were merely partisan. And if Republicans reconsider Trump’s actions that led to the Capitol riot? Well, maybe they’d reconsider voting to return Trump to power.

As with so many other aspects of the 2024 election, the positive effect of this argument for Harris is likely to be subtle.