Their ‘security theater’ won’t change any voters’ minds.

A s long as there has been a United States of America, voters have granted a political benefit to war heroes. Most famously, George Washington rode his battlefield glory right into the presidency. In the late 19th century, 150 Civil War veterans served in the U.S. Senate.

Modern Democrats, seeking to absorb some of the gruff, dignified ethos reserved for military heroes, are seeking candidates who fit the mold. With their party flailing during the Trump era, they are set on proving they are no longer woke, ineffective ninnies. But having learned no lessons, they are more concerned with who is carrying their message than what their message bucket actually contains.

Take progressive Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a 40-year-old combat veteran who appears to have forged his political philosophy by playing too much Monopoly as a child. While on the trail campaigning with lefty diehards Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bearded Platner has identified “the oligarchy” as America’s “enemy,” making himself the hottest candidate of the year 1890. (The ironic “progressive” label, after all, simply means “here are some reheated ideas that were discredited a century ago.”)

Or just go back to last year, when hastily nominated Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Undoubtedly, Harris thought Walz’s military service would help her standing among young men, but the governor ended up being an anvil around her campaign’s neck when he admitted he never served in Afghanistan (or anywhere in combat), as he had led people to believe.

Nonetheless, this year’s new Democratic hotness is the rise of the “national security mom,” represented by burgeoning celebrities like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Each has served time in Congress; Sherrill, running for governor of New Jersey, is a former Navy helicopter pilot whose first television ad is dripping with military imagery, and Spanberger, running for Virginia governor, is a retired CIA officer who spent time tracking down terrorists and drug traffickers.

But neither gubernatorial candidate has tickled the party’s imagination like Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a 49-year-old former CIA analyst and Pentagon official who last year rose to the Senate and delivered this year’s Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Slotkin has urged her party to adopt the more pugilistic style of Detroit Lions Head Coach Dan Campbell (winner of zero Super Bowls), counseling Democrats to “f***ing retake the flag” of patriotism.

(To her credit, Slotkin also urged Democrats to stop using the word “oligarch” because it resonates only with pinheaded elites. Good! But she also suggested swapping in the term “kings” instead. Not so good!)

But Slotkin’s plan to keep Democrats from being seen as “weak and woke” is more challenging than even she envisioned. When asked in March whether she believes biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports if they identify as transgender, Slotkin stammered through her answer as if she had just learned the big twist in the Unknown Caller Netflix catfishing documentary. Evidently never expecting to be asked a question about transgender athletes, Slotkin filibustered by mentioning her history of playing women’s sports, by arguing there aren’t many examples of its happening, and by complaining it is simply an issue used to “make sparks.”

What you didn’t hear was a no. (As David Spade cracks in Tommy Boy, “Did I hear a ‘niner’ in there?”)

Slotkin’s verbal bouillabaisse demonstrated the limits of the effort to give the Democratic Party a tougher veneer. Moving to the center on cultural issues will cost Democrats some voters at the outer fringe of the party, so they are constantly being pulled back to supporting issues favored by a quarter of the country. “Moderate” Democrats can urge members of their party, as Slotkin has done, to display more “no-bullsh**” energy all they want. Still, if they remain blind to why people wanted more enforcement at the Mexican border or don’t support taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery, or if they don’t understand why universities should have more ideological diversity, then they will remain the Detroit Lions of political parties.

And camouflage-washing the party with military and national security affiliations will do nothing to fix this. As a nation, we have twice elected Donald Trump, a man who ducked military service and said avoiding sexually transmitted diseases in the 1990s was his “personal Vietnam.” (“I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”)

Trump probably called soldiers “suckers” and “losers” and definitely mocked Senator John McCain, one of our most admirable war heroes. And yet he is now a two-term president. So let’s not get too crazy about how much America values a military or national security credential in 2025. (Just ask Vice President James Stockdale.)

For decades, Democrats have lived under the delusion that their policies are secretly popular and that they simply have fallen short in marketing their big-government solutions to the lightly educated commoners. Having failed at their latest laughable scheme to attract voters (spending $20 million on a plan detailing how to talk to American males), they are seeking to buttress their credibility by borrowing the goodwill we rightly reserve for the men and women of our armed forces and national security teams.

The problem for Democrats, of course, isn’t that Americans don’t know what they stand for. It is that they know exactly what they stand for. And while wearing our nation’s uniform to keep its citizens safe is an admirable endeavor, voters know it is just the beginning of the story, not the end.