Even as Democrats scramble to find a message to run on in the midterm elections, Republicans, by focusing on “progressives,” are helping insulate their mainstream opponents against criticism instead of holding them accountable for their unpopular policies.  

I often told the late Rush Limbaugh that watching Republicans govern and campaign made me feel like Casey Stengel, the New York Mets manager who asked his 1962 team, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Limbaugh, who got his start with the Kansas City Royals, loved the comparison. The Democrats run their party like the New York Yankees — who have won 27 World Series titles compared to the Metropolitans’ two — while Republicans seem happy just to be on the field. 

“This term ‘progressive,’” Limbaugh said, “is one of the biggest lies in all of politics, and the reason I don’t call ’em ‘progressives’ is because they’re not. They are regressives: They want to take us back to poorer economic times, larger and bigger government. They want to roll back freedom. There is nothing progressive about these people and I’m not gonna call ’em that. They’re socialist/Marxist.” 

The only time Limbaugh would use the term was with callers who identified that way, as a means to have conversations and perhaps persuade them. 

Labeling is key in politics, and yet you’ll hear Republicans praise Democrats in cities like San Francisco for recalling their “progressive DA,” Chesa Boudin — as if they hadn’t elected him in the first place because they shared his ideas.

Republican candidates will even refer to such opponents as “too progressive,” a phrase that’s nonsense in the average voter’s ears. How can someone want too much progress? 

Democratic prosecutors such as Mr. Boudin and the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, are worsening the wave of violence wracking the nation, particularly in the inner cities, by refusing to press charges against criminals even for armed robbery and rape. They are, in effect, decriminalizing crime. 

That’s not progress, but a return to the sort of anarchy that inspired America’s Founders to form a new nation. To secure the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Declaration of Independence states, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

It’s the consent of the governed that Republicans seek to win in November, so they can protect those rights — primarily life, with the murder rate at a 25-year high — and they can’t make the strongest case by letting their opponents determine the lexicon used in honest debate.

Consider by comparison how the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, tagged every Republican as a member of “the Tea Party” a decade ago. No such party ever appeared on the ballot. Rather, it was a loose term for Americans who opposed the very sort of government spending that has pushed inflation to a 40-year high.

Republicans used to have some Babe Ruths in our ranks who understood the power of defining opponents, starting with a strategist to President Reagan, Arthur Finkelstein, with whom I worked on two campaigns. Branding is key in politics, and Finkelstein was a master, painting opponents as “liberal” and variants like “ultraliberal,” “unbelievably liberal,” and “hopelessly liberal” to win elections.

In a “center-right country,” as Gallup described America, these labels became radioactive, helping deny scores of candidates high office. If Democrats strike out when these pitches are thrown, the answer isn’t to be good sports and start lobbing pitches they can hit.

Conservatives spent 50 years defining their opponents for the electorate that way, to the point that in 2020, Gallup found that only 25 percent identified themselves as “liberal,” 11 points less than the 36 percent who said conservative.

So, the leftists rebranded themselves as “progressives,” while never extending the same courtesy to Republicans, who they tag as everything from the far right and Nazis to white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Only fools would stop throwing fastballs that nobody on the other team can hit, but many Republicans seem determined to do just that in 2022. It’s better to stick to what works, and — whether campaigning or governing — to really learn how to play this game.