Can Democrats turn Jan. 6 into a voting issue?

You may have forgotten about this, but the last president of the United States incited a mob to descend on the Capitol in an effort to overturn his election loss through intimidation and violence. Much of his party has tried to erase and rewrite that history, and to kill a real accounting into it.

One reason all this has receded from memory is that Democrats have largely stopped talking about it.

Now, one Democrat is trying not only to keep this alive in the minds of Americans, but also to turn it into an issue that motivates voters. Abby Finkenauer, a former congresswoman who is running to unseat Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley in Iowa, is talking about the insurrection in many settings, in a way that just about no other Democrat is doing.

Finkenauer regularly discusses the Capitol riot in highly personal terms. As she told The Des Moines Register, on Jan. 6 she watched her “former colleagues and my friends get attacked,” with the result that “the world changed and so did I.” And during her announcement video, she ripped Republicans: “Since the Capitol was attacked, they turned their backs on democracy, and on us.”

Not too many Democrats have talked about the violence and its rupturing of our illusions about democracy in such human terms. Perhaps more should.

Grassley recently defended Trump’s corrupt effort to get the Justice Department to cast doubt on his loss. And Grassley has said positive things about that sham “audit” of voting in Arizona.

Wherever any particular Republican sits on the spectrum of this ongoing betrayal of democracy, you’d think Democrats could make them pay a political price for it.

Finkenauer is not the only Democrat trying to do this. But what’s striking is how rare this kind of thing truly is.

One problem is that the House will be decided in no small part on whether a host of Democratic incumbents survive, and the Senate will be decided in part via a slew of open seats. That means the outcome won’t necessarily turn on the fate of too many Republican incumbents, making it harder to make the conduct of Trump-protecting Republicans an issue.

But Grassley, if he runs, is one such incumbent. However difficult unseating him will be, it’s good to see at least one Democrat trying to keep the insurrection from sliding down the memory hole, and make Republicans pay a price for it.