One reason the Democrats lost

Hume said:
you're too silly to care about
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I normally wouldn't post entire articles from behind a paywall, but Mika Brzezinski read the entire thing on-air...

Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics
Nov. 9, 2024

Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.

Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.

Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.

I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

There were a lot of Democrats “barking,” people who “don’t represent anybody,” he said, and “the leadership of the party was intimidated.”

Donald Trump played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred to women as “beautiful” and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get in trouble for using that word. He’d also call women “darling” and joke that he had to be careful because his political career could be at risk.

One thing that makes Democrats great is that they unabashedly support groups that have suffered from inequality. But they have to begin avoiding extreme policies that alienate many Americans who would otherwise be drawn to the party.

Democrats learned the hard way in this election that mothers care both about abortion rights and having their daughters compete fairly and safely on the playing field.

A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Gobsmacked Democrats have reacted to the wipeout in different ways. Some think Kamala did not court the left enough, touting trans rights and repudiating Israel.

Other Democrats feel the opposite, calling on the party to reimagine itself.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat in a red congressional district in Washington, narrowly held her seat. The 36-year-old mother of a toddler and owner of an auto shop told The Times’s Annie Karni that Democratic condescension has to go. “There’s not one weird trick that’s going to fix the Democratic Party,” she said. “It is going to take parents of young kids, people in rural communities, people in the trades running for office and being taken seriously.”

Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

On CNN, the Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said that Democrats did not know how to talk to normal Americans.

Addressing Latinos as “Latinx” to be politically correct “makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do,” she said. “When we are too afraid to say that ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”

Kamala, a Democratic lawmaker told me, made the “colossal mistake” of running a billion-dollar campaign with celebrities like Beyoncé when many of the struggling working-class voters she wanted couldn’t even afford a ticket to a Beyoncé concert, much less a down payment on a home.

“I don’t think the average person said, ‘Kamala Harris gets what I’m going through,’” this Democrat said.

Kamala, who sprinted to the left in her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, tried to move toward the center for this election, making sure to say she’d shoot an intruder with her Glock. But it sounded tinny.

The Trump campaign’s most successful ad showed Kamala favoring tax-funded gender surgery for prisoners. Bill Clinton warned in vain that she should rebut it.

James Carville gave Kamala credit for not leaning into her gender and ethnicity. But he said the party had become enamored of “identitarianism” — a word he uses because he won’t say “woke” — radiating the repellent idea that “identity is more important than humanity.”

“We could never wash off the stench of it,” he said, calling “defund the police” “the three stupidest words in the English language.”

“It’s like when you get smoke on your clothes and you have to wash them again and again. Now people are running away from it like the devil runs away from holy water.”

 
Walt said:
The point is we want the political leadership to do what they are supposed to do, not try to take over our lives, like trump wants.
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You have it backwards. Trump isn't the one that will "take over our lives," that's the Leftist Democrats. They are the ones that want you to have:

A nationalized retirement system based on social security
A government run healthcare system with few or no alternatives
A car of their choice (an EV) with no alternatives.
A "Disinformation" bureau, agency, or whatever that censors what you see and read on the internet, in news, etc. You only get the government version.
Higher taxes
Price controls.
Heavily restricted access to firearms, if even allowed.
To use public transit far more
Few alternatives to travel and those available are expensive and slow
To live in a dense urban area, preferably in high-rise multifamily housing.
 
Hume said:
For Democrats, the traditional strategy of pairing social liberalism with modest economic reform no longer connects with today’s voters. While social equality is a moral imperative, it requires bold, egalitarian economic policies to truly resonate. Until such policies take shape, political dysfunction and public frustration will persist.

www.theguardian.com

The great danger is that this time, Trumpism starts making sense | Randeep Ramesh

So far, the president-elect’s rhetoric has been at odds with reality. If that changes, it would redraw the US electoral map, says Randeep Ramesh
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The Guardian

:magagrin:
 
Walt said:
The point is we want the political leadership to do what they are supposed to do, not try to take over our lives, like trump wants.
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Your life probably needs to be taken over, Walter.

Stop whining and get over it...Walter.
 
ZenMode said:
That's not what I said. Why do you think Trump made record gains with Hispanics and blacks? Apparently those groups, and others, are more scared of the direction the Democratic party is taking the country than they are of Trump.
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@Hume should also think about why the "working class" vote (or as Democrats will insultingly refer to it, the "uneducated" vote) has shifted so far towards the right as of recently... IOW, these are the farmers, manufacturers, etc who received their education from elsewhere instead of bothering with a 4+ yr college degree. Why are these people voting for REPUBLICANS now?

And it's not just "blacks and hispanics" either... it's also YOUNGER people (Gen Z) ... Why are YOUNGER people now much more open to voting for Republicans than they were in the past??

A final note: When I say "Republicans", I don't mean the Republican Party (I don't mean McConnell, Romney, Cheney, etc etc)... I specifically mean Trump and his MAGA movement. Without embracing Trump and his MAGA movement, those aforementioned people (similar to the people who made up the Ross Perot coalition) will all disappear once again and the Republican Party will get their asses spanked once again. A Republican Party that doesn't embrace MAGA will experience "Ross Perot 1992", but this time on steroids.
 
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