Posted on 11/08/2024 8:06:06 AM PST by Red Badger
Democrats didn't just lose badly.
They lost to a convicted felon they ridiculed as a racist, misogynistic fascist — and an existential threat to democracy.
And they didn't just lose to President-elect Trump. They lost the Senate ... likely the House ... many Hispanic men ... all three Blue Wall states ... both Southern swing states ... even substantial support in the bluest of states and cities.
Why it matters: Top Democrats, including Harris advisers, tell us they feel like a lost party. Come January, they'll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states.
The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump's, was shattered. The big picture: In our volatile, 50-50 America, where voters seem to swing fast and hard against the ruling party, resurrection and resurgence are often an off-year election away.
But the road to the Democrats' Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership.
White House officials were dismissive of reporting about screwups. When journalists held up a mirror, they often looked away.
President Biden, 81, has faded even before his job is done. Harris' team didn't even want him to campaign. Impossible to imagine Democrats turning to him for sage advice on what's next.
Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history. Hard to see her guiding Democrats out of the wilderness.
The party's two most popular figures — Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — are happy to help in the waning moments of elections but aren't going to lead a revival.
Look to the states, Democrats will say: Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania ... Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan ... Andy Beshear in Kentucky ... newly elected Josh Stein in North Carolina.
Other Democratic future faces: Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and Ruben Gallego, who leads in the race for U.S. senator in Arizona.
All are from states Trump just won. They're certainly politically smarter than the Washington crew. The evidence: They didn't lose.
Democrats will now start the predictable cycle of blame-casting and bellyaching. Every losing party does it. Then, they'll turn to a more serious autopsy: why they're bleeding support virtually everywhere.
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), who campaigned for Harris every single day the House was out of session, told us that if you were out there listening to union members, to Black voters, to men, to young people, to working women and men struggling to pay for groceries ... you knew what was coming. "Democrats shouldn't do the blame game," she said. "They should do: 'What aren't we doing right — all of us?' "
Doug Sosnik, a wise, clear-eyed Democratic strategist who bases analysis on empirical data, not emotion, is a good place to start.
He sent us a post-election deck attached to a one-word email: "bloodbath."
Sosnik's report captures the blunt reality: "The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. ... [Trump's victory this week] was due to support from a multi-racial working-class group of voters." The coalition includes:
One in three voters of color voted for Trump.
Trump increased his support with Hispanic voters by double digits compared to 2020.
Trump carried Hispanic men by 10 points.
Trump improved his support with voters ages 18-29 by 10+ points.
Between the lines: But top Democrats tell us the party needs to dig deeper into root causes — and to reach back to COVID to truly understand why many of these voters revolted.
It was the COVID era when many voters felt elites were lecturing them on wearing masks, hiding at home and shutting down their businesses. This preachy, judgmental tone alienated many former and would-be Democrats.
Word-policing escalated.
This invigorated the non-legacy media and started pushing Hispanic and Black men away, starting in the last presidential election. Centrist Democrats tell us this is why even big cities turned redder this month.
The political correctness movement calmed. But Biden, then Harris, could never find words or ways to convince working-class voters they had policy ideas to make prices lower, jobs more lucrative, the future brighter.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a moderate, told Axios' Andrew Solender: "We have to stop pandering to the base and we have to start listening to the people ... People are sick of extremism."
Ezra Klein, the popular liberal New York Times columnist, wrote Thursday: "I do think a lot of Democrats have alienated themselves from the culture that many people, and particularly many men, now consume. I think they lost people like Rogan by rejecting them, and it was a terrible mistake."
The country has moved right on immigration and energy, and Democrats need a new approach — fast.
The Senate border bill that Harris repeatedly pointed to was "an insider talking point that was too disconnected from what Americans had witnessed in their own communities for the past four years," former Biden adviser Andrea Flores wrote on X. She says Democrats urgently need fresh ideas.
What we're watching: There'll be a strong tug back to the blue-collar-focused politics of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He sounded more like Trump than his party elites. And Sanders was quick out of the gate with a scathing critique of his party's rich, educated ruling elite.
"It should come as no great surprise," Sanders wrote, "that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Hard to see Democrats losing bigger chunks of the working class and winning elections. So Sanders makes a great point. But Trump often sounds more like the socialist Sanders than a Mitt Romney.
A real fight to best serve the less educated and less wealthy seems good for a nation divided by education and income, operating in a system tilted decisively to the latter.
Finally, Dems need to grapple with their denialism. Democrats let their hatred of Trump put them in a state of denial about Biden and the party's unpopularity — confident that Trump's toxicity was enough. They didn't believe their own eyes when staring at polls.
So they got crushed. Now they have dilemma and opportunity: In a 50-50 country, how do they articulate a theory of the case to win back voters — and power?
The bottom line: This will be the Democratic story of 2025.
Axios' Alex Thompson contributed reporting.
The twin Josh-Jewish ticket of Shapiro-Stein could prove formidable for 2028. Both are swing states and both are good speakers, unlike Kamala.
Note that most media post-mortems are blaming anything and everything... except Kamala herself. She sucked as a candidate.
I saw that too. No mention of the double digit black support for Trump.
Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich) campaigned for Harris every day the House was in recess. “If you were out there listening to union members, Black voters, men, young people, to working women and men struggling to pay for groceries ... you knew what was coming.”
......a bloodbath for Democrats........
Obama and Clintons destroyed the democrats party, crushing anyone who got in their way of power. Dems have NO bench.
Liberals NEVER, EVER correlate their POLICIES with their DEFEAT.
It’s always, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘antisemitism’, ‘homophobia’ or some combination of all of the above.
Their ‘policies’ are their dogma and their hymnal.
They blame others for their losses and go on their merry way totally oblivious to the reality of their situation.
It’s what’s called ‘category error’ in logic. Category Error is when you have so misinterpreted the data that solution to a problem is impossible.
They believe their problem is ‘poor communication’ when the problem is what they are communicating.....................
They will have to come to terms with the fact that their world view operates outside of the Overton Window.....The Overton Window defines the boundaries of the Societal Sandbox. .....outside of which becomes a socially unacceptable zone of morality and values that is not acceptable to the majority of the Electorate......I personally do not think that they will be able to re-calibrate, so in the end will bring their own eventual extinction upon their heads. Trust The Science.....
That’s hilarious!!!!!
And the really funny thing, Democrats have NO CLUE that their bad policies created that mess for the US Working class
This is fundamentally cost push inflation driven by the ridiculous “green” agenda Democrats pushed
It was the number one thing Biden did when he got into the White House. Start crippling US Energy production.
Their theory was artificially inflating energy prices would “save the planet” by reducing “greedy” US consumerism as well as make “green energy” more affordable. The “evil” US people where going to be made to take their “green energy” medicine if they liked it or not.
Instead they created the same world wide economic impact the 1973 Arab Oil embargo created.
Reliable cheap energy is the corner stone for healthy economies. When Government artificially start constricting supply, as the Biden regime did, this is the damage you get to average people’s financial security
“Empty pantsuit”—love it!
:)
“...The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. .... We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984
When Dems are using radical stupid failed leftists as their new front line spokesmen, like Hochul, Tish James, AOC, and Newscum, they aren’t learning any lessons and are doubling down on stupid - which is nice.
Depression is often the result when your world view gets destroyed. You believed the lies and not your eyes.
It’s hard to refrain from laughing at them and telling them to go eff themselves, but a part of me enjoys that a majority of them still believe that it’s the message and not the messenger or their opponent. “Let them eat cake”
Whether the GOP recognizes it either, us peons actually want a voice and don’t want to be told what or how to think and what is good for us... and most certainly, not from the coastal elite and academia.
The Overton Window is applicable only with a sane society....😉
Too bad we cannot encourage them to blame each other. Then, pass out half bricks and go for it.
We have................
They now cost more than we paid for our house!....................
Newspeak Orwellian terms used by the blinded, delusional leftists. The Truth does not reside in them. They themselves are what they project and accuse others of.
“They’re arguing over “How did this happen?!?” without considering that their candidate was a drunken airhead, that they believed their own propaganda or that 20 million votes fraudulently showed up for Dementia Joe but not Kamala.”
You’ve summed it up perfectly. I couldn’t agree more!
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