For one thing, if "identity" politics were the key, how is it that a black candidate got more white votes than a white one did? And how is it that "a" woman wasn't propelled to office by an avalanche of women? The answer is that the premise behind identity politics turned out to be unsound. The other side to the question about women, for example, does not take into account that a female candidate named Sarah Palin was absolutely trashed by the same women who insist that identity is all important to them. It obviously is not.
This is actually class-based politics dressed up a little with new terminology, and it suffers from the weaknesses of internal suppositions.
First, it treats politics as a zero-sum game in a country that is characteristically oriented to progress for everybody because it has achieved that in the past. Listen to the furious denial of this obvious fact on the part of the Left - it's now foundational to them, and progress doesn't count unless it's distributed according to their multiple visions of the future. These inherently and fatally conflict. The way to get a bigger piece of the pie is to make the pie bigger, not put the government in charge of the cutting and fight about where the cutting goes.
Second, overlaying racial identity on a two-party system is going to have some problems in a multi-racial society. The approach the Left has taken of late is to attempt to group that society into white and non-white, oppressor vs victim, but that simply isn't and never has been how voting patterns break down. Attempting to model it as male and female, oppressor vs victim, proved disastrous. That isn't how Americans behave and it isn't how they vote. It's a failed, primitive, adolescent theoretical approach to society that has only a fatal simplicity to recommend itself to the politically naive. It's fine on campus, not so fine in the voting booth.
Third, identity politics has a dark side, and that dark side is hatred. Ostensibly intelligent people are actually mystified about the loss of white middle-class votes when substantial portions of their ideological advocates have declared them inherently racist, hateful, oppressors and thieves who must be taught a lesson and put into their place. That may be a lot of things but a way to build a coalition is is not. It is outrageously racist, which the Left has thought to address by refusing to recognize. Change the definition of the word and you can't be accused of it, insist the fascists of language. It doesn't work. It didn't work.
Lastly, the attempt to address the calculus of oppression by finding that mythical minority female disabled left-handed green-eyed midget candidate is not an act of inclusion but an act of absurd exclusion. Ordinary American citizens whose lives have priorities other than the encumbrances of high political and social theory simply don't think that way, and more to the point, don't vote that way. The tendency of social activists to treat them as lesser human beings because they are insufficiently politically obsessed is insulting, inaccurate, and inevitably fatal. Academia and the media are full of these creatures, to whom my advice is simply shut up and listen and learn first, propound later. Or not, and take the consequences.
It’s unlikely democrats will abandon ID politics; they’ll just double down as they continue adding illegal aliens to the rolls and trying to convert muslims to the liberal mindset. It’s who they are. Their DNA makes them incapable of rising above themselves.
Oh, yes you will. That is exactly what the Dems have done for the last 50 years and the black "leadership" keep selling their own people down the river for the trinkets they are given.
When blacks elect different leadership, perhaps they won't be taken for granted.