Democrats Form Circular Firing Squad
Their big losses Tuesday boil down to bad policies and poor candidates.
The losing party in a presidential election always faces some soul-searching. What went wrong? How did we blow it? What did the other party do better? The five stages of anger often apply: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Unlike 2000, 2004, and 2016, Democrats seem to have skipped the denial stage and gone right to the middle three simultaneously.
The Leftmedia showed us anger, throwing a post-election tantrum full of blaming voters. Kamala Harris’s concession speech late Wednesday afternoon was an example of bargaining (and also essentially plagiarism of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 concession speech). She promised to fight (18 times) and never give up the quest for power. Her audience displayed depression, weeping and wailing over the loss.
I could certainly tell Democrats what they did wrong, but instead, I’ll just quote a few of their own players.
I’ll start with the hyperbole of Democrat strategist Chris Kofinis: “This is a historic disaster of biblical proportions.” Yeah, when people at a Harris rally say “Jesus is Lord” and are told they’re “at the wrong rally”…
Next up is the economy. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” huffed Senator Bernie Sanders. He’s not wrong that workers rejected Harris’s phony-baloney “middle-class kid” rhetoric after enduring three and a half years of rampant inflation and gaslighting that Bidenomics was working.
Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, David Axelrod, similarly complained, “All these blue-collar workers and people who do things with their hands … they make this country go. [They] feel like they are thought of as less and that their priorities are not the priorities of the Democratic Party.” He added that the party “has increasingly become a smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party, and it lends itself to the kind of backlash that we’ve seen.”
New York Democrat Representative Ritchie Torres offered astute analysis of his own. “We should expunge from our vocabulary the words: we have a ‘messaging problem,’” he said. “When over 70% percent of Americans think we are on the wrong track or headed in the wrong direction, that is not a messaging problem. That is [a] reality problem. Inflation and immigration are not ‘messaging problems.’ These are realities that produced discontent widespread enough to hand Donald Trump the presidency.”
Furthermore, he chastised the radical left wing of his party. “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party,” Torres said. These people not only lost the election but are making defeat even worse: “Popular explanations for the outcome of the election seem to include white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny. I am going to state the obvious here: vilifying voters of color as white supremacists will not attract them back to the Democratic Party. It will drive them further into Trump’s camp.”
Ya think?
Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, blamed the gender cult. “I have two little girls,” he said. “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.” He added, “I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports. … Democrats aren’t saying that, and they should be.”
They are, after all, the party of science.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough agreed: “Democrats should be smarter on the women’s athletics thing [because] 85% of Americans oppose men transitioning after puberty and competing against women.”
Washington Post columnist Matt Bai also concurred, albeit with a false and gratuitous shot at the Right: “Trump’s vicious transgender ad in the closing weeks (‘She’s for they/them, he’s for you’) was probably the most effective of the cycle.” Saying true things is hardly “vicious.”
Bai also surmises that the Democrat lawfare campaign against Trump backfired, saying, “I do think the prosecutions fed a narrative of Trump as victim.” Similarly, Kofinis said the message from voters was to “focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump.”
Other Democrats “are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner,” reports Politico. “They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.”
“Among Democrats,” The New Yorker adds, “the blame for Trump’s victory overwhelmingly lies with one person: Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump’s triumph will be Biden’s real Presidential legacy.” Suddenly, the man who was recently likened to George Washington for his humble self-sacrifice has become something else: “Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold.”
Breaking news from 1972.
All of those things are true, but there’s also the fact that Kamala Harris was simply a terrible candidate. She’s unlikable, fake, grating, and never displayed a knack for the retail politics at which Trump excels. She’s a radical leftist elite who tried to run as a “middle-class” champion of Bidenomics. She’s an abortion-obsessed fanatic who couldn’t speak passionately about any other issue. She never won a single primary on her own steam in a party frenetically trying to “save democracy.” She was an obvious liar, spending years telling us that Biden was a cognitive marvel before finally shoving him out of the picture.
Famously, she couldn’t really distance herself from him, either. Would she do anything different? she was asked. “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” If ever a statement captured the essence of a campaign, that was it.
In hindsight, maybe she was, as historian Victor Davis Hanson opines, “always doomed.”
