Defund the police.

Has there ever been a more infantile, more idiotic, and more ruinous campaign slogan than this one from the Marxist Black Lives Matter crowd?

We can’t recall one, but don’t take our word for it. Check with all the Democrats — we’re at 12 and counting — who lost their congressional seats two weeks ago, and see if they think defunding the cops is a political winner. Or expand your survey and check in with the losers of the 27 “toss-up” races highlighted by the once-respectable Cook Political Report. Those 27 losers? All of them were Democrats. All of them.

As National Review’s Rich Lowry writes, “BLM broke through the clutter with a catchphrase that was memorable, pungent — and utterly devastating to Democrats. All over the map, Democrats got hammered on defunding the police, which couldn’t have been better designed to extract maximum political pain with zero upside.”

Late this summer, the BLM rose began to drop its petals, and folks began to wake up to the group’s thuggishness and its money-grubbing corporate extortion. But by then, plenty of damage to the Democrat brand had already been done. As Lowry put it, “To take this position of strength and use it primarily to associate your allies with a politically radioactive position requires extraordinary strategic folly and heedless ideological fanaticism. BLM had both, in ample supply.”

And so, the Left turned off the “defund” spigot and began denouncing the violence, but it was largely too late. In congressional districts all across the country, the idea of “law and order” resoundingly trumped the idea of defunding those among us who are sworn to preserve it.

Here, one might think BLM, thus duly chastened, would slink back into the halls of hard-left academia from whence it came. One would be wrong, though. “We want something for our vote,” declared BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors in a letter to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome. In short, Black people won this election.”

The message, as our Nate Jackson noted last week, was obvious: We delivered. Now pay up.

Not content to extort Democrats at the national level, BLM also trained its sights on California, whose leftist governor, Gavin Newsom, will have to replace Senator Kamala Harris if she ascends to the vice presidency. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board writes, “Identity politics was a debacle for Democrats on Nov. 3, not least in California where voters defeated a constitutional amendment to allow racial preferences in schools and government. But don’t tell that to Black Lives Matter, which has delivered its new orders to Gov. Gavin Newsom: ‘He Must Appoint a Black Woman to the Senate.’”

Never failing to judge others by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character, the BLM brass announced that the Senate will soon have no black women and therefore recommends either of two longstanding hard-left political mediocrities from the House to replace Harris: Karen Bass or Barbara Lee.

As we noted previously, President Donald Trump earned a greater share of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960. Might BLM’s tired, obsessive, one-trick racial-grievance pony have something to do with it?