What is the Democrat Party thinking? This question has been raised not only by conservatives but by many who see themselves as politically centrist or independent. What they are witnessing in the Democrat leadership is significant cognitive dissonance when it comes to the party’s recent policy stances.

The cognitive dissonance has been especially apparent in the Democrats’ decision to disingenuously attack Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law with the lie “Don’t Say Gay.” Have they not learned their lesson from Virginia’s gubernatorial election last year? Attacking parents’ right to decide what’s best for their children, particularly when it comes to (sex) education, is not a winning recipe. But the party of the donkey has chosen to double down on dumb.

Democrats have essentially branded themselves the party of the woke radicals, embracing the transgender agenda as well as the racist and anti-American critical race theory ideology. Parents don’t want their children raised to embrace a Marxist racialized worldview, where they are taught to hate white people and hate America.

Besides, as James Carville so memorably quipped in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Voters of every stripe are feeling the impact of Joe Biden’s policies that have sent inflation to a 40-year high, even as the economy attempts to pull itself out of the pandemic-excused over-the-top government lockdowns and restrictions. Democrat-controlled states held onto their emergency power grabs for way too long, to the point of creating COVID fatigue among their own voters.

Biden’s anti-fossil fuel agenda, which is the direct cause of the current high prices at the pump, has also turned off Americans. And then Americans struggling to pay the higher prices for nearly everything are told by Biden’s transportation secretary to go buy an electric vehicle as a solution to higher gas prices. How out of touch with average Americans can you get?

Evidence of Democrats’ political malaise came with New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Governor Phill Murphy squeaked out a victory in a state that Biden had won the year prior by 12 points. One of the leading issues that pushed many Democrats to cast their vote for Republican Jack Ciattarelli was directly related to Murphy’s COVID-related mandates, specifically the mask mandates. One longtime Democrat citizen who still views herself as a liberal voted for Ciattarelli, explaining, “Democrats have left me so disillusioned.”

Then there’s Biden’s de facto policy of open borders, which has set new records for the millions of illegal immigrants who have streamed across the U.S. southern border. You know it’s bad when even other Democrats (like several in the border state of Texas) are calling for Biden to do something to stop the flow. Even more troubling for Democrats are the number of Hispanics who are leaving the party for the Republicans, a 30-point swing since 2018, according to a recent poll. And the lack of illegal immigration control is a big reason behind this shift.

Maybe the answer to the very first question in this article is that Democrats have decided to blindly follow their bumbling leader who has been underwater in the polls for so long he’s growing gills, and to simply sink or swim with him. The real answer is that their bumbling “leader” is really just following the radicals, and they’re all politically drowning for it. Of course, Republicans shouldn’t be counting their chickens before they hatch, and as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) warned, “You can’t nominate somebody who’s just sort of unacceptable to a broader group of people and win.”