Whos driving this donkey? Losing Dems need a moderate pivot, but radical left steering for a cliff
On Nov.5, the Democratic Party received what counts in our hyper-polarized age as a comprehensive drubbing.
Donald Trump swept all seven battleground states, improved over his 2016 and 2020 performances with nearly every demographic subcategory, and became the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.In the end, Vice President Kamala Harris’ $1 billion-plus war chest and much-praised “ground game” proved a boon to the college funds of Democratic consultants and not much else.“This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party,” one congressman told Punchbowl News on the morning after the election.“People are not buying what we’re selling.
Period.”Post-election polling confirms that the party’s national brand is in the Dumpster.A late January Quinnipiac poll found that only 31% of voters hold a favorable opinion of the Democrats, versus 57% with an unfavorable one.By contrast, Republican favorability stood at 43% — still underwater, but 12 points better — while Trump enjoyed the highest approval rating of his political career, 53%, according to a February poll from CBS/YouGov.While voters are undoubtedly angry at the party that gave us the Biden administration, surveys from Democratic polling firms suggest a broader public rejection of progressive cultural politics.According to an election postmortem by the Democratic polling firm Blueprint, published in mid-November, swing voters who broke for Trump — as 52% did, compared with only 36% for Harris — saw Democrats as being more supportive of immigrants than of American citizens (73%), wanting to “promote transgender ideology” (72%), being “too focused on identity politics” (67%), and having “extreme ideas” about “immigration” (69%) and “race and gender” (63%).The Progressive Policy Institute’s survey of working-class voters found that 68% of respondents said that Democrats had moved too far left, compared with 47% who said that Republicans h...