Democrats failure to find a positive message could turn blue wave into a blue puddle

With Election Day just nine weeks from Tuesday, Democrats have high hopes of taking back the House and Senate — yet can’t seem to find a real positive agenda.They’re relying purely on economic anxiety and Trump fatigue because even as the party establishment and the insurgent left struggle, neither faction has any clue how to win a lasting majority of the country.The establishment is hobbled by its donor class’s obsessions with such toxic, exotic issues as DEI, trans rights and open borders; the rebels, by the socialist fantasies of the college-centered, downwardly mobile activist class.Neither wing has much to offer the party’s traditional working-class base nor even black and Hispanic voters, while the hard left’s alliance with Islamists scares many voters toward Republican hands.Everyone’s trying to speak to “affordability” these days, recognizing that it blows all other issues out of the water.A recent Americans for Prosperity poll sets out the numbers pretty well: In seven battleground Senate states, 56% of voters named “economy/inflation” as their No.1 issue, dwarfing issues from immigration to health care to crime.As the “ins,” Republicans get default blame for this anxiety, but Democrats haven’t come up with any better answers than the ones that only made things worse in the Biden years.Consider establishment pick Cait Conley’s bid to unseat Rep.

Mike Lawler in the red-hot Hudson Valley race: Her platform is the same old farrago of federal interventions from a “public option” for health care to zero-down mortgages to crackdowns on drug-maker “price gouging.”The left is just as hopeless: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offers the Soviet-style chimera of city-owned grocery stores, a “rent freeze” that won’t freeze enough rents and the class-war-symbolism of a pied-à-terre tax that his own team is still trying to figure out.Worse, the Democratic Socialists’ rise rightly scares most voters outside the city; ...