What Should the Democrats Do?
At the end of the last post, I said the Democrats were in the wilderness, and it is unclear how they will get out. They are struggling to understand their loss in November. Some think they have been too timid and need to move solidly and boldly to the Left. Others think their only problem is marketing. They have the right policies; they need to improve their message. Others believe the problem is the messenger. They need new, younger representatives to bring their message. Still, others believe the policies are the problem. The party has gone too far to the Left and needs to return to the center.
You see this in the nightly news. While some democrats are trying to move to the middle, many are still acting like a machine, speaking the same words, making fighting videos, holding up paddles, or swearing in unison as the machine tells them too. Meanwhile, the base is protesting, some are using violence, and in California (of course) they name a proposed initiative in honor of an accused murderer.
The party has faced this choice before. Following Nixon’s win in 1968. The party believed it needed to move to the Left and did so with George McGovern. 1972 was a historic loss. They faced a similar choice after Reagan. The Democratic Leadership Council shifted the party’s message to the Right, and they won with Clinton. Still, this shift was more rhetorical than real. In many ways, Obama, Hilary, and Biden were farther to the Left than McGovern. Trump won.
Still, few, if any, Democrats seem to grasp their real problem. Democrats have become a party driven by hate. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Trump’s message before Congress. While not technically a State of the Union speech, it was effectively one. These speeches follow a fairly standard formula. They are primarily a time for a President to brag about their policies. They also include two types of applause lines, some for the President’s party and others for everyone.
Trump’s speech followed this pattern, yet the hatred of Trump was so intense that the Democrats delegation that was supposed to escort the President into the house refused to show up. Then, the Democrats refused to stand for any of the applause lines aimed at everyone, not even for the 13-year-old boy who survived cancer and wanted to be a police officer. Their hatred of Trump was too intense.
Such hatred can only blind someone to reality. The problem with such hatred is that it leads first to exaggeration and then, second, a tendency to believe the exaggerations are real. What Democrats need to do is not only understand why they lost but also why Trump won despite their demonization and lawfare.
Thus, over the Biden presidency, problems like inflation, crime, and the border grew worse as did voters distrust in Democrats to solve them. Democrats’ solution was to attack Trump, try to remove him from the ballot, bankrupt him, and throw him in jail. None of this worked. Voters were suffering, and Democrats attacked Trump. Even worse for Democrats, Trump made significant inroads into the Democratic base.
For Democrats to restore their credibility, they must first accept that they are the problem. They do not have to agree with Trump or even like him, but they must realize that their intense hatred of everything Trump is hurting them, not Trump.
To recover, they first need to admit they were wrong about many hoaxes they pushed and sometimes continue to push. It is unclear whether they can do this now, as many of their base have the same problem. And why not? Democratic leaders have been pushing these hoaxes for eight years. So, not only must they admit they are wrong, but they must also convince their base. That will be a hard sell. Just look at what happened to Schumer when he made the perfectly reasonable decision to keep the government open or Gavin Newsom when he tried to take a step back from biological men in women’s sports.
Second, and perhaps even harder, it will require them to accept the majority on the other side are not just Nazis, racists, or any of the other false labels they use to shut down discussion. As one commenter on our podcast put it, “America is actually full of Nazis.” As long as that is a dominant view among Democrats, it will keep them from any serious self-analysis. It will keep them from discovering why many people who used to vote Democrat changed and voted for Trump. It will keep them from understanding why the Democrats are so unpopular.
There is at least a chance that the hatred is so intense and embedded into their base that it may be impossible to fix. Some pollsters have reported that the Democrat Brand is so toxic it may be beyond repair.
Thus, the two options facing Democratic leaders are to try and fix the problem, or a group of leaders will break away, form a new party under a new name, and try to rebuild their base. The latter is what happened to the Whig party, which dissolved and reformed as the Republican Party.
What will the Democrats do?
