While schadenfreude certainly plays a big part in my current obsession with reading Democrats' post-mortem analyses of why they got KO'd by a roundhouse punch they never saw coming in the 2024 presidential election, I am also deriving great comfort from the fact most of them haven't the slightest idea why they failed.
That's good news for freedom lovers.
I was very reluctant to make any predictions for this election. My pessimism was well documented, but I still never said that I knew what would happen in the end. There was, however, one thing that I repeated in conversations, podcasts, videos, and writing that I got right. Since Joe Biden got into office in 2021, the supposed "moderate" Democrat had his party take an immediate hard left turn and hit the gas. Yeah, we know that it was really the people running his brain who did that, but it happened nonetheless.
As I watched the already progressive Democratic Party rush headlong to see how far left it could go, I was convinced that the party's radical coastal elites were leaving behind regular Democrats in the rest of the country. That conviction grew stronger this election year. I repeatedly said that I couldn't believe that Joe and Edna Democrat in Flyover, USA were on board with drag queen story hours and pro-criminal prosecutors.
We now know that they weren't. In fact, there were rightward shifts even in deep blue states, indicating that some Democrats want the progs to pump the brakes on the raging lefty garbage. One of those pro-criminal prosecutors was tossed out on his ear by voters in Los Angeles.
Still, the Democratic Party remains under the control of those coastal elites who are so blinded by ideology that they don't know they're on the fringe (I'm adding Illinois, Colorado, and Minnesota Dems into the "coastal elite" mix here). One Democrat in a deep blue state on the coast does see how things really are, though, and it doesn't appear that many of his fellow Dems are listening to him.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) has been on a tear these past couple of weeks, making the case that the far left isn't doing his party any favors. This is what he tweeted the morning after the election:
Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like “Defund the Police” or “From the River to the Sea” or “Latinx.”
— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) November 6, 2024
There is more to lose than…
Torres understands that the Democrats lost as big as they did this year because they went all-in on bats**t fringe leftism. Here is something he shared on X earlier this week:
The far left—illustrated by the lonely long left tail in the graph below—has no overlap with a supermajority of Americans, who reject far-left policy positions on immigration and public safety.
— Ritchie Torres (@RitchieTorres) November 19, 2024
We can either pander to the lonely long left tail that gave us Donald Trump or we… pic.twitter.com/UxsXs18fUI
This isn't some red-state Democrat trying to run to the middle to hang onto his seat in Congress. Torres is a young, gay, Afro-Latino man who represents the district that abuts the one that gave us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If I had merely given you his bio and not shared the tweets, you probably he was a whacked-out prog. It would have been a fair assumption too.
Make no mistake, Torres is still a leftist; he's just not that far left.
To you and I, Torres is making sense. As of this writing, it would appear that he's a voice crying alone in the Democratic political exile wilderness. This is from a deep dive into the Democrats' state of denial that my friend Stephen Green wrote about in a VIP post:
More concerning is Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. On Wednesday, I reminded you just how important illegal immigration was to Donald Trump and Harris voters. Yet, the Dem-dominated Los Angeles City Council and perhaps Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) are ready to double down on "sanctuary" status for illegal aliens. But Johnston just took it a dangerous step further.
Visegrád 24 reported that Johnston "has challenged Trump to try to deport any illegal migrants from his city, saying he would deploy the Denver City Police and volunteers from the local community to use force against federal forces trying to deport illegals."
"More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there. It's like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun," he boasted. "You'd have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. You don’t want to mess with them."
So, other Dems are not only not getting it, but they're super duper double secret probation not getting it.
The longer that the Democrats who are in power remain clueless, the more time the country has to heal from the damage that the Biden administration's progressive wrecking ball has done to it. I hope they never figure out that their open-borders insanity isn't popular and navel-gaze themselves into at least a twelve-year timeout from the presidency.
Heck, let's make it 20.
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