Calling their current predicament the "Dems' dark, deep hole," Axios reported Monday that Democrats "fear things could actually get worse," and do you prefer your champagne dry and chilled or as part of a mimosa?
That last part was my own, naturally.
Typical for Axios, the article by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei was long on laundry list items and short on writing, but the list of Democrat woes looks like somebody just got their first credit card and a Costco membership. In addition to the party enjoying its lowest favorability ever, Democrats have "no popular national leader to help improve it."
Axios also bemoans that Democrats have "dwindling influence over the media ecosystem, with right-leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascendant." But that's not quite correct. The old media ecosystem — including outlets like Axios — still serves by and large as the party's agitprop arm. The new media ecosystem — which arose precisely because outlets like Axios act as party mouthpieces — is split much more evenly between Left and Right, Democrats and Republicans.
It's a national crisis when the Democrats can't fully dominate something, at least to hear them tell it. Barack Obama set up a budget-cutting office that became Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency? Fascism! The Supreme Court has three or four reliably conservative justices and a couple of semi-conservative squishes? It's illegitimate! People get their news from nontraditional outlets? It's the end of Muh Democracy™!
I'll have another mimosa with my Eggs Benedict, please.
Maybe the most damning part from the report was this bit: "Doug Sosnik — a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and widely followed thinker on political megatrends — told us this is Dems' deepest hole in at least the 45 years since Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980. Sosnik said the 2024 election was at least as much a repudiation of Democrats as it was a victory for Trump."
Emphasis added.
Is it supposed to be the icing on their crap cake that Americans are just as anti-Democrat as they are pro-Trump? Trump has less than four years left in his political career. If "At least we still aren't Trump!" is still the best they've got in 2026 or '28, the party's prospects are even worse than I'd dared to dream.
And Another Thing: You might remember Axios chief VandeHei as the guy who said after the election, "My message to Elon Musk is: Bull****! You’re not the media." I'd just add that everything VandeHei and Allen talk about in today's article has already been all over PJ Media and X except for a couple of juicy insider quotes. That's the "journalism" VandeHei compared to being "a damn neurosurgeon."
"Democrats are losing working-class voters," Ezra Klein said last week in an NYT column quoted by Axios. "They're seeing their margins among nonwhite voters erode and vanish. They're losing young voters. Something is wrong in the Democratic Party."
But don't take Axios's word for it. In an UnHerd essay out today, Ryan Zickgraf warned of "the greying of the Resistance." He asked, "Where did the kids go? The best answer is that most of them didn’t vote at all," but "when the youth did vote, they leaned Republican."
"The youth have been missing for so long," from the Left he wrote, "it’s a wonder that progressives don’t print their faces on milk cartons."
According to various reports, the median age of a Tesla protestor is "Werther's."
Is it too early to pop open the champagne for the Democrats' doom? Of course. The party is an institution with roots going two centuries deep. They'll focus, rebrand, and maybe even rethink long before they go the way of the Whigs. Besides, statism is the kudzu of politics. You can beat it back and hope to maintain a holding action, but the human desire to boss people around while taking their money — for their own benefit, of course — isn't going anywhere.
But is it too early to make mimosas and raise a glass (or three) to their current (and entirely self-inflicted) predicament?
Salud!
Recommended: Americans Are Still Fleeing Blue States — and Taking Their Electoral Votes With Them
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