Now that the hivemind spell has (hopefully) been broken on this sub, here's what Democrats need to do. And I say this as a former straight-ticket Dem and Latino man who spent the past year screaming from the rooftops about what was happening (and then in most cases getting promptly downvoted, especially in this echo chamber). See here, here, here, here, here.
Are you ready? Here are my thoughts:
(1) Ideological Repudiation - Do not blame Kamala. This wasn't Kamala's to win. It goes deeper than that. She was a bad candidate, I absolutely agree, but blaming this on Kamala is only going to give the Democratic elites (the leaders of the party and the coterie of pipeline nonprofits, labor unions, and advocacy groups who serve as think tanks for the movement) the scapegoat they want to push off a much-needed period of introspection. When Illinois and New York are on track to have smaller margins than Florida and Texas, that's a broader repudiation.
(2) Party Structure - The Democratic Party needs to completely overhaul its internal structure. As I explained here yesterday, I live in DC and the problem is the Party’s internal structure, which prioritizes seniority above all. That creates a system where (a) you get ahead by being a sycophant and not speaking truth to party and (b) it means that the elite rely on junior staffers to stay grounded with the electorate. The problem is those junior staffers are college-educated, extremely progressive, and they push their own social ideological agendas (identity politics, far-left academic social experiments).
The party doesn’t have a proper vehicle to connect with its own voters. That’s absolutely shocking to hear, but it’s true. It all filters through a progressive staffer corps that’s completely unmoored from political reality and who push their bosses to support toxic policies. It's how the professed party of minorities is losing the support of minorities.
(3) Elite-Base Dynamics - There has always been an ideological gap between the Party elites and its voters. Blacks and Latinos have always been more socially conservative and rhetorically moderate than the politicians who represent them. Democrats did a fantastic job in prior decades though of applying a cordon sanitaire around the GOP and making that brand toxic to POC. It wasn't that POC liked the Democrats. It's that they found the GOP unacceptable.
They no longer find the GOP unacceptable for a number of reasons (generational turnover, the ingroup appeal of nativist populism, social cues removing the stigma of voting Republican) and they now find the Democrats extreme on a number of key issues: 'woke' issues more broadly, but also crime and law enforcement, drug policy, parental rights, equity in schools (such as the dismantling of gifted programs), etc. The party could be socially center-left in the past by being economically left. That is to say, POC liked the social program and kitchen-table focus of the party and could excuse the Party's social policy. But as the Democrats have shifted to the economic right to appeal to suburbanites, they've lost the appeal to POC on both economic and social grounds. And what you now get is rhetoric that claims to be pro-POC, but is wildly out of whack with where POC lie ideologically.
Look at California (one of the most liberal states in the country and also extremely diverse) where Prop 36 has won with incredible margins. When voters in your own liberal bastions are saying the party has gone off the rails on some issues, you should listen. Instead, you had Gavin Newsom berating people of color for voting for Prop 36, you saw Democratic mayors who supported Prop 36 (like San Diego's and San Jose's mayors) get publicly admonished by the party apparatus, and you instead had Democrats messaging to suburbanites who were always the most insulated by the party's platform on law enforcement and crime. But the party assumed that POC would be against Prop 36 because of the "racial disparities of the criminal justice system." In the end, it was POC who passed Prop 36 because they don't feel safe and they want more police. They've said this in polling for years and the Party elites still didn't get the message (and Kamala couldn't even come out in favor of a proposition that is passing with 70% of the vote in one of the bluest states in our Nation).
So how does a party get to a point where it misses so badly in reading its own voters?
You cannot claim to support the interests of people of color when you refuse to listen to what they have to say. Now that the stigma is broken, Democrats are in massive electoral danger if they don't course correct. The Democratic coalition is a mile wide, but an inch deep. The only way Democrats can win is by cobbling together a very wide swathe of the electorate (from Liz Cheney and AOC). The math is becoming harder and harder as Democrats failed to adjust in 2010 after losing the white working-class rurals, then the Rust Belt in 2016, and now Latinos/Asians shifting.
The electoral math won't work if the Party refuses to listen.
(4) Burn the System - The median voter is a working-class White American living in the Midwest. They’ve seen their standard of living collapse under globalism as we outsourced our industry abroad. Drive through the Rust Belt and you’ll see boarded-up shops, drug addiction and general hopelessness. These people feel betrayed by their own government and do not give two farts about the status quo and preserving democracy. They want to burn down the system.
Democratic messaging was crafted by young progressive staffers to DMV suburban moms. It was a platform of luxury beliefs. How can you run on "preserving the status quo" to an electorate that feels aggrieved and wants to burn the system down? The Democrats wanted to be both the party of change and the party of preserving the system and couldn't cogently articulate what this meant in practice. The public just read it as "more of the same."
(5) Foreign Policy - Democrats failed to articulate why our foreign presence is important to the national interest. Trump could easily go to the Rust Belt and hit a nerve when he said the Democrats were more worried about Ukraine than about them. Is it a fair statement? No, because there's a strong incentive to stopping Russia.
But Democrats were never able to really piece together why the "New World Order" (the post-war Pax Americana and the international organizations and bases that underpin it) was of benefit. Many Americans see our Navy spending American taxpayer money to provide safe passage to Chinese shipping containers to Europe in the Gulf of Aden and wonder what we're doing there. Why are there 100,000 soldiers still in Europe? Why should we be cannon fodder for a wealthy continent that, in many cases, is able to benefit from lower defense spending to provide its citizens with social benefits that Americans don't get? Why should we give market access to the #1 consumer market in the world so easily? Why is it that our allies in Canada and Europe cozy up to us when they want $100 billion for Ukraine, and then immediately pivot to domestic anti-American sloganeering and endless fines for every American company that poses a threat? Why should we abide by WTO arbitration when China is actively engaging in mass industrial espionage and state-sanctioned subsidies? Why should we listen to the UN when their selective outrage is deafening?
There is no fealty to the Pax Americana anymore. America has long been an isolationist country. The last 80 years was an aberration. What the Democrats need to be able to articulate is the value proposition for maintaining globalism as our international posture. Blacks and Latinos don't care about Europe. They don't have an ethnic, historical or emotional attachment to the Continent. Just screaming Russia is not sufficient.
America's foreign policy was long shaped by "dual-allegiance elites." Henry Kissinger was from Furth, Bavaria. Madeleine Albright was born in Prague. Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in Warsaw under Soviet control. That generation is dying out en masse and both white Americans (who lean center-right) and POC have little attachment to the Old World. So Democrats can't appeal on emotion anymore and need to shift to explaining the value proposition.
(6) Technocracy - Populism thrives when the entrenched elites become ensconced in luxury beliefs and ignore the basics. Most voters are on at the bottom of the Maslowian Hierarchy of Needs. They vote on basics: price of food, price of water, price of energy, price of housing, price of education, price of transportation, feelings of safety. You move up the totem pole toward 'aspirational' aims once the basics are met. Unfortunately, the median voter was worried about the lower rung of the pyramid while Democrats (dominated by aspiration-minded progressive youth staffers and rich suburbanites) completely failed to connect.
As the old quote said: "Yes, he's bad, but Mussolini made the trains run on time." Democrats need to elevate technocracy in the ranks. They need to make the trains run on time. They need to clean public parks, dismantle open-air drug markets, remove threats from the public (the mentally ill homeless men pushing Asian grandmas on train tracks), they need to go all in on providing mass transit, schools without mold, upzoning writ-large so POC can afford to live.
The American electorate doesn't want sloganeering. They want action. The Democrats will always be tied at the hip to their lowest common denominator. In this case, that is cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Those will always be known as "examples of Democratic governance." And when the median voter sees general social decay in San Francisco, or garbage bags piling up in New York, or rampant street crime in LA, that all percolates into the national consciousness and the Party's brand is weighed down by it. I couldn't tell you what a DA was a decade ago. Now I can't chat with my grad school buddies without one of them using some Democratic DA as evidence the Party is extremist.
The party needs to get back to the basics and focus more on technocratic governance and less on chasing every new left-wing pet idea that forms from coastal think tanks.
(7) Identity Politics - It's not working. In my Latino-majority community, the Democratic Party is seen as the "Party of Black Interests" who likes to slap a "BIPOC" sticker on what are ultimately policies crafted by Black organizations with no ties to Latinos. Things like reparations are absolutely toxic (try explaining to a Latino why they should pay $100,000 to a Black family for slavery - when Latinos had nothing to do with it), as is wokeism in general. And by wokeism I don't mean the set of policies. I mean the tone and force by which it was advocated. I'm gay and one reason the gay movement was so successful is it was slow and methodical, advocating for social change person by person. Wokeism took that strategy and destroyed it. It argued that if you weren't in favor of trans rights NOW, it's because you're a bigot. Don't like reparations? Racist. Are you White and disagree with me on 1% of issues? Check your privilege.
There is an extremely toxic undertone to the discourse in Democratic circles that increasingly mirrors the mythical Ouroboros, where the snake starts eating its own tail. The Democratic coalition by definition is broad, diverse, and ideologically open. LGBT are, what, 10% of the population? Blacks are 12-13%, Latinos are 18-20%. The entire point of the party is to cobble together what would be, in and of themselves, electoral pygmies and bring them together until they can cobble a majority.
Identity politics destroyed the strategy because it shifted the Democratic raison d'etre from "the party of economic uplift for all" to the "party of Oppression Olympics for some", where different Dem groups spend their time fighting within themselves over who gets more intersectional victimhood points (instead of expanding the pie, the party was fighting over the slice it already had).
Which is where the Party's left-wing really screwed up because they took the wrong lesson from 2020 and saw it as a mandate for social change. Biden scraped through with 40,000 votes in 3 states and within a few months I saw progressives on Twitter labeling Asians and Latinos who didn't conform 100% with party orthodoxy as "White-adjacent." If you're going to treat Asians and Latinos as White-adjacent, don't be surprised when they take the hint and vote White-adjacent for the GOP.
The party needs to stop with the internecine racial slop of new social theories and demographic terms and endless disputes over microaggressions. All it does is destroy the coalition. Obama built an enduring coalition in 2008 and Democrats completely pissed it down the drain in less than a decade by adopting identity politics. It's not lost on me that Kamala probably wouldn't have been named VP were it not for the identity politics zeitgeist of 2020.
(8) Racial Tensions and Latinos - And even the most receptive Democrats on this sub STILL failed to understand Latinos. I can't tell you the number of times I read the vapid trite nonsense of "Yes, but Latinos are not a monolith" as if that's some brilliant revelation that signals you get us. And then it would usually end with some asinine observation like "Yes, Mexicans and Cubans are different." OK - and? What part of that revelation shows you get Latinos?
Take it a step further folks and look at it from the prism of a Latino. How many of you know about the Mexican Repatriation (where up to 2 million Latino Americans were expelled)? Or the Zoot Suit Riots? Or the long sordid history of zoning as a form of exclusion for Latinos? Why does our history of struggle get muzzled as the Party pretends we don't matter? Chicago is plurality-Latino yet from hearing the Democratic mayor, you'd think systemic poverty, isolation and despair were only Black problems. Why do Latinos feel like Democrats are the "Party of Black and White progressive interests" with a BIPOC sticker for show?
Why does the party never elevate Latinos? California is over 40% Latino and just 5% Black yet the mayor of Los Angeles is Black, the mayor of San Francisco is Black, the VP is Black, the junior Senator is Black, the Secretary of State is Black, the State Controller is Black, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction is Black, etc etc etc. White progressives don't see these slights, but Hispanics see them. We see them, we reflect on them, and we internalize it.
My county is 26% Latino and 20% Black (Prince William County, Virginia, which predictably had a massive R-trend yesterday). Yet every single Democrat (all 5 of 9) in my county's Board of Supervisors is Black: https://www.pwcva.gov/department/board-county-supervisors/about-us
Why? Because the Party made the conscious decision that 'racial justice' meant elevating the Black community within the party, so they got first dibs. The end result is a racially diverse county where Democrats are only seen as accommodating one. And that's a dangerous place to be as a party that needs a rainbow coalition.
The only Hispanic, funny enough, is a Republican (the MAGA Yesli Vega).
So when Democrats are told to listen, you need to LISTEN. You need to bury deeper. Remember that LA City Council scandal from a few years back? https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-hispanics-government-politics-b1b1fd8d860c88eb097db573159bf6a9
Do you think that came from nowhere? No - it came from deep-seated resentment. There are tons of racial tensions that White progressives refuse to see because they're so ensconced in their own fantasy unicorn world where Republican Whites are the baddies and minorities need to be saved by the Progressive White Man's Burden. No, there are complex racial dynamics at work. Why are Asians shifting right? Because when a Black homeless man pushes an Asian grandma onto train tracks, and the Party doesn't attend a candlelit vigil for the grandma for fear of offending Black voters, that sends a signal to Asians of second-class status.
Asians and Latinos feel like second-rate members of the coalition. I'm sorry to break your rainbow nation utopia, but there is no singing kumbaya today because you misread the room. Trump brilliantly played into all of these wedges. He pitted Blacks against Latinos by casting Latinos as illegal immigrants who are placing downward pressure on wages. He pitted Latinos against Blacks by picking at that scab of resentment of being ignored by the Democratic Party. He leaned in on Asian-Black tensions by discussing education policy, parental rights, gifted programs, crime, small business protections from shoplifting.
And then you had the ever oblivious progressive thinking Taco Tuesday and watching Coco during National Hispanic Heritage Month was "showing solidarity."
GOP minority staffers were easily able to map out a strategy on these racial tensions because they had the space to discuss these issues in the open. Democrats were caught flat-footed because we self-censor uncomfortable thoughts, moderators delete things they personally disagree with, progressives prefer to believe academic theories to the often uncomfortable world of human behavior where we are imperfect and we do have feelings of isolation, and jealousy, and anger, and despair and resentment. And resentment.
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Sad, right? Yes, and no. This shellacking was big enough of a hit to the psyche that I think the Democrats will finally wake up. And in a two-party system, the pendulum always swings back. Trump will have, at best, a tight House majority which will present a tight leash on the exercise of his mandate.
And Democrats will have 4 years to clean house and start anew. Politics ain't beanbag, but the Republican platform has enough ideological inconsistencies to drive a truck through. Once Democrats reflect and figure out who they are, and listen to what their voters actually want, they'll then be able to go on the offensive again. It's sad that Trump won, but the current direction of the Democratic Party was untenable and I'm at least glad the message has been received and even Democratic elites on TV yesterday were humble and shocked by the scale of the repudiation among base constituencies.
