Dem Stranglehold on Coastal Votes Should Worry Conservatives

The Democratic Party may no longer be a national party in any meaningful sense of the term. Its coastal and urbanite control give it a substantial built-in advantage that allowed it to laser-focus on a few states that could carry the election. While the voting irregularities – which may soon turn up in the Supreme Court – could stain the party, conservatives should not dismiss the fact that Democrat dominance of its base, confined as it is, is a potent political force and will be for years to come.

As anyone looking at an electoral map in recent presidential election years can see, Democrats have a stranglehold on the Boston-D.C. corridor in the Northeast and the entire West Coast. They can win presidential elections with this plus a couple of Rust Belt states. Furthermore, their political ownership of big cities enables these locales to serve as aircraft carriers in battleground states. By weaponizing four of these aircraft carriers – Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta – Democrats showed in 2020 that they can capture the White House while ignoring the vast majority of the continental mass of America.

Monkey in the Wrench

And yet this very dynamic may hurt Democrats in ways they seem unable to grasp. In choosing a Swamp careerist like Joe Biden as its 2020 candidate, the party made clear that a head of lettuce with a blue sticker can sweep the West Coast and upper Northeast, accruing some 160 Electoral College votes in the process. This can happen because the progressives who overwhelmingly reside in these states, despite their hollow talk about demanding "real change," always toe the DNC line come general-election time.

The blue wing of the Swamp has so successfully demonized any Republicans within the leftist orbit that progressives happily pour off a cliff lemming-like for entrenched establishment figures, such as a Hillary Clinton or a Joe Biden.

The taken-for-granted Electoral College votes thus encourage Democrats to play it safe as they seem to take progressives for a ride early on and then turn more moderate in going for the Rust Belt. With this formula baked in, the party is bound to be saddled with the antiquated fossils as flag-bearers we saw in 2016 and 2020.

Stuck in a Bad Place

In this regard, a tainted and thoroughly gamed "victory" could turn out to be a disaster for the Democrats in the long run. Observe the stilted vibe emanating from a lot of Democrats right now; they know it doesn't look or feel right. Politically speaking, this Biden moment appears to resemble the last gasp of the aged oligarchs of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when a creaking Yuri Andropov rose to power and quickly croaked, only to be replaced by an even more decrepit and shorter-lived Konsantin Chernenko. The Old Guard of Biden -- 80-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), 87-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and their colleagues -- represent a similar flickering vitality. This is entrenched machinery clinging to power, nothing more.

A Biden win, if it stands, could mask the dire need for sweeping change in the party and the injection of non-radical fresh air, a wallpapering over of the crumbling party foundations.

For what has changed? How does the elevation of 47-year D.C. lifer Biden clarify what Democrats stand for? The party seems awash in a dizzying stew of Black Lives Matter Marxist revolutionaries, Antifa rioting in the streets, climate change fanaticism, and simmering grievance politics. If Biden does survive the court challenges to the election-night activities, he will take office and promptly begin catering to his corporate donors and insider cronies like every other president, Republican or Democrat, 1988-2016. That is who he is.

What do progressives do then? Barack Obama got away with it because the identity-politics-obsessed left was so enamored with the color of his skin that it seemed willing to overlook his actual performance in office. Biden will get no such leeway. For him, the coastal/urban redoubts he leaned on so heavily may prove a double-edged sword. An ersatz President Biden is far more likely to trip the rockslide of Democrat division that has been uneasily kept in check by a united hatred of Trump than it is to lead the party to any kind of fruitful future.

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