The question isn’t how Democrats went off the rails in the 2024 election but why. Ignoring the two issues that undeniably concerned Americans far more than all others – immigration and inflation – was a deliberate choice by these politicians, not a flawed miscalculation. And that speaks to the heart of the existential crisis facing the party today.
The November 5 blowout is now more than a month old, and Democrats are acknowledging that their Marie Antoinette approach to the immigration crisis sealed their fate.
‘Political Malpractice’
“We destroyed ourselves on the immigration issue in ways that were entirely predictable and entirely manageable. We utterly mismanaged that issue, including our Democratic caucus here,” an anonymous senator told The Hill. “That’s political malpractice. That’s not someone else’s fault. That’s not the groups pushing us around.”
When President Joe Biden rather transparently worked to slow the surge of illegal alien “migrants” over the porous US southern border in June for political purposes, it was never going to move Americans who had seen the vast damage his administration’s open-border agenda had already wrought.
“You can’t go three and a half years with the perception being you’ve done nothing, to doing something right before the election and expect it to have an impact,” an unnamed Democratic strategist explained to the news site.
That Democrat politicians thought they could treat the border catastrophe as just another political football to be manipulated on command further highlights the vast gulf separating the party’s top ranks from the bulk of the American people. In May, a poll by left-leaning media organ Axios found that “half of Americans – including 42% of Democrats – say they’d support mass deportations of” illegal aliens.
In each of the first three months of 2024, leading pollster Gallup asked those surveyed what they thought was the “most important problem facing this country today?” Immigration was the top response among 20 different answers in February and March, garnering 28% of the replies, coming in second by one percentage point with 20% of all replies in January.
Abortion, meanwhile, notched 2% of responses in January and February before climbing to a whopping 3% in March.
Liberty Nation News asked on May 4:
“The overarching question is twofold. First, how long can a manipulative big-box media shy away from honestly conveying the reality of a core issue that can demolish blue electoral hopes in November? Second, what can Democrats do to dodge this potential ballot disaster of their own making?”
We all know what they did. Nothing. And it was the Democratic Party establishment that was most responsible for the lethargy.
“Abortion and the 2024 election: There is no easy way out for Republicans,” asserted the influential DC think tank, the Brookings Institution, during an April 17 commentary. “The Wall Street Journal came out with a poll showing that abortion was the number one issue – by far – for suburban women voters in swing states,” a subhead read.
Republican Donald Trump then proceeded to trounce Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in those swing states.
Democrats: Why Do Voters Believe These Awful Things About Us?
Democratic firm Blueprint conducted a post-mortem on November 15, and guess which issue proved decisive in those key battleground states?
“The consistency and intensity of border-related critiques from swing voters who chose Trump suggest this issue serves as a gateway for broader skepticism about Democratic priorities,” Blueprint lamented. It then ran up some sobering numbers:
“Percentage of swing voters who chose Trump characterizing the critique as ‘extremely accurate’ or ‘very accurate’:
“77% – Democrats aren’t tough enough on the border crisis
“73% – Democrats ‘support immigrants more than American citizens’
“72% – Democrats ‘don’t care about securing the border’”
Yet even with these hard truths jumping out at them from the pages of their report, the blue brains at Blueprint still comforted themselves by stating this was a failure of messaging and not of policy.
“These voters – who remained open to persuasion until the very end – delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing right-wing narratives,” the firm concluded.
There is no way out for Democrats until they stop deluding themselves that the pain regular Americans experience due to massive unchecked illegal immigration – regardless of their political beliefs – is a phantasm crafted by a Trumpian fascist Big Lie.
Are they capable of it?
“You know, since 2022, there has been an unprecedented wave of migration, whose impact was felt not only at the border but in cities like New York, where the shelter system and the social safety net and municipal finances were completely overwhelmed,” Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York told The Atlantic, a progressive magazine, in a rather contentious November 14 podcast interview. “You know, in December of 2023, [pollster] Quinnipiac reported that 85 percent of New Yorkers were concerned about the impact of the migrant crisis on New York City.”
“Despite clear signs of popular discontent, the Biden administration waited two and a half years before issuing an executive order regulating migration at the border,” Torres continued. “And by then it was too late. The political damage had been done. The Republicans had successfully weaponized the issue against us.”
“You know ... you know.” Democrats do know, and that is the crux of the problem. How do you bend your agenda to address “clear signs of popular discontent” when the defining purpose of that agenda is to fundamentally transform a society without regard for the petty wishes of the little people who populate it?
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