Democrats are blowing it.

The Blue Wave is turning into a Blue ripple. 

 

Once again, Democrats at the national level come across as the party of self-righteousness, over-reach, and intolerance. They hate Trump so much they are blind to what voters see in him.  And in them.

Once again, Democrats are scolding the deplorables. 

Jobs and the economy are better issues than the culture war.

Election Night, 2016

The national polls are shifting back away from a big Democratic victory. The Blue Wave in turning back into a humdrum blue ripple, not a thunderous denunciation of Trump some thought plausible a month ago. It is not that people like Trump any better. It is that they trust Democrats less.

I am traveling and find myself in the company of politically active progressive Democrats, primary litigator attorneys. They are sensitive to what juries want. They know what will sell and what will not. They sense it too. They realize that the activist core of the Democratic Party--progressives, feminists, environmentalists, social justice advocates--hate Trump so much they give him a wide and clear path to election victory. Or in the House, a wide path to avoid the debacle that could have been.

Immigration:  We are in a period of mass immigration. A great many people coming the the US are low skilled people, some looking for work and some for exile, and they are entering a job environment where the market for those jobs is either saturated or where the jobs are unusually unattractive, e.g. slaughterhouse, agricultural, or construction labor. This tends toward marginalizing those immigrants into enclaves which impedes assimilation. The Democratic response to the utterly predictable social friction--which friction elevated immigration to a winning issue for Trump--has been to double down. They dropped their talk of strong border security and immigration controls and now have a message so mushy that Trump can characterize it as "open borders" and "sanctuary for criminals."   

Click: Democrats drop in generic poll

Gender relations:  Democrats have become so thoroughly the party of women that they have allowed the party to come across as anti-male. The Kavanaugh hearings backfired. It hardened the opinion of female voters who were already Democrats, moving them from angry to more-angry, but it simultaneously positioned them as injudicious, over-certain, and anti-male, at least in the minds of a great many voters. The Kavanaugh backlash created a series of related memes best articulated with joke cartoons that are now circulating: "A boy tried to kiss me," the little girls says. "I'm going to wait 40 years and tell on him." And, "Isn't it strange that the only girls Kavanaugh supposedly misbehaved with were women who grew up to be extreme liberals."  Democrats forget how they themselves closed ranks to protect Bill Clinton twenty years ago. Republicans are doing it now.

Tribal divisiveness: Democrats have seized from Trump the mantle of divisiveness. Democrats think of Trump as being the divider, citing him saying Mexicans as rapists, NFL players kneeling as disloyal, and his comments on white nationalists in Charlottesville as being archetypes of Trump-ism. There is another view, one which Democratic leadership has inadvertently nurtured: affirmative action as anti-white prejudice, women as closed-minded believers of accusations, colleges as hothouses of offense over micro-aggressions. 

Self righteousness. Evangelical Christians had long been the symbol of self-righteous over-reach--those irritating moral scolds who presume to make people feel guilty for not being Christian enough, heterosexual enough, goody-goody enough. They have now embraced Trump, warts and sins in all, and in so doing thoroughly lost that status, but Democrats have grabbed it from them. Now Democrats are the ones who insist on politically correct speech and action, the ones who examine thoughts and actions of others and are quick to condemn.  Democrats are the ones who harass Republican leaders at restaurants, and feel righteous in doing so. Sinner! Unworthy!

Al Franken is gone. Trump is in office. Voters got the message about Democrats.

Watch out, Democrats.

Two years ago this week this blog warned Democrats to lose their self confident assurance that the public was going to back them in their supposed sure thing election of Hillary Clinton. This blog said it wasn't that Trump was so good. Trump was interesting, I wrote, but deeply flawed.  He was saying things people liked regarding jobs and immigration, but a big part of Trump's appeal was that he was pushing back against Democratic over-reach. Trump represented freedom, freedom from Democrats. Freedom from Hillary.

This summer Democrats energized Republicans and some portion of the people who mostly don't care about politics. Democrats may limp over the finish line in the House, because the pendulum swing is so powerful. But the opportunity for a great rejection of Trump is slipping away.

It isn't too late. Democrats can talk about jobs. Jobs and a strong economy. That is their issue.