Pronouns and abortion are easier to understand than inflation and corporate tax rates.
Democrats wonder why voters -- nearly across the board -- moved toward a criminal, corrupt, lying autocrat rather than choose their candidate. And why was the Democratic brand so toxic that good candidates like Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana lost their offices?
Blueprint, a Democratic-aligned polling company, concluded:The top reasons voters gave for not supporting Harris were that inflation was too high (+24), too many immigrants crossed the border (+23), and that Harris was too focused on cultural issues rather than helping the middle class (+17).
Inflation, immigration, and cultural issues. Those seem intuitive and reasonable. The inflation issue being first leads Democratic strategists to think that Biden and Harris were simply caught by an international wave, in the wrong place at the wrong time, and there is nothing to fix. Same with immigration. It is a devilishly complex problem existing for decades, created by global economic and political problems, confounded by Republican obstruction. Yeah, in hindsight Biden should have got moving earlier, but there were a million constraints, and at the end he got it right. Nothing to fix.
Blueprint has a chart that breaks down subgroups of voters and what issues motivated them:
The issue that stands out as the one that moved swing voters toward Trump is the third one, cultural issues.
Cultural issues are simple to understand. They reflect whether the politician and the party are "on your wave length." Democrats would like to dismiss cultural issues as simply Republican talking points. Bernie Sanders says that Democrats just need to hammer away against "the billionaires." Ro Khanna urges Democrats message an economic new deal for the middle class. The premise is that economic issues, not cultural ones, are what voters care about.
This is convenient for Democrats, but it is wrong.
Democrats are considered extreme on a suite of issues under the umbrella of "woke." Dismissing cultural issues allows identity interest groups in their coalition to stay on board. Spokespeople for those groups stand ready to attack any policy heretic, calling it racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, age-ism, able-ism or one of the other moral ills that would represent the party backsliding. Fear of intra-party divide is the real reason Biden did not think Democrats could have an open primary fight. The solution was to paper over the divide. Pivot to billionaires and corporate greed.
"Wokeness" is generally unpopular with a majority of Americans, including ones that had been reliable parts of the Obama coalition. I addressed the "Sunday school" scolding problem when I described Jimmy Carter two days ago. The public is inconsistent here. It wants virtue and rectitude in theory, but it doesn't like a finger pointed at them, not by Carter and not by Democrats. Voters didn't like being shamed when told that the cause of the energy crisis of the 1970s was them, and that they should wear a sweater indoors. Voters didn't like hearing from Barack Obama that they were "clinging" to guns and religion, nor being called deplorable by Hillary Clinton.
There is a reason Trump and other Republicans campaigned with images of trans people and accusations that pro-choice women want abortions up to the time a healthy baby is delivered. These are easy-to-understand issues. Democrats thought that "childless cat ladies" was a phrase that hurt the Trump/Vance campaign, and among some Democrats it did. But it addressed a cultural point that Democrats are anti-motherhood, and that they have contempt for women who want to stay at home with their infants. Many women want exactly that, and many men want that for their wives.
Democrats cannot finesse this with messaging that pivots from unpopular policies. I watched Kamala Harris repeatedly refuse to say that she disapproved of abortions at the moment a baby is delivered. She said it was rare. She said it was a GOP accusation. She said it wasn't what women wanted. All true. But she would not say clearly and flatly that no, of course it was wrong and should be illegal. Voters noticed. Republicans saw to that.
Democrats cannot win the trust of working people on issues of economics if they seem slippery and untrustworthy on issues people can understand simply. They need to do the uncomfortable work of deciding if they want to be virtuous, as defined by their well-educated policy advocates, or if they want to be popular with voters.
[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]
20 comments:
Gov. DeSantis is probably the most prominent critic of “woke.” During a court case in Dec. 2022, some of his officials were asked to define it. His general counsel, Ryan Newman, described it as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."
DeSantis denies them, never mind the gross disparities between Blacks and Whites in health, wealth, education, etc. Republicans would rather ignore them, just as they do climate change, but that doesn’t make them any less real. It would be regrettable if Democrats were to abandon efforts to address them out of political expediency.
By the way, the court case was between Gov. DeSantis and Andrew Warren, the state attorney he had suspended for being too “woke.” DeSantis lost.
I can't rank them in importance, but in my view all three featured Blueprint factors were important at the expense of Democrats. The Biden team spent a great deal of time condescending to Americans on rampant inflation and surging prices, urging that it was illusory, then merely transitory. We're still transitioning. Biden openly ran in 2020 on loosening the borders AND government coffers in inviting association, then immediately upon taking office used his executive authority to actuate that policy. Condescension followed again, as Americans were repeatedly told there was no surge at the border--video of human convoys to the contrary--let alone a crisis. Until there was. American Hispanics agree. The cultural issues are already covered nicely here.
The common thread for me is the perceived moralizing lectures from the modern Left, the pharisaical hectoring from prigs and prats of a type that used to be the stock-in-trade of Republicans, especially during the Jerry Falwell/Moral Majority years. America remains stubbornly centrist. The judgmental are marginalized (including anti-abortion triumphalists in 2022). Right on cue, the primary 2024 takeaway from prominent Democrats seems to be that voters are too dumb or weak to appreciate otherwise unassailable Democratic messaging. No self-reflection on the merits is necessary, nor even possible.
James Carville says it’s economic issues and I agree. The other things are relevant but those working class voters who can’t afford a house voted for Trump. I think they were wrong to do so for economic reasons, but they thought Trump would be better for their pocketbook. Messaging needs to focus on economy and not Trump.
I don't think it is so clear that these issues were the only ones voters cared about. We need to remember that only one third of people voted for trump (31.4 %), nearly one third for Harris (30.4%.), and over one third of eligible voters DID NOT VOTE (38.4%). The young women I talked to who probably did not vote just "did not trust" or know Harris enough to support her. They said that Oregon would protect them on abortion issues. They did not see the dire possibilities of a trump administration.
“Get woke, go broke.”
True for Bud Lite.
True for Harley-Davidson.
True for many other denizens of corporate America.
True for the former presidents of Harvard and U Penn.
True for “progressive” Democrats like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.
True for Kamala Harris, who could never escape the extreme and obnoxiously woke version of herself she presented to the country in 2019. “She was that little girl,” and more than half of the country chose to vote against who she grew up into.
And once Trump takes office, true for many other promoters of woke ideology. I have high hopes that 2025 will be, in the words of Ron DeSantis, where woke goes to die.
You forgot to mention the party of domestic terrorists (republican) lying to Americans and relying on foreign influence.
The US has spent trillions on national security, all to be sacrificed by electing Putin's orange puppet.
I'm so proud that President Biden is honoring the January 6 Committee members!
The common thread I see is that while many Americans don’t like to be told what to do, they will believe what they are told when the messenger appeals to their fears. Even when the messenger is openly lying and manipulative.
Carville also said that the Democrats had to stop speaking to the voters in a sneering judgemental voice that sounds like it came straight from the faculty lounge at some Ivy League bastion of wokeness.
I'd offer another definition of "woke" than DeSantis' flack's.
"Woke" is the simplistic and harmful insistence that statistical differences between racial identity groups can only be the result of racism**, with government-rigged equality of group outcome the only adequate response.
The notion of "systemic" racism is just another way to draw the same inference, absent proof of what was once rather quaintly known as "actual" racism.
**Except for Asians and Jews.
You have to be careful to understand the actual cause of these disparities. They are not all the result of racial discrimination.
Blacks commit crime at a higher rate per capita than whites do. Blacks end up involved with the criminal justice system at a higher rate per capita than whites do.
This is exactly the result you would expect if the law was being applied equally to everyone, without regard to race.
James Carville: Kamala Harris Lost Because ‘It Always Will Be the Economy, Stupid’
Sure, LD, why would anyone think hundreds of years of oppression might have any lingering effects, or that Whites might still harbor prejudice over such superficial differences as skin color - never mind that the GOP has essentially become a White nationalist party led by the biggest blowhard in the Birther Movement.
No argument on the likelihood of "lingering effects" or that many "might still harbor prejudice". They're just not a remotely sufficient justification for the toxic, reductionist assumptions and often wildly inapplicable (on an individual level) group-based sledgehammer that is so much DEI-style policy.
James Carville for the NYT, October 23, 2024: "Three Reasons Why I'm Certain Kamala Harris Will Win".
Was he lying to The Times' readership, and America, or are his prognostication chops overrated?
As the data and the hate crimes make all too clear, racism remains a serious problem in the U.S. Like climate change, ignoring it won't make it go away, but unfortunately that's the solution of choice for Republicans, who don't want to address what they don't want to hear.
It’s easy to “make all too clear” when one assumes what is to be proved, even if only part of a loaf is gained thereby as it is. Ignoring non-racist variables greases the skids to unwarranted—and socio-politically divisive—certitude.
Right, "non-racist variables," such as...?
Various facets of socialization. MT cited one area.
So, what do you suppose accounts for that, genetic inferiority?
Post a Comment