Post-electoral Democrat blues

After having spent almost eight years deriding Donald Trump, telling all who cared to listen that the man is a crooked businessman who fiddles his accounts, a born rapist who cavorts with porn stars, a Russian stooge on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, a clone of Adolf Hitler and a great many other nasty things, the Democrat power-brokers assumed that even a candidate as unprepossessing as Kamala Harris would manage to beat him in a national election.

On Wednesday morning, they learned that they had got things badly wrong. Instead of harming Trump, the relentless campaign of lawfare they had waged against him, with prosecutors winning office after promising to send him to jail, ended up strengthening him. So too did attempts to warn their compatriots that another four years of Trump would have catastrophic consequences for planet Earth. This time round, the appalling “orange man” they hate won not only in the Electoral College but also got more votes nationwide, something he had failed to do in 2016 and 2020. What's more, he did all this while spending about a third of the money that the Democrats invested in Kamala.

The election that concluded on Tuesday night was a contest between two flawed products in which the least likeable got routed. Some Democrats, including Barack Obama, believe this was because too many North Americans are not prepared to let a woman govern their country. However, had the Republicans opted for Nikki Haley, say, she would probably have won by a landslide bigger than the relatively modest one chalked up by Trump, as indeed would have Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio. If Democrats were wise, they would understand that it was due to their incompetence, combined with the highhandedness that is one of their less endearing characteristics, that Trump came roaring back.

Long before polling day arrived, it was evident that large swathes of the US population had come to the conclusion that the Democrat dispensation was not for them. While it may have been a bit unfair to blame Joe Biden and his crew for high prices in grocery stores, they were certainly responsible for the chaos prevailing at the southern border where huge numbers of migrants poured in and then fanned out to reach “sanctuary cities” under Democrat mayors, such as Detroit and Chicago, in the north, for the humiliating way the military withdrawal from Afghanistan had been handled and for the negative impact “green” policies are having. Even worse, needless to say, was the holier-than-thou arrogance of members of the largely Democrat credentialled class who made no secret of the contempt they feel for “ordinary” North Americans. Biden spoke for many when he described Trump voters as “garbage.”

There can be little doubt that the Democrats’ willingness to push the inherently racist and weirdly sexist “woke” agenda did much to ensure Kamala’s defeat. Strange as it may seem, many people do not take kindly to being told that, whether they are aware of it or not, they were genetically programmed by their ancestors to hate all those whose skin colour differs from their own and they should pay penance for their inherited sins. It the final stages of the campaign, Trump’s team hammered away at the woke contribution to Democrat thinking, with ads mocking the bizarre pronoun mania that has gripped progressives in the English-speaking world by saying that “Kamala is for they/them – President Trump is for you,” condemning the drive to let biological males who say they want to be female compete in women’s sports, and making fun of Timothy Walz, calling Kamala’s pick for the vice-presidential slot “Tampon Tim” because he ordered that such menstrual products be made available in boys’ bathrooms.

For years now, Democrat strategists have been smugly telling people they had put together a permanent majority by building a progressive coalition, led by university-educated professionals who could be relied on to take over the media, that for decades to come would enjoy the electoral support of suitably grateful ethnic minorities. Even after Trump swaggered onto the scene and won the presidency for the first time, many Republicans feared that, as the proportion of whites in the population would continue to diminish, they would have to resign themselves to a Democrat-dominated future.

Given the way things are turning out, such pessimism on their part was unwarranted. To the bewilderment of Democrat stalwarts, a growing number of blacks, Hispanics and Asians are breaking out of the ethnic boxes in which they thought they had trapped them and voting for Trump and other alleged white supremacists. So too are more women than Kamala’s backers, who apparently believe that they are all strongly in favour of abortion on demand, had expected.

Would the Democrats have done better if they had fielded a more appealing candidate? Perhaps they would have, but to bypass Kamala they would have had to dissociate themselves from the Biden-Harris administration, something which for them would have been extremely difficult. In any event, even if they had succeeded in coming up with a more polished performer than the inarticulate vice-president, he or she would have found it hard to reconcile the aspirations of the noisy and rancorous leftist brigade, which includes fierce supporters of Hamas, with those of the pro-Israel middle-of-the-roaders who are accustomed to having things their way.

The Democrats will now have to choose between sticking to the ideological guns provided by progressives and trying to narrow the gap that separates them from much of the electorate. For those who would prefer to stay loyal to the creed party members recently adopted, even if does mean remaining in opposition for a very long time, that would be a price they would be willing to pay. However, for the many politicians who are less interested in fanciful theories about gender and race relations than in acquiring and then clinging to positions that allow them to become powerful and, in some cases, very wealthy, losing touch with the electorate would be a fatal mistake. Such pragmatists will already be pressing for a drastic rethink of what the Democrat Party really stands for and what it would have to do to win back the presidency and the Senate which, thanks almost entirely to their collective efforts, have fallen into the hands of heterodox Republicans led by Trump and his presumptive political heir, J. D. Vance.