Have Dems Finally Started to Get the Message?

AP Photo/Ben Curtis

Well ... perhaps a few, but so far they seem to be mainly in the Democrat wilderness. One person who nails the problem -- and even part of the solution -- is Julie Roginsky, a Democrat strategist and CNN contributor. Immediately after Joe Biden's valediction at the White House. CNN anchor Pamela Brown tried to throw it to Roginsky by framing Biden's speech as a way to defend himself from finger-pointing over his decision to run for a second term.

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Roginsky rejected the premise, and indeed that any one person in the Democrat Party should get the blame for the electoral disaster. The whole party has gone off the rails, Roginsky tells Brown and Shermichael Singleton, in a surgical strike only partly captured by this clip from MRC:

When we put pronouns after names, and say she/her, as opposed to saying, you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, but stop with a virtue signaling, and just speak to people like they're normal. There's nothing I'm going to say to Shermichael that I'm not going to say to you, that I'm not going to say to somebody else.

I speak the same language to everybody. But that's not what Democrats do. We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking to different cohorts, because our focus groups or our polling shows that so and so appeals to such and such. That's not how normal people think.It's not common sense.

And we need to start being the party of common sense again. Joe Biden is not responsible for that. Neither is Kamala Harris. It is a problem that Democrats have had for years. I have been banging the drum on this for, I don't know, probably 10 years, if not longer on this. We need to get back to being the party of common sense that people look at us and say, we understand you, we appreciate what you say because you speak our language.

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Brown tries to hew back to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, arguing that "they were the messengers" that needed to deliver that message. No they weren't, Roginsky argued after this cut, and neither is anyone else in Democrat leadership. None of them speak the language of ordinary Americans any longer. They speak the language of TikTok and Academia:

But when you're spending your time at the White House trying to have viral moments with Steve Doocy of FOX News, which nobody in the real world in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, or in Saginaw County, Michigan, knows or cares about, when you're trying to go viral on TikTok because you're somehow taking on and trying to humiliate an anchor at a cable news station, as opposed to looking into the camera and saying, this is what we have accomplished for you today in plain terms, right?

You could look into the camera and say, thanks to our infrastructure bill, Route 212 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we will finally have that pothole filled in Riegelsville that you have been complaining about. But that's not what they did. They try to have these weird viral moments constantly where they're trying to take on Doocy at FOX and they think it's hilarious.

Nobody knows who Doocy is. And the people who do know him are not voting for us anyway. So the point is, there's a way to talk to people on their own terms about things that they care about. That is a messaging problem the White House has had since day one. I have complained about it since day one. I'm complaining about it now.

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So she's no fan of Karine Jean-Pierre, clearly. That does reflect on Joe Biden's judgment. Harris, of course, is the apotheosis of Academia-speak in the Democrat Party; she proved several times that she can't connect with anyone in conversations. She lapses into exactly the kind of progressive-cliché word salads that Roginsky castigates as well. The problem is that the party leadership has absolutely caved to the queer-based Left and has adopted its patois and its extreme agenda, and can't grasp that it only matters to tiny percentage of the electorate.

Ruy Teixeira gets it too. I included a small excerpt in last night's Final Word of his essay on the shattering of the Democrat coalition, which parallels what Roginsky sees too. "The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose," Teixeira writes, mainly because it's hardly a coalition at all any longer. Democrats abandoned the working class for its fringe obsessions, and shouldn't be surprised to see the GOP become focused on working-class voters looking for a real home and real coalition:

Among all working-class voters, Trump dramatically widened his advantage, tripling his margin from 4 points in 2020 to 12 points in this election. That included moving from 25 to 29 points among white working-class voters and radically compressing his deficit among nonwhite working-class voters from 48 points in 2020 to 33 points this election. Compare that margin to what Obama had in 2012: according to Catalist, he carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points in that election. That indicates that Democrats have had their margin among this core constituency more than cut in half over the last 12 years. Ouch. So much for the “rising American electorate.”

And it’s time to face the fact that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class. Democrats hate to admit that and mutter that they represent the “interests” of the working class. But the numerical pattern is now too powerful to be denied. Instead of denying the obvious—or, worse, blaming the dumb workers for not knowing their own interests—Democrats would be well-advised to accept this new reality and seek to change it.

Unless they’re content to be primarily the party of America’s well-off. Harris lost voters under $50,000 in household income as well as voters from $50,000 to $100,000 in income. But she did carry voters with over $100,000 in household by 8 points, one place where Harris did improve over Biden in 2020. This is not, as they say, your father’s Democratic Party. Not even close.

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I had noticed that too, in the Cook Report's aggregated polling demographics. That just reflects again that Democrats have become the party of elites -- elites in finance, elites in Academia, elites in media. And they chose that path as the electorate has only grown more frustrated and hostile to elites.

Can they reverse course? It's possible, but it seems unlikely. They may find a candidate that can paper over it in 2028, but all of their bench candidates are drenched in elitism and scorn for ordinary Americans. Until they start making that language their language and stop enforcing pronoun usage, they'll fail. 

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 07, 2024
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