The Democrats’ initial reflex seems to be to lurch further left. Schumer joined Bernie Sanders in backing Rep. Keith Ellison as Democratic national chairman. Ellison may be smart and charming, but he’s also a Muslim representing a 73 percent Obama 2012 Minneapolis district. Back in 2007, he said the 9/11 attacks were “almost like the Reichstag fire,” enabling a leader to “have authority to do whatever he wanted.” That sounds uncomfortably close to 9/11 trutherism and comparing George W. Bush to Hitler.
It’s not likely to win votes for Democrats in Wright County, 40 miles outside Ellison’s district, where Hubert Humphrey had a lakefront home and Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton 62 to 29 percent. A party with a leftist national chairman and congressional leaders from Brooklyn and San Francisco is not ideally positioned to appeal to voters in those places where Hillary Clinton fell short.
Exit polls showing Republican improvement among blacks, Hispanics and Asians suggest regression to the mean—people considered minorities behaving more like the national average than they had previously. The results also suggest that when you keep telling white Americans that they soon will become a minority—a message that sometimes sounds like “hurry up and die”—then many non-college-graduate “deplorables” may start acting like members of a self-conscious minority, and vote more cohesively against your own side.
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