Democrats Need to Get Over Their Delusions

Since the election conservatives have assumed that the results represent a “mandate” for their political agenda, as well as a confirmation of their version of national identity. Yet in reality, the election was actually quite close, as Trump’s win margin in the popular vote is the smallest since Jimmy Carter’s in 1976.

This is remarkable given the inadequacy of the Democratic candidates, as well as the well-deserved disdain many Americans feel toward the Biden Administration. Indeed, the case can be made that the November vote was less an endorsement of Trump, who remained widely disliked all the way to the election, than a rejection of the current cocktail of progressive policies. These include unpalatable positions from draconian climate policies to the embrace of transgender ideology, open borders, race quotas, and censorship. As Nate Silver suggests, voters were “giving the middle figure” to the “expert class” of Harvard and Yale credentialed types whose genius brought the country rising crime, inflation, and a generally unstable planet.

Yet conservatives are making a mistake in supposing that the Democrats will be down for the long-term. Gallup notes that Kamala Harris was detested for many positions, but was still favored on such things as “preserving the American dream for young people” and “strengthening the middle class.” Similarly, most Americans favor increasing taxes on the wealthy, a position anathema to most Republicans but usually embraced by Democrats.

On top of this, Democrats can count on Trump finding ways to alienate voters with his myriad personal faults, which will make it unlikely there’s a repeat of Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Trump also will inherit Biden’s awful legacy, including a bloated budget deficit, a weakened military, inflation that hits hardest among the least affluent, and an economy that has failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class. Overall, one in four Americans fear losing their job over the next year, and roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of homeownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

The traditional Democratic focus on class mobility would be far more effective than their current approach, which is largely shaped by their own ideological and sociological bubbles rather than the concerns of regular Americans. As long-time Democratic operative Van Jones has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Democrats are already sharpening knives to keep anyone from thinning out the bloated bureaucracy, which, as Rep. Ro Khanna suggests, also places them out of touch with the majority of voters.

As they kowtow to progressive non-profits and public employee unions, Democrats reflect the values of the progressive culture dominant in classrooms, the media, Hollywood, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Doing this has led the Democrats to lose even the most basic sense of what is happening on Main Street.

Some Democrats are so clueless that they are contemplating another Kamala Harris presidential run in 2028. But Harris has proven repeatedly she can’t win anywhere east of the Sierra Nevada. Hers was a message that failed everywhere, from the suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities—basically everywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades. Ultimately, the Democrats cannot consolidate a majority until they can appeal to voters in these places.

But the Harris campaign did all the things that do in Democrats. It was obsessed with Trump and issues like abortion. Harris surrounded herself with celebrities but did little to connect with grassroots Americans. Perhaps worst of all, she came from a state, and a particular city, widely looked down on for its crime, political extremism, and vast homeless population.

Today’s Democrats reflect the realities of a political economy (so evident in places like New York and California) based on a relatively small class of ultra-wealthy and elite industries. And this works, at least when stock prices are high, in deep blue states like California. But it’s not ideal for those stuck with extremely high living costs and a lack of well-paying jobs (the real reasons for California’s 18% cost-adjusted poverty rate, the nation’s highest and rising). California may be home to by far the highest number of billionaires—but it is also home to 30% of the country’s homeless and features the highest percentage of people living in poverty and the widest gap between the middle class and the rich.

In embracing draconian climate regulation states like California and New York have seen their industrial jobs move to red states—Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, and Florida. Similarly, policies all but banning drilling have undermined energy production in California. At the same time, the Permian basin (located in New Mexico and Texas) is the world’s fifth largest oil producer and is expected soon to be responsible for half of all U.S. output.

Despite occasional efforts to boost their support via transfer payments, Democrats have disconnected themselves from their historic working-class base. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. Approximately 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical emerging voting bloc, has moved to the Right.

The losses in non-white constituencies upset the whole rationale behind identity politics. Minorities make up over 40% of the nation’s working class and by 2032 will constitute its majority. They may be Asian, black, or Latino, but they are also people with economic interests and aspirations. Areas that were once Democratic have become redder; California’s Inland Empire, a preferred locale for upwardly mobile Latinos, went for a GOP presidential candidate for the first time in 20 years. Another warning sign: as Latino populations have surged, Texas has, if anything, gotten redder.

The question now facing Democrats is does the Harris “coalition” represent the future of the party? An argument can be made that as the country continues to unravel, we will have a growing cascade of welfare-dependent voters and ever more cat ladies who obsess about abortion long after they are no longer fecund.

But the party’s class base now lies with the professional urban elect, whose views differ enormously with the vast majority of Americans on issues like censorship and rationing of gas and meat. As a recent Rasmussen survey suggests, there’s an enormous distance between the views of graduate school educated urban professionals and everyone else on virtually every major issue, from race and gender to the border and government control of speech.

The cultural gap could widen, as the Democrats remain dominated by these same professionals, the media, and the politically leftist academy. But having increasing control of the old institutions is not making an impact as it once did. Democrats, notes the American Prospect, have been caught flatfooted as the mainstream media fades and new, more right-leaning outlets gain traction.

As Democrats rely more on the growing but still minority proportion of Americans who neither marry nor have children, they also tend to be very different than immigrants who are more likely to live in two-parent families, are twice as conservative in their social views than the general public, and generally reject identity politics.

Essentially, the Democrats are waging a demographic war on themselves. Blue states and cities suffer the nation’s lowest birth rates, with San Francisco and Los Angeles suffering the first and second lowest fertility rates of the 53 largest markets. In contrast, eight of the youngest cities are almost all in red states, led by Salt Lake City and Houston.

These state are also the primary beneficiaries of migration, both domestic and foreign; the second- and third-largest metros gaining foreign-born people in the last decade were Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Texas is projected to replace California as the U.S.’s highest population state sometime in the 2040s. It is also the nation’s second youngest state, is home to four of the six youngest large U.S. metros, and has enjoyed the largest net in-migration of any state, with the largest contingent coming from California.

Texas’s growth, in parallel with those of Southern states, needs to be seen as a formula favoring continued red state power. Based on the last census, Texas gained two seats and Florida and North Carolina gained one, while New York, California, and Illinois all lost seats and electoral votes. If current trends continue, by 2030 the South will have 30 more seats than it did in the 1970s.

This demographic shift is increasingly paralleled on the economic front as well. According to recent analysis by Zen Business, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots, attracting the most tech workers. Income growth is now roughly 40% higher in these states than in New York and New Jersey, as well as other blue state laggards California, Illinois, and Oregon.

Wealth too is shifting in the direction of red states, a pattern that has persisted over the past four decades. In the past decade alone, the six fastest growing Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee—added more to the national GDP than the Northeast, the long-time perennial powerhouse. Most of the big Southern metros have far lower unemployment rates than places like New York City or Los Angeles.

Declining business and social conditions in blue states are driving higher net worth individuals to red states. As affluent residents arrive, notes the IRS, metros like Dallas last year gained $6 billion in gross income from other states while New York lost $60 billion and Los Angeles $15 billion.

Many Democrats refuse to confront these trends, but there’s no long-term future without winning in the South as well as suburbs and exurbs around the country. This is not necessarily impossible. By shifting to the center, Bill Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. With economic and demographic shifts, becoming competitive in these areas has become more critical for Democrats.

But this will require confronting the increasingly powerful progressive Left and its unpopular stances, for example, on transgenderism, reparations, and racial quotas—all of which are backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Democrats also must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Joe Biden, Clinton announced that the “the era of big government is over” and embraced pro-growth tax policies, pouring billions into law enforcement to address popular concerns over crime.

To quote long-time party activist Ted Van Dyk, Democrats ultimately need to start “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking.” They have to stop being so remarkably sanguine about their party’s current message. Some like former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki have denied that transgender issues hurt Democrats in 2024. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomizes a flawed ideology, has been blaming white women for failing Harris, part of an effort from activists to blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

To win decisively, Democrats have to stop trying to titillate their university, public employee, and non-profit base and focus on the concerns of regular people. People are not necessarily happy to pay more taxes for bureaucracies that do little for them but have swelled as private employment has stagnated. If you want a big government, it has to accomplish something—like improving education or investing in roads, bridges, and energy and water systems—that actually benefits middle-income families.

There are some hopeful signs. Some deep blue cities, including San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle, have shifted to the center on crime, removing numerous permissive DAs. We are seeing the emergence of dissident center-left figures, including new San Francisco Mayor Dan Lurie, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, and Houston’s John Whitmire. These are people who realize, for example, that a ban on fracking may not be very popular among working-class people in their states.

In the 1990s Democrats beat the Reaganites not with one policy shift, but by prioritizing the aspirations of the middle and working classes. By curtailing the influence of the left-progressives and once again embracing reality as experienced by most Americans, Democrats today still could make the world’s oldest political party, to use a popular phrase, great again.

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