What a mess Democrats have got themselves into!
A galaxy of events, lousy leadership, election losses, dumb decisions, clumsy conclusions, and changing demographics have combined to put the ancient party of Andrew Jackson in a deep, deep hole.
The good news for Republicans is the Dems are still digging.
The bad news is the extremists in that party are on the ascendancy for the moment. Three socialist candidates in New York City, in effect, were elected to Congress as Democrats last week after being endorsed by New York City’s socialist Muslim mayor.
Things are going to get kinda messy for a while in our politics. And the mainstream media is infatuated with the whole thing. They will pounce all over the socialist shenanigans once these folks start performing on Capitol Hill.
Of course, this is all Donald Trump's fault.
This inserts a profound, new unknown in how all this affects the usual midterm voting patterns come November.
Let’s back up a bit: For too many years, members of America’s two dominant political parties in Washington have been infatuated with holding on to power. Not doing much to earn it, mind you, but liking the perks, pensions, and influence that come with congressional employment.
Our system awards extra clout to incumbency. Although Americans chronically gripe and moan about politicians and those schlumps in D.C., the people who bother to vote tend to reelect incumbents anyway.
Their names are familiar. They get the most media exposure through photo ops calling for this-and-that that might sound good at the time, though no one follows up on the promises. Incumbents can raise the most campaign money. And almost 90 percent of congressional districts have been drawn and redrawn to make them safe.
Seventeen years ago, a movement involving huge crowds bubbled up within the GOP after congressional Democrats under Nancy Pelosi's leadership rammed through a huge spending program and Obamacare without a single Republican vote.
The grassroots revolt against the GOP’s sloth-like go-along-to-get-along establishment came after the shattering loss of the presidency in 2008. It involved libertarian-leaning activists favoring fiscal responsibility, tax cuts, and reducing the national debt. If you can imagine such a thing today.
They called themselves the Tea Party. Some wore patriotic colors and funny hats. I remember a CNN street reporter in Chicago mocking them.
Mock away, sweetheart. In the next year’s midterm elections, Republicans, energized by the Tea Party, ousted an historic 63 House Democrats and seven Democrat senators.
At the state level, the GOP gained six governorships for a total of 29 and captured nearly 1,000 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers. Which – wait for it! — gave Republicans the upper hand for congressional redistricting from the 2010 Census. Democrats have yet to fully recover.
That’s what a savvy, major political party can do for itself after a presidential loss. (After the huge presidential defeat of 1964, the GOP reoriented and won four of the next five White House races.)
Joe Biden led the Democrat ticket in 2020 because he was familiar and not Donald Trump. Turned out, Biden was also not smart, senile, and presided over a disastrous term of inflation, illegal immigration, military decline, and serial screw-ups like the lethal Afghan withdrawal.
What happened to Democrats in 2024? They rigged the primaries to renominate Biden until he froze on national TV. Then, one party leader, Pelosi, who was even older, dumped him without a vote and gifted the ticket to Kamala Harris, who had been picked as Biden's VP for her DEI-ness, certainly not her smarts.
As her VP partner, she selected a goofball governor, offered no new ideas, and spent $100 million every week to lose the White House and all seven key swing states. Other than that, the Democrat Party responded well to its self-inflicted wounds.
Democrats' new party chair, Ken Martin, commissioned an autopsy of the loss by a friend. You know, to draw some valuable lessons for the future. Initially, Martin tried to hide it because it was so sloppy and incomplete.
Without some historical anomaly like 9/11, midterm elections almost always go against the party of an incumbent president, meaning the GOP’s slim majorities in both houses should be endangered. But, strangely, the generic who-should-control-Congress poll this spring showed only a two-point Democrat edge.
In April, a CNN poll produced disastrous results for Democrats. Apparently, sticking with unimaginative party leaders organizing serial government shutdowns and sticking with everything-Trump-is-bad is, well, bad.
Do Democrats in Congress have the right priorities? Seventy-four percent of adult Americans said No; only 25 percent said Yes. Even 55 percent of Democrats said No.
Current congressional leaders of the party of diversity are Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, both from Brooklyn.
Which gets us to New York City. The jobs of both those men are likely in danger if last week’s Democrat primary results there metastasize elsewhere, revealing an internal party revolt akin to the GOP’s Tea Party uprising of 2009.
Their virulent anti-Israeli views go over well in a city where one million foreign-born Muslims helped elect one of their own mayor. This offers a real opening for the GOP, especially in a city with the world's largest Jewish population outside Israel.
Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three challengers. All won. Two are Democrat Socialists like Mamdani with extremist views. This group ousted longtime Democrat powers.
Anti-Jeffries chants erupted at one insurgent’s victory celebration — “You’re next.” New York's Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another Democrat Socialist. She’s expected to challenge Schumer in 2028.
Let’s take a quick look at one of these candidates virtually assured of election in New York City.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, a political rookie and longtime graduate student recruited by the so-called Justice Democrats. The group has recruited other radicals including AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.
As my colleague Nick Arama posted, Chevalier has sought to delete from her online posts calls to abolish police, borders, and prisons and naming America as a “f***ing disgrace.”
She has led nothing. She lists her work career as two years as a paralegal and “activist.” She will now represent New York’s 13th District of upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx. She ousted 71-year-old Adriano Espaillat, a five-term House member and head of the Hispanic Caucus.
These newcomers are out-hustling the party’s old guard, speaking in the angry language that resonates with a younger generation of urban Democrats. A poll by the smart guys over at Issues & Insights finds socialism increasingly popular among Democrats, who obviously don’t know what it really is.
As Brandon Morse noted here the other day:
It's gotten to the point where Democrats can no longer deny their true intent. They are officially the party of socialism, something that Republicans need to capitalize on immediately.
But it's also something the old guard in the Democrat Party needs to start strategizing around before they're made irrelevant and kicked from the party.
The Democrat (1828) and Republican (1854) parties have survived this long through their enduring ability and willingness to shape-shift, subsuming rebels and incorporating shifting priorities and even ideologies.
The Tea Party was essentially absorbed by the GOP when party control shifted in 2016 to Donald Trump, himself a political rookie and rebel who attacked the political establishments of both parties and redirected Republican interests more toward the working class.
We will see only over time how lasting is today’s surging socialist slant of the Democrat Party — whether the party takes on the full-blown colors of socialism, which has never worked long-term anywhere.
Or whether, after the initial attraction of freebies and government as society’s clumsy handyman, this spasm of socialism gets absorbed and diluted into a renovated Democrat Party that actually has always had much more faith in government than the party of Abraham Lincoln.
