Quote:Byron York, the doyen of the conservative media – I can remember seeing his shaggy mane at Supreme Court Nomination Hearings for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the mid-00s – wrote a truly fascinating column recently about the Democrats' mood post-election.

In his column, York reported:

Democrats are angry about a lot of things. But the three that have attracted some attention in the last few days are 1) the massive amount of money Harris spent and where it went, 2) the campaign role Harris gave to former Rep. Liz Cheney, and 3) the part the media played in Harris’s loss and Trump’s win. All have Democrats nearly gagging in disbelief and, in some cases, anger.

The latter two points were what attracted my attention. And both indicate that Democrats are not done falling into their Doom Loop, which I discussed in my earlier column.

A doom loop, in economics, describes a situation in which one negative economic condition creates a second negative condition, which in turn creates a third negative condition or reinforces the first, resulting in a downward spiral.

The 2024 Democrat Doom Loop I wrote about described the fact that the Democrats knew they were behind in the presidential race because of the economy, the border, the world chaos, and the left-wing and lightweight record of Kamala Harris, and how all this compared (poorly) to Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 presidential record during his term in office (minus the year of COVID). So, the Democrats were forced to lean into the “Trump is the devil” campaign they had started in 2015 to right their ship. In other words, they campaigned heavily on the idea that Trump was a crude barbarian crook who abuses women and minorities and wants to overthrow America’s democratic society in favor of dictatorship. But, because that campaign had been ongoing for almost a decade now, the gettable voters for it had already been gotten, and the charge itself had lost its impact with other voters because of “the boy who cried wolf” syndrome. But, because the Democrats didn’t have anything else to work with, and because they really believed their own propaganda, the Democrats couldn’t stop pushing the “Trump is the devil campaign,” and each time they used it, they expected it to finally stop Trump dead in his tracks.

This is why Kamala Harris and her campaign advisors chose to end her campaign with Liz Cheney. Cheney was the unquestioned Republican leader in the “Trump is the devil” campaign. So, it was quite natural (considering their logic and bias) for the Democrats to hope that Liz Cheney singing from their mutual playbook with Kamala Harris would move some Republican voters or swing voters into the Harris column.

But it (once again) didn’t work for the reasons I explained above, and now the Democrats are angry about it.

And what do the Democrats think should have been done instead? Well, according to York, “(t)he current idea in Democratic circles is that the liberal media establishment — the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, plus Hollywood, the music industry, and academia — was too timid in reporting on Trump’s liabilities.” Even their popular comedian, Jon Stewart, thinks this is true.

That’s right – the current Democrat conventional wisdom is that there was not enough browbeating of the swing voters with the idea that “Trump is the devil.” And now, to impede Trump’s second presidential term, they and their allies believe they need to talk some more about how Donald Trump is a crude barbarian crook who abuses women and minorities and wants to overthrow America’s democratic society in favor of dictatorship.

Yup, truly… fascinating. (Imagine me arching my eyebrow as I type this, a la Mr. Spock.) And very indicative of the fact that the Democrats are still spiraling down into their Doom Loop.

Link

What does anyone expect from the party of weak men and angry women?

Instead of attempting to propose how they might clean up the huge mess they made of the country over their last four years .

So much winning

The prog filth on this very forum illustrates this failing.

I hope they never learn.

While the Dem's commit own goals and if the Republicans are smart (a heroic assumption I admit), an opportunity exists to continue broadening the party's base, IMO.

(11-23-2024 11:52 AM)Tiger1983 Wrote:  While the Dem's commit own goals and if the Republicans are smart (a heroic assumption I admit), an opportunity exists to continue broadening the party's base, IMO.

The advice that Dems get comes from the cesspool of academia — the very ones who are smug, arrogant, woke, blames everyone as racist, sexist…etc and don’t know a thing about regular men. They can’t break themselves from them.

Democrats are too stupid to comprehend:

1. The only people impressed by celebrities are the idiots who would already vote for them.
2. Nobody with a brain trusts the media anymore.
3. Intelligent people see right through phony.
4. People get tired of being lied to.

It's fun to watch them going nuts wondering why their grand plan failed... miserably.

It's Slash and Burn Time in the Democratic Party As They Come Face to Face With Their Failures

Quote:The 2024 election isn't even a month behind us, and the recriminations within the Democratic Party are well underway. And, frankly, after the beating they just took, some self-examination is in order; this is a party that was, by and large, fired up over Kamala Harris' anointment as their presidential candidate and seemed to have little idea that it would work out about as well as putting a sixth-grade schoolyard bully in the ring with Joe Louis.

Some Democrats claim they didn't get their message out well enough. They're missing the point; the message itself was the problem for many voters. An op-ed at the Washington Examiner has some details, but I think it misses a point or two.

When they weren’t talking about “transitory” inflation and trying to mainstream transgender athletes competing against biological women, Harris and other Democrats focused on pushing a message that Trump was a fascist and his return to the White House would usher in the end of the republic.

While most Democrats are united in the understanding another four years of “resistance” rhetoric and charging headlong into the left wing’s most progressive policy ideas is a recipe for defeat in the 2026 midterm elections, the handful of elected officials and leaders who have dared to speak out about how the party needs to change have been shouted down and threatened with ostracism.

Clearly "Orange Man Bad" wasn't a winning message, although some of the more strident progressives are still mouthing that loudly and repeatedly - especially those like the hysterical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), whose district is so safely Democratic that the party could run a Halloween jack-o-lantern for Congress and would win as long as they put a "D" behind its name.

Democrats also ran on a few other major issues, but none of them seemed to resonate. They ran on abortion, but most of the populace already has strong feelings about that and won't be dissuaded from what they already think, and those lines were drawn long ago. And, unbelievably, they ran on allowing boys into girls' sports - and locker rooms.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) tried to verbalize his problem with his party’s position and might wind up getting driven out of the House for it.

“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton said days after the election concluded. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

If Moulton had spoken out earlier, and if more Democrats had spoken out forcefully on this issue, they might have retained some of the votes they lost this cycle.

But this wasn't the main reason for their losses.

Here's the onion:

While Trump’s “they/them” ad was hugely successful, Democrats barely talked about transgender issues on the campaign trail and failed to communicate a clear message about economics — the top issue voters said they were concerned about this cycle.

The first layer of this stinker is that the Democrats didn't just fail to communicate a clear message about economics - it's that they had no clear message to communicate. The Biden administration's handling of economic issues was abysmal, and the results of their policies have been keenly felt by run-of-the-mill Americans. The ivory tower academics and coastal elites that make up much of today's Democratic Party are insulated from the effects of those policies, but the rest of us? Not so much.

The second layer is that the Democrat presidential candidate, the one person who should be able to articulate the party's case, utterly failed and transparently dodged every effort to question her on this issue. Part of that is that she was just an awful candidate who could barely string together a coherent sentence if you spotted her two verbs and a conjunction, but the other part is that the message was one of failure, and there was just no getting around that.

As someone once said, "It's the economy, stupid."

If today's Democrats want to do a dispassionate analysis of their 2024 election losses, they need to look not at their messaging but at their positions, which are far to the left of the mainstream. That's why they are losing people like retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV); that's why they are falling behind in demographics that they have long dominated.

The GOP, on the other hand, had to deliver one primary message in 2024, and it's a familiar one: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

The election results provide an eloquent answer.