I haven't written much about politics of late. Largely this is because I mostly write at night, and I don't like thinking about politics at night. (I follow the mullet strategy of content consumption: News in the morning; entertainment at night.) But also it's because I'm pretty much a "blue no matter who" voter, and I don't think the midterm elections are going to go well for people like me. There was a period a few months ago when things looked a bit more promising for the Dems, but that mini surge has faded, and it's looking like a red wave could very much be in the cards.
So, I'm doing my best not to invest too much emotionally (nor financially) into these upcoming midterms. Plus, none of the big races are occurring where I vote (in DC the primaries are typically more important than the general election), and I question how much outside energy and money can influence an election anyway. Anecdotally, all the Senate candidates I donated to in the last election lost, so I specifically didn't donate to either Dem in the Georgia runoff, and they both won. I know that it takes money to run a campaign, and every candidate will tell you they need more, but, after a while, I think the returns are seriously diminished and possibly even counterproductive, as voters might be resentful of outsider influence.
And if the Reps don't run roughshod over the Dems in the midterms, it will only be because, despite their reputation, they actually aren't all that great at politics, and they nominate bad, extreme candidates in races in which more normie Reps would probably perform much better. But it might not matter this cycle because the Dems have too many things working against them -- one of which is that their brand has become utterly poisonous to a large segment of the population.
I was thinking about why this is the case -- why so many voters recoil in disgust when they see a D on the ballot next to a candidate. It's easy to understand the other way. I won't vote for a Republican because of Donald Trump, full stop. Unless a candidate openly disavows Trump and Trumpism, I'm out. But there's nothing like this on the Democratic side -- there is no cult leader. Instead, I think there are several reasons why so many people see the Dems as toxic. One reason is that it's "white lash" against a party (and a country) that's becoming more racially diverse. This phenomenon certainly exists, but I now think it's a much smaller part of the picture than I used to. After all, Trump actually increased his share of the vote among non-white voters in 2020. Another reason is that this is the result of a now decades-long bad-faith assault on Dems by right-wing media, such as Fox News. This is indeed a huge factor, I think, and it seems to only be getting worse as "news" becomes even more siloed and less trustworthy.
I think liberals like to cite these reasons because they are mostly outside their control. But there is a third reason that should warrant some soul-searching among people who don't want to see red waves become a regular occurrence: Dems are increasingly becoming unlikable to, and unrepresentative of, all but a very narrow segment of the population -- urban, affluent, highly educated, and woke. Too often the messaging from liberal spaces implies that, not only is there no need to appeal to anybody outside this cross-section, but such people are morally bankrupt and only worthy of contempt. This is the big problem with woke liberalism as a political movement: It's terrible at building the coalitions needed to win elections. It unnecessarily alienates too many people. I heard Barack Obama on Pod Save America, and he basically said the same thing. He criticized the hyper-focus on language rules that most people, especially older people, can't understand, and he called Democrats "buzzkills". I unfortunately agree.
A great example of this is the Covid response. It's ironic that this is now such a liability for so many Democratic candidates in the midterm, as it was a huge part of why Biden won in 2020. But I think Dems took the wrong lesson from it. What people wanted was responsible leadership to take Covid seriously, mitigate the risks, yes, but return us to somewhat normal life as quickly as possible. Few signed on for seemingly endless shutdowns and nonsensical masking rules. (That weren't even always followed by the people who made them.) Then the Dems really lost the issue when they didn't universally get behind schools reopening even after teachers had the opportunity to get vaccinated. The was just a total gift to Republicans. (Glenn Youngkin says thanks.) And it wasn't just the policy, but also the attitude, that parents only wanted their "babysitters back" (as if the child care schools provide is a luxury service and not a vital public resource that millions of parents rely on to go out and earn a paycheck), and the learning loss wasn't that bad, and that anybody who was weighing priorities differently was being reckless or not believing the science.
Another thing is that many of the people who were hurt the most from Covid shutdowns were poor service industries workers (often non-white people), who didn't have any savings to fall back on and couldn't work from home. On a podcast segment, I heard this Hispanic woman in Florida who was talking about how she absolutely hated Ron Desantis' bullshit immigration stunts but was going to vote for him anyway because he kept things open when other states were shutting down and that allowed her to keep her job in a nail salon. Can you really say she's wrong? I mean, I would never vote for Ron Desantis, but I understand where she's coming from.
Dems did get a big Covid relief bill through to help ease some of the shutdown hardship, but nothing comes for free, and we are now seeing the inflationary effects of giving people all this money for staying home. This is certainly not the only reason inflation is high right now (there's also that whole war in Ukraine), but it is a contributing factor. And inflation is the issue right now that is giving Democratic candidates the biggest problems.
Anyway, I have several more examples of the buzzkill Dems, and maybe I'll get to them in the future, but I'm out of time for now.
Until next time...
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