Savor this moment. They’re panicking. The institutional left is sending up signal flares that this whole open border thing has backfired, and backfired bigly. We’re seeing it from a CNN poll, from a swampy, spooky Washington Post columnist, from a lefty think tank talking head, even from Bloomberg. They’re all telling the Democrats to be very, very careful how they handle the L.A. riots in particular, and the issue of illegal immigration in general because all signs point to… doom.
David Ignatius is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post who typically deals in the obfuscating matters of deep state intelligence, but Wednesday morning he posted a shockingly lucid piece on the immigration news of the last few days:
Democrats ignored border politics. Now the consequences are here.
Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter — in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump … may prove the most dangerous yet.
Yikes. He goes on:
Democrats’ mistake, over more than a decade, has been to behave as though border enforcement doesn’t matter. Pressured by immigrant rights activists, party leaders too often acted as if maintaining a well-controlled border was somehow morally wrong. [snip]
[T]he immigration issue has been a car crash skidding toward us in slow motion.
[snip]
The saddest part is that Democrats still have no clear policy. Some blue-state mayors and governors have pledged to provide ‘sanctuary’ for migrants, but they don’t have good arguments to rebut Trump’s claim they’re interfering with the enforcement of federal law. In some cases, sanctuary has meant refusing to hand over undocumented migrants convicted of violent crimes, former DHS officials tell me. That’s wrong.
“That’s wrong.” Wow. Just WOW. He concludes:
Democrats need to oppose violence, by anyone — and to help enforce immigration policies that begin with a recognition that it isn’t immoral to have a border.
That shouldn’t be a big ask, but it’s Democrats we’re dealing with here, not rational people. Expect to see more incoherence from them.
Here we have Amy Walter from The Cook Report, which is a kind of polling/analysis think tank, who is usually juuuuust to the right of crazy. She’s one of those rare liberals who hasn’t gone completely off the deep end, and here she dips her toe into right-wing waters. In a segment titled, “Democrats Used To Have An Advantage Over Trump On Immigration, They Have A Disadvantage Now” Walter had this to say:
This is a fight that Donald Trump wants, (and) Democrats know that... They can see the poll numbers. … Donald Trump has the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t have on a lot of other issues. So this is a fight that he wants to have. What Democrats are saying is, let’s not give him more fuel to keep this fight going.
You see the mayor of Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom, others saying, please, if you want to protest, that’s great. Don’t turn it violent. Don’t allow this to turn into something that benefits Donald Trump, the signs, the scenes of chaos and police in the streets.
The question going forward, I think, is how Democrats do talk about these issues, it’s going to be really important for the — not just what's happening today in Los Angeles, but just writ large. I think there has been a lot of pullback and a lot of hand-wringing from Democrats about an issue which they used to have an advantage on during the — Trump’s first term, they have a disadvantage on now.
This issue isn't going away. And how Democrats respond to whether this is going to happen in other states, how they address concerns about safety and security, that is going to be critical just for the next — well, forever long.
And finally, some fascinating insights according to David Drucker at Bloomberg:
Democrats have been losing support among [Hispanics] for years… (and) Democrats have largely themselves — and their faulty strategic choices — to blame, political analysts and operatives (say).
It’s just what many of us (MAGA) have suspected: Democrats have gone so woke they’ve gone and broken one of their most reliable coalitions, mostly by abandoning bread and butter issues:
‘They [Hispanics] think Democrats are prioritizing what they see as niche and liberal social and cultural issues over real ideas to make life more affordable,’ wrote Working Class Project (a Democrat research project) spokesman Ian Sams …detailing the findings from focus groups with working-class Hispanics in McAllen, Texas, a border community in the once deep-blue Rio Grande Valley.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and Trump critic, articulated that “the Hispanic electorate has evolved” and these voters are “behaving politically like blue-collar whites” in their political affiliations.
The Democrats got left behind. They’ve been stuck in gear doing the Hispanic stereotyping for so long an entire population has passed them by, grown up, and fled the nest. Hence the (insane) term, “white Hispanic.”
It will be fascinating to watch the Democrats continue to lose this coalition. They used to be able to rhetorically rely on “dreamers” as an emotional gut punch issue, but that emotional potency has waned dramatically. What remains is electoral potency: because The Supreme Court bungled the matter of citizenship and the census several years ago, ruling that immigration status needn’t count in apportionment, the Democrats once had a huge incentive to get warm bodies in precincts they wanted to shore up or take over, but now… do they? Will they? Those numbers from Harry Enten at CNN show the ground moving beneath their feet. Their previously reliable constituency has now receded and the warm bodies? Well, they may or may not be amenable to Democrat vote “fortification” efforts….
So savor this moment. It is a watershed. Let’s hope the stupid party (the GOP) doesn’t do what they usually do: snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
