Former President Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris offers a teachable moment for Democrats.
The question is, will they learn from it?
They didn’t in 2016, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton reduced Trump’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.” They missed the point in 2020 by dismissing the voices of some 75 million Trump voters and painting them all as de facto Capitol rioters.
Hyperbole and vitriol, the stock in trade of progressives, rose to the fore in this election as Trump supporters were castigated as fascists and Nazis.
It wasn’t subtle. The mainstream media, who’ve erased all doubt that it’s an arm of the Democratic Party, laid it on thick. MSNBC even spliced footage of a 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden over footage of a Trump rally at the same venue, in case anyone had trouble connecting the dots.
President Joe Biden couldn’t resist a diss of his own.
As The Hill reported, during a video conference with Latino supporters Biden said, “Just the other day, a speaker at (Trump’s Madison Square Garden) rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ … The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
Election night must have come as a shock for the mud-slingers on the left, as Trump’s numbers climbed in both the Electoral College and popular vote.
Documentarian and Trump critic Michael Moore told MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin Sunday: “I feel the same way that I felt a few weeks ago — that Trump is toast.”
Keep your day job, Mr. Moore.
Who are the 71,975,584 voters who checked the box this year for Trump? They’re the folks in the red states, clustered mostly in the south, center and midwest part of the country. “Flyover states” as elites call them. You’ll find a lot of working-class people there, those who’ve been living paycheck to paycheck since Bidenflation placed a stranglehold on their budgets. They’ve watched their communities struggle to fund the cost of sheltering and caring for fresh arrivals of migrants. Affording an electric vehicle is not top of mind when you’re cutting back on groceries and taking on another job to make ends meet.
It comes as no surprise that red states Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina lead in the number of military recruits. They ask what they can do for their country, not what loans the country can erase for them.
But Democrats consistently missed the memo. Poll after poll found that a majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track going into the election, yet course-correcting wasn’t on the “to-do” list.
It all came to a head on Tuesday night and the post-election scene of Democratic pundit-land is one of wailing and lamentation.
An op-ed in The Hill summed up the sentiment with this headline: “America will regret its decision to reelect Donald Trump.”
Going forward, it’s vital that the Democratic Party shed the “the country is doomed if we don’t win” mindset and listen to the voices of the people who don’t vote for them. It’s easy to demonize the other side, it saves the trouble of critical thinking. But until Democrats walk the talk on unity, they face more somber election nights.
