Desperate to run away from President Joe Biden’s inflation and immigration disasters and dwelling inside a liberal media bubble, Democrats thought they could win the 2024 elections by focusing hard on abortion. At the same time, the party made no effort to shed its side’s recent excesses on gender ideology and other radical stances.
This hard-left campaign on social issues may have cost them the election by alienating socially conservative Hispanics and Muslims and turning off socially moderate buttoned-up suburban parents.
Democrats’ 2024 losses among these groups, compared to 2020, might have been large enough to explain Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to President-elect Donald Trump, as well as the GOP takeover of the U.S. Senate.
So, this election might be another that the Democrats lost by embracing an ever-expanding sexual revolution.
Pornography, abortion, and gender-bending
“Why do you think uneducated white women voted against their reproductive health freedoms,” 56-year-old Democratic attorney Sunny Hostin asked on The View the morning after the election. It was a perfect articulation of the Democratic establishment’s blind spots and obsessions.
Hostin seethed with disdain for those who didn’t go to law school, as she did, or finish college. She racialized everything, using “white” as a slur. She posited that abortion ought to be the primary issue.
On the last point, at least, the Democratic leadership agreed. Harris made “Freedom” her campaign motto. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), gave us a new “golden rule”: Mind your own damn business. He might have added parenthetically, “Except when it is a Democrat telling you how you should live your life.”
Neither of these politicians is libertarian or laissez faire in any broad sense, and it was crystal clear they were just talking about abortion and maybe in vitro fertilization and birth control. But also, if you read between the lines, Walz thought you should mind your own business and not care whether the 6-foot-tall sweeper on the opposing women’s field hockey team is actually male, and whether your daughter’s English teacher is talking to her about whether, deep down, she’s actually a boy.
Even pornography was part of the Democratic effort. Two Democratic funds, the Progress Action Fund and Defend the Vote, ran an ad in swing states that depicted a young man masturbating while watching pornography on his iPhone. He was interrupted by a mean Republican congressman taking the porn away from him.
By focusing on abortion and refusing to moderate their views on and presentation of other sex-related issues, Democrats repelled Hispanics and Muslims, who are more religious than average white Democrats, and even turned off socially moderate white voters.
Abortion and the Hispanic vote
The problem with abortion wasn’t that Democrats were pro-choice — most Americans are. The Democrats’ problem was that they never stopped talking about abortion. They came across as obsessive on the matter.
On social issues, particularly ones that touch on intimate matters, the side that appears obsessed tends to lose. Trump understood this, and that’s why he wanted abortion and IVF to disappear as controversial issues. Democrats, however, seemed to believe that the more they spoke about people’s sex lives and reproductive systems, the better they would do.
Democrats are, however, not merely pro-choice. They have adopted an extreme position on abortion. When asked if there was any situation in which they believe an abortion is impermissible, not a single prominent Democrat, certainly not Harris or Walz, gave an inch. Abortion on demand for any reason was their position.
Harris went further and suggested she wouldn’t even allow Catholic or Muslim doctors to opt out of performing abortions. “I don’t think we should be making concessions,” she said.
These extreme positions and constant drumming on abortion probably turned off Hispanic voters.
“I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” Democratic activist Maria Elena López told the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land, but they are against it morally. They may not be, ‘pro-life,’ but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”
But Democrats did shove the issue in voters’ faces. As a result, Trump won nearly half the Hispanic vote, and he carried many rural Hispanic communities. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the majority-Puerto Rican city where Democrats predicted huge gains, Trump cut his 2020 margin of defeat by 8 points.
Across the country, you saw religious people of all stripes rebel against Democrats. The Catholic vote, for one, tacked hard to the GOP: Four years ago, Trump won Catholics by 5 points, and this year, he won by 15 points.
Abortion wasn’t the only subject on which Harris-Walz alienated religious voters.
Gender ideology
Democrats’ 2024 campaign didn’t focus on gender ideology, but the matter nevertheless hung over the election.
Biden had tweeted, in the heady days of the 2020 primaries, “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”
In practice, this implies the federal government has an obligation to force every institution, including religious ones, to adopt gender ideology, reject natural differences between the sexes, and treat as a woman every man who decides he wishes to identify as a woman.
Harris, likewise, in 2020, had come out in favor of taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgeries and hormone treatment for prisoners. It’s a position so crazy that when Trump cited this in a 2024 debate, many journalists thought he had made it up.
The Trump campaign after the debate began running ads about Harris’s position, ending with the tagline, “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.” This ad used Harris’s extreme position, taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners, to make a wider critique of the entire project of gender ideology, choosing and enforcing bespoke pronouns, that average social moderate citizens probably do not want to talk about and are certainly uncomfortable with.
Former President Bill Clinton saw the impact this ad was having and pleaded with the party to respond, the New York Times reported. The Harris campaign or the Democratic National Committee would not or could not respond, though, because backtracking even an inch on “the civil rights issue of our time,” as Biden put it, meant “there is no room for compromise.”
Any Democrat who tried to compromise on gender ideology suffered backlash from the left-liberal groups that form the party’s activist and donor bases.
The Muslim vote
Democrats’ politically destructive sex-related radicalism extended to other matters.
The four states with the biggest swings from 2020 to 2024 were deep-blue states with hardcore liberal governments. California and New York swung 12 points toward the GOP, while New Jersey moved 11 points rightward and Maryland moved 10. In these states, religious and socially moderate voters had the most extreme versions of left-wing ideology on sex and gender constantly shoved in their faces.
In Maryland’s largest county, Montgomery County, the liberal Democratic school board recently tried to force books about homosexuality and transgenderism onto elementary school children, circumventing the county’s parental opt-out rules on sex education by moving the books into the main reading curricula.
It was a clear attempt to impose a specific sexual morality and worldview on children whose parents objected. One liberal school board member attacked angry parents for being “on the same side of an issue as white supremacists and outright bigots.” Another belittled a Muslim student for “parroting dogma.”
The parents who objected were not mostly white evangelicals or Latin Mass Catholics. They were Middle Eastern Muslims and Ethiopian Christians. These were the voters, it appears, who swung hardest to Trump.
In Michigan, the Muslim swing to Trump was massive. Trump won famously Muslim and Arab Dearborn by 10 points after losing by 40 points in 2020. Trump this year almost carried Hamtramck, the only city in America with an all-Muslim city council, after losing by 70 points four years ago. The Biden-Harris embrace of Israel was a primary issue, but social issues were a central part of this swing.
When Hamtramck Mayor Ameer Ghalib told me the story of his endorsement of Trump, it began with the city flying a Pride flag, complete with transgender colors, at city hall. When voters subsequently elected an all-Muslim, all-Yemeni city council, the Michigan Democratic establishment cracked down on them. Attorney General Dana Nessel even traveled to Hamtramck to help lead a protest outside of city hall.
“That’s how it started,” Ghalib said of his embrace of Trump. “This is part of the series of events that led to where we are today.”
Then, there’s the suburban white vote. This is made up of socially moderate, pro-choice people who accept or even approve of gay marriage. But if you’re uncompromising on late-term abortion and transgender surgery, and won’t say a peep for parental rights, this electorate will see you, not the pro-life GOP, as the culture warriors.
In these suburbs, parents have seen “woke” ideology on sex, gender, and race interfere with their children’s academic learning and educational attainment.
The upper-middle class suburbs of Bucks County embody this demographic, and Trump won Bucks County.
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Together, these constituencies of Hispanic voters who don’t want abortion shoved in their faces, Muslim voters who don’t appreciate being asked to pledge allegiance to a Pride flag, and upper-middle-class suburbanites who just want their children’s schools to teach normal stuff combined in a big voting bloc that was turned off by, and turned away from, a Democratic Party that had tacked hard to the social Left.
Subtract those voters from the Democratic base, and you get a Democratic Party out of power.