The state of the democratic party

Joe Manchin torches Democrats on the way out the door

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/politics/joe-manchin-congress-democratic-party/index.html

excerpt:

WashingtonCNN —
As Joe Manchin prepares to leave Congress after nearly 15 years, the West Virginia senator — who left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent earlier this year — is further distancing himself from his former party, calling the Democratic brand “toxic.”

“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of, it’s just, it’s toxic,” Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju in an interview that aired Sunday, citing the shift as the reason why he left the party.

Adding that he no longer considers himself a Democrat “in the form of what Democratic Party has turned itself into,” Manchin — who has long been a pivotal swing vote in the Senate — said the party’s brand has become about telling people what they can and can’t do, blaming progressives for the change.

“They have basically expanded upon thinking, ‘Well, we want to protect you there, but we’re going to tell you how you should live your life from that far on,’” Manchin added.

Manchin cast progressives — a small number of lawmakers within the party who he claims have an outsize influence — as being out of touch with the majority of Americans.

“This country is not going left,” he said.

The former West Virginia governor-turned-senator shared that he was a lifelong Democrat because the party used to focus on kitchen-table issues such as “good job, a good pay,” but claimed Democrats are now too worried about sensitive social issues, such as transgender rights, while taking “no responsibility at all” for the federal budget during the election.
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New research shows the massive hole Dems are in
Even voters who previously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/22/democrats-2024-election-problem-focus-group-00195806

excerpt:

Democrats conducting post-mortems on their sweeping losses in 2024 are finding more reason for alarm. And the problem isn’t just Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.

In a trio of focus groups, even voters who previously backed Democrats cast the party as weak and overly focused on diversity and elites, according to research by the progressive group Navigator Research.

The focus group research, shared first with POLITICO, represents the latest troubling pulse check for a party still sorting through the wreckage of its November losses and looking for a path to rebuild. Without a clear party leader and with losses across nearly every demographic in November, Democrats are walking into a second Trump presidency without a unified strategy to improve their electoral prospects. And while some Democrats blame Biden, others blame inflation and still others blame “losing hold of culture,” the feedback from the focus groups found Democrats’ problems are even more widespread and potentially long-lasting than a single election cycle.

The focus groups offer “a pretty scathing rebuke” of the Democratic Party brand, said Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, a project within the Hub Project, which is a Democratic nonprofit group.

The focus group research, shared first with POLITICO, represents the latest troubling pulse check for a party still sorting through the wreckage of its November losses and looking for a path to rebuild. Without a clear party leader and with losses across nearly every demographic in November, Democrats are walking into a second Trump presidency without a unified strategy to improve their electoral prospects. And while some Democrats blame Biden, others blame inflation and still others blame “losing hold of culture,” the feedback from the focus groups found Democrats’ problems are even more widespread and potentially long-lasting than a single election cycle.

The focus groups offer “a pretty scathing rebuke” of the Democratic Party brand, said Rachael Russell, director of polling and analytics at Navigator Research, a project within the Hub Project, which is a Democratic nonprofit group.
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lol

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/5057264-democratic-party-trump-victory/

Democrats must make working Americans a better offer
by Will Marshall, opinion contributor
12/27/24 12:00 PM ET

Americans voted for radical change in November, and judging by the chaos he’s already generated before taking office, Donald Trump might give them more than they bargained for. Can Democrats offer a saner alternative?

So far, the signs aren’t encouraging. Instead of taking a hard look at how they managed to lose to the most ethically tainted and unpopular presidential candidate in memory, many in the party seek refuge in self-exonerating excuses.

President Biden was too old. Kamala Harris didn’t have time to wage a real campaign. Republicans and Elon Musk dominated social media and flooded the campaign debate with lies and bigoted attacks on immigrants and transexual people. The high cost of living warped voters’ perception of the nation’s economic health.

And anyway the race was still close, even if Harris failed to win a single battleground state, Trump cut his losing margins in blue cities and states, and Latino and Black voters without college degrees continued to defect to the Republicans.

This is the politics of evasion — the recurrent tendency of badly whipped parties to blame everything but their own failure to make a convincing case to voters that their ideas and governing commitments would serve them best.

Many progressives, for example, are loath to admit that Biden’s economic policies had anything to do with the loss. In their view, he was right to spend trillions to revive a pandemic-stricken economy, reduce inequality and combat climate change, sideline trade in favor of industrial policy, launch an unsuccessful attempt to break up America’s most dynamic tech companies and side reflexively with unions in labor disputes.

It was just bad luck that inflation came out of nowhere to mug working families, preventing them from appreciating all that Biden and the Democrats had done for them. Instead, a 20 percent rise in prices put them in a mood to punish incumbents.

Well, that’s one possibility. A more plausible one is that the president and his advisors fell victim to the establishment fallacy of “deliverism” — the notion that passing a slew of multi-trillion-dollar spending bills in Washington would impress working families and show that the “system” was working for them at last.

For one thing, those voters are deeply mistrustful that the “deep state” has their interests at heart. According to a YouGov poll commissioned by my organization, they also believe that heavy public spending helped to spark the upsurge in prices — a view shared by Larry Summers and other prominent economists who note that the chief economic dilemma Biden faced on taking office wasn’t weak demand, but insufficient supply.

Some liberals argue that they were done in by cultural politics rather than the economy. Indeed, a post-election analysis by More in Common found that Americans overwhelmingly believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social causes than the kitchen table interests that preoccupy working families.

In fact, that wasn’t the case in 2024 — Democratic voters like Republicans cited inflation and the economy as their top concerns. But the public’s skewed perception reflects the outsized influence of progressive activists, who have associated Democrats with positions on immigration, crime and race and gender that are toxic to working-class voters.

The breadth of Trump’s victory suggests the right answer to the question of why Harris lost is “all of the above.” Democrats were seen as defending a status quo inimical to working families’ interests and values, and as wielding power in Washington mainly for the benefit of educated and wealthy elites.

That helps to explain why Democrats suffered from wide deficits of public trust on almost all the issues that working class voters cared most about.

PPI’s post-election analysis, based on polls and focus groups with working class voters, shows that they trusted Republicans more than Democrats to improve the economy (55-34); make housing more affordable (45-37); protect Americans from crime (54-31); handle immigration (57-29); keep Americans safe from foreign threats (55-30); handle Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and fight for working people (48-39).

By a whopping 62-43, non-college voters saw Republicans as the more patriotic party. And by nearly 2-to-1 they identified Trump and the Republicans as strong and Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats as weak.

In short, Democrats have dug themselves in a very deep hole and must change direction dramatically to regain their competitiveness.

Blurring the line between hyperbole and fantasy, Trump claims he won an “unprecedented and powerful mandate to govern.” While solid, his victory was no landslide. Moreover, Trump remains underwater in terms of personal approval, which is extraordinary for someone who’s just won a presidential election.

Nonetheless, Democrats should focus now on their own vulnerabilities, not Trump’s amply documented flaws. Their coalition is inexorably shrinking, demographically and geographically, as non-college voters head for the exits.

Trump’s antics and misrule will no doubt create tactical openings for Democrats to take the offensive. But their strategic challenge now is to draw up a new governing blueprint that centers on America’s non-college majority.

Democrats must show they get how those voters feel and what matters to them, and offer concrete remedies to the problems working families in middle America define as urgent, rather than the post-material preoccupations of progressive elites.

They also must stop reflexively defending the programmatic status quo at a time when working families feel forgotten and disrespected by Washington policymakers and want to see fundamental changes in politics and government.

Instead of simply expanding government, it’s time for Democrats to remake themselves as a forward-looking party of change and radically pragmatic reform across the full range of what government does and fails to do well.

For Democrats, the only way to win back working Americans is to make them a better offer.

Will Marshall is founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
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Trump congratulates Democratic state rep on switch to Republican Party

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-...atic-state-rep-on-switch-to-republican-party/

excerpt:

“I would further like to invite other Disillusioned Democrats to switch Parties, and join us on this noble quest to Save our Country and, Make America Great Again – GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. THANK YOU HILLARY!” Trump wrote.
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