After suffering what could shape up to be their biggest electoral defeat in more than 40 years, the New York Times opined that Democrats agree on one thing: They need to figure out what went wrong.
New York Times reporters Jess Bidgood and Adam Nagourney asked swing-district Democrats, like Representative Tom Suozzi of New York, who held onto his seat on Trump-friendly Long Island, what they thought, and Suozzi’s answer was revealing.
“Trump won my district by 19,000 votes. I won by 9,000 votes,” Suozzi responded. “Democrats should not be asking, ‘How could they vote for him?’ They should ask, ‘Why did they vote for him?’”
Why indeed.
Back in 2020, when Democrats lost seats in the House even as Trump lost the White House, Democrats did some polling and discovered that ‘Defund the Police’ really hurt their candidates, but that didn’t change the anti-police, get-out-of-jail-free policies of their leading elected officials. So, we doubt Democrats really want that question answered, or that they will accept the reality of the answers received.
You see Democrats are really bad at listening to anything that contradicts their elitist narrative, so they think that it’s not their policies that are defective, it is their communications strategies and tactics that have failed.
So, rather than accept the fact that voters want something different than what Democrats are selling they double down on “resistance” and blocking the policies that most Americans want their government to follow.
The most obvious example of this problem for Democrats is the announcement by leading Democrats, such as California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James, and Democrat leaders in Illinois and Massachusetts who have all announced plans to fight Trump’s plans to deport illegal aliens, get men out of women’s sports and clean up their states’ streets, and other popular Trump policies.
American voters aren’t as dumb as Democrats think they are.
Saying you are for border security, while your Party’s leaders oppose securing the border and fight to keep illegal aliens in the country doesn’t just step on the Democrats’ narrative, it insults the intelligence of voters.
Another question about the 2024 election that Democrats won’t want answered in their “autopsy” of Kamala Harris’s defeat is “where did Joe Biden’s ‘missing’ 2020 voters go?”
“It’s vital that we learn why turnout disappeared from 2020 to 2024 and much more,” former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile wrote in an email to the New York Times’ Jess Bidgood and Adam Nagourney.
How about the reason something like 12 million Democrat voters went missing in 2024 is that they never existed to begin with.
We know there are something like 400,000 Georgia ballots for which there is no ballot image in the electronic system. And Democrats have successfully resisted attempts to pry open the records in other states, such as Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and Arizona.
It is very likely that much, if not all, of Joe Biden’s margin in those states in 2020 was manufactured from “harvested” mail-in ballots that had no connection to a real live voter.
See our article “How Democrats Sign Up Non-Citizens To Vote” for just one of many ways that worked in 2020.
Between the end of the COVID pandemic and its relaxation of ballot security measures, and ballot integrity efforts by Republicans, replicating the 2020 steal was – if not impossible – at least much more difficult for Democrats.
Finally, Democrats aren’t going to want to know or accept that content-free race-baiting campaigns aren’t working the way they use to.
When you subtract the imaginary voters who didn’t show up to vote for Kamala Harris, Trump still vastly exceeded expectations in the Democrats’ urban strongholds and liberal states.
“Kamala Harris won New York City by a thirty-seven-point margin, far shy of the nearly fifty-four-point margin of victory that President Biden held over Donald J. Trump in 2020,” Dana Rubinstein and Stefanos Chen wrote for the New York Times.
In Cook County, Illinois, Barack Obama managed to capture 74 percent of the vote. Hillary Clinton didn’t fare much worse — retaining 73.9 percent. Kamala, for all of her talents, only managed 69 percent, reported Grace Curley in a must-read article for The Spectator world edition.
Ms. Curley reported Trump gained twelve points in this year’s election versus 2020, in Boston and twelve points in Chicago, and made double-digit gains in Manhattan.
In Grace Curley’s analysis, with which we agree, the Democratic Party was so focused on getting Trump, they didn’t leave time in their schedules to do anything else — including listening to their constituents.
Had Democrats listened – or asked the right questions is a better way to look at it – they would have discovered that their message of “Orange Man bad” did not neutralize the lived experience of urban dwellers suffering from the high prices of Bidenomics and the quality of life deficit brought on by the Democrats’ soft on crime and illegal alien coddling mayors, district attorneys and governors.
Democrats will never figure out why they lost to Trump because they don’t really want to know the answer, which is that voters rejected their policies based on what they experienced in their everyday lives.
Voters aren’t as dumb as Democrats think they are, and they correctly figured out who created the problems they want solved. No “new narrative” or bumping their campaign spending up beyond the nearly $2 billion they spent on Kamala Harris is going to reduce inflation, eject the illegal aliens who are ravenously consuming public resources, put criminals in jail, or solve any of the other problems Biden, Harris and the Democrats have created.
George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com. A veteran of over 300 political campaigns, including every Republican presidential campaign from 1976 to 2004, he served as a staff member or advance representative for some of America’s most recognized conservative political figures, including Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin and Jack Kemp. A member of American MENSA, he served on the House and Senate staff and on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle. Rasley is a graduate of Hanover College and studied international affairs at Oxford University's Worcester College.
2024 Election
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This is only a temporary setback for the left. As with every Republican presidency since TR, one step back has been followed by two steps forward. A century of "progress" won't be undone in four years, or twelve if JD Vance follows Trump, or twenty if Ron DeSantis follows JD Vance. The rot is firmly ensconced and needs to be cauterized. Generations will be required.
It began when Democrats started the bloodiest war in American history so they could keep their slaves (actually before that, when Martin van Buren exiled the Five Civilized Tribes during the dead of winter). It accelerated when John Dewey returned from Stalin's Potemkin Villages and set out to destroy American education. That he was successful…
In my opinion, the liberals aka Democrats aka Demonrats aka Socialists aka Communists know exactly what went wrong. But they can never admit it for the simple reason that their egos won't let them. You see, down at heart every liberal in the Universe thinks that he or she is really God or at least God's gift to humanity. And since by definition God can't be wrong it's therefore impossible for them to be wrong. To admit that they're wrong would literally destroy them spiritually. Which would be an excellent thing for humanity!
I heard some Democrat big wig bozo on the radio this morning suggesting that deporting aliens was going to harm the economy. He left out the word "illegal". They just don't get it. Instead of asking what went wrong, they need to look at what went right and try to emulate it in the future. It has nothing to do with communications or even message, and everything to do with actions.