Democrats Don't Get It
Why I wasn't surprised by the Trump victory
I've been a Democrat my whole life. I've never voted for a Republican.
I wanted Kamala Harris to win the election. But I'm not remotely surprised she lost.
I frankly would have been surprised if she won.
The Democratic Party has morphed into the party of educated elites—what the Republican Party was known as when I was growing up, and this was a heavy mantle to carry in the current anti-establishment environment.
Working class voters were once a crucial part of the Democratic coalition. Now Democratic leaders talk openly about ignoring them in favor of educated Republicans in the suburbs. From the Washington Post:
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dismissed the possibility that Donald Trump's popularity with rural and working-class voters spelled trouble for the Democratic ticket. "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia," he proclaimed, reflecting the prevailing attitude within the party establishment. "And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."
We all know how that went.
Yet, as anyone paying attention knows, this was the same strategy the Democrats employed this cycle.
Bernie Sanders blasted this approach following Trump’s win, noting it "should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
Elites, by nature, are out of touch with reality. They have to make a real effort to see things clearly because their privilege and money insulate them from what the average person is experiencing. George H.W. Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton largely because he couldn't acknowledge the economic pain people were feeling and wanted them to trust the "experts."
Sound familiar?
Over the last few weeks, I watched Democrats I respect chastising voters who were choosing Trump1 because they thought he would bring down grocery prices (helping them feed their family) rather than making preserving democracy their top priority.
A more constructive approach would have been to acknowledge that grocery prices are out of control, a point Harris inserted into her stump speeches, though by then it was probably too late. Democrats—both elected and in the media—should have been hammering this issue long before she became the nominee.
Kamala Harris actually had a plan to address this issue, and Trump does not—something I don't think many voters know largely because the media was too busy lecturing Americans about how stupid they are for not knowing how great the economy is. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic by a respected economics writer claiming that there was no price gouging going on with the monopolies that run the US food industry.
This is insane.