The Democratic Party is obsessed with Donald Trump and Elon Musk right now. They want to slit the throats of the Senate Democratic leadership. The leader of House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries, looks like a draft bust, incapable of doing anything but making cringy videos where he’s all alone outside the Capitol Building and repeating shoddy DNC talking points. This party is so lost and preoccupied with niche matters that they stare at Armageddon and don’t even know it. This warning comes from The New York Times, where Ezra Klein paints a bleak picture for Democrats if they can’t leave the wilderness by 2030.
The party is in its worst shape in 50 years. The groundwork for a successful midterm season isn’t there, at least for now. Democrats have no leader, message, or unity. There’s no communication strategy other than making viral social media posts, most of which are astounding regarding the depths of stupidity that are exposed. Ezra Klein’s column on the party's state has one haunting passage for Democrats regarding census time: If nothing changes, Democrats could win every state Kamala Harris carried in 2024, plus Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and still lose. He also says that the cost of living issue was a cancer of the Democrats' own making, one that they need to admit was their blunder [emphasis mine]:
I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.
Look at the places Democrats govern — liberal strongholds like New York, Illinois and California. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents; in Illinois, the net loss was 93,000; in New York, 179,000. Why are they leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this: The cost of living is too high. It’s too expensive to buy a house. It’s too expensive to get child care. You have to live too far from where you work. And so they’re going to places where all of that is cheaper — Texas, Florida, Arizona.
For Democrats, this is a political crisis. In the American system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024 will lose perhaps as many as a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes. The states that Trump won would gain them. In that Electoral College, a Democrat could win every state Harris won in 2024 plus Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose.
But it is also a spiritual crisis: You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families can no longer afford to live.
This is the policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. It is too hard to build homes. It is too hard to build clean energy. It is too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn’t technical: We know how to build apartment complexes and solar panel arrays and train lines. The problem is the rules and the laws and political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.
And yes, Klein does spend a lengthy part of his column discussing the failure of California’s high-speed rail system, a multi-decade exercise in failure. That is the Holy Grail of failed liberal projects, struck down by the very policies Democrats pushed and implemented, especially within the regulatory state. Now, he gets into the politics of scarcity and Trump’s tapping into the populist wave that fueled that sentiment among voters.
“When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics,” he wrote. However, he added that even the perception of it could be just as effective. Klein’s path for Democrats is admittedly challenging, and I don’t see this party willing to take the steps to tear itself down to rebuild. Too many unhinged leftists feel their positions are correct and no changes are needed. Democrats also hate debate and the process that places their core ideals to the scrutiny test:
In the past few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.
Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or was decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures instead of fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.
To unmake this machine will be painful. It’s also necessary. In the long run, the way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the superiority of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. They need to offer Americans a liberalism that builds.
That won’t happen when the core of the Democratic Party is promoting illegal immigration, defending terrorists, trying to stop their deportation, and forcing biological men into women’s sports and locker rooms. The Democrats fall on the opposite end of too many 80/20 issues. And before they can even do a renovation, like the one Klein describes, they need a charismatic leader and candidate, which they lack. Find that person, and this rehabilitation can begin.
And I hope they fail.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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