Will Democrats learn from Trump’s victory?

Photo © 2024 Paul L. Gleiser

So, wide open borders, sky-high grocery prices, rising crime, boys competing against girls in sports (after changing clothes in the girls’ locker room), taxpayer-funded transgender surgery for prison inmates, high gasoline prices, looming government diktats regarding what kind of car you can buy and what kind of stove you can have in your kitchen, and conspicuous fecklessness regarding conflicts in Israel and Ukraine that could mushroom into World War III – don’t all come together to create a formula for winning the presidency.

Who knew?

Let me admit that though I might claim justification for having had them, my reservations regarding the electability of Donald Trump as expressed in this space during the run-up to the primaries proved unfounded. Donald Trump didn’t just beat Kamala Harris, he obliterated her.

But that drubbing isn’t the real story. The real story lies in how that drubbing came about. Donald Trump created a political coalition on the Republican side of the ticket the likes of which the GOP has never seen. And with that coalition behind him, he demolished the far-left radical agenda that hijacked the Democratic Party.

Sure, Trump did well among core conservative voters. But as I noted in my (often roundly criticized) analyses as to why I harbored reservations about a Trump 3.0 candidacy, those conservative voters alone would not have gotten him elected.

What I didn’t see coming last fall, and what propelled Trump’s electoral victory this week, is the fact that in unprecedented proportions, black voters, Hispanic voters, union workers, high school diploma-only working-class voters and just-out-of-college young voters all abandoned their traditional home in the Democratic Party to vote for him.

Democratic Party leadership, together with their media handmaidens, accelerated the alienation of those traditional Democratic base voters via a toxic combination of condescending to them and taking them for granted.

If in 2019 the combined monthly incomes of you and your spouse were sufficient to make ends meet with some left over for luxuries and savings, and if in 2024 you are, financially speaking, now gasping for air, you’re not really in the mood to be told that Bidenomics is working just fine, that massive illegal immigration is just a right-wing talking point, and that you’d understand these things if only you had a top-tier college degree, admission to elite political, media, corporate or show business circles and the concomitant financial ability to afford a home in a gated community at a comfortable remove from the consequences of inflation, illegal immigration, spiking crime and homelessness.

The question now before us is this. Given the shellacking they just got, will Democrats learn anything?

The normal people who make the country work just repudiated the far-left loons and the condescending liberal elites that control the Democratic Party. Will that repudiation give rise to the kind of introspection the party now clearly needs?

Let’s hope so.

A return to a sane, policy-centric contest between Republicans and Democrats – rather than the lunacy we have suffered since 2016 – would be good for Democrats and Republicans alike.