How we Democrats Blew an Easy Lay-Up
With marginal competence this could have been a Democratic wave election
I wrote the below before the election. And it was wrong. Very very wrong. I own my errors and so I leave this up instead of pretending I’m always right.
Ok, so I’m predicting here as the polls have just opened. But we’re (Democrats) are going to get our ass handed to us today. and it’s due to rank incompetence. And to avoid a repeat, we need to call out the causes of this to insure we don’t do it again (and again and again and…)
First off, yes the president’s party tends to do poorly in the midterm. So we are fighting that headwind. But we had more than enough to counteract it. So let’s dive in to the mistakes.
First, everyone thought abortion was this giant game changer. We democrats could sit back on our collective buts, scream abortion, abortion, abortion, and get easy wins across the country.
Nope. When a family is struggling to afford the weekly grocery bill, their neighbor was robbed, and the world they know is changing in ways they don’t understand, abortion drops down to a secondary or tertiary issue. For those whom it is a primary issue even in all of this, they already were going to vote Democratic.
Second, we Democrats constantly talked about how our Democracy is at stake and that the only way to save it was to vote Democratic. And then in their actions our Democratic electeds acted as though it was politics as usual.
We helped the Republican crazies win their primaries. We proposed extremally liberal and passed very liberal laws telling the voters that saving Democracy was not important enough to dial back the progressive legislation.
Third, we passed a lot of very good laws bringing a ton of benefits to people across the country. And we then shut up about it all to make sure that we would gain no political benefit from that work. Finally in the last week, out of sheer desperation, there was finally some talking about what we have brought people. Way too late.
Fourth, we had this wonderful opportunity with inflation1. We could have used it to break up the monopolies we have in just about every part of our economy and to pass significant windfall profit taxes. This would have addressed a lot (not all) of the causes of inflation, implemented some very good legislation, and shown the voters we were trying to fix things.
Instead we sat around hoping & praying that inflation was transitory and was about to go away. Yeah that’s what the voters want, leaders that sit around hoping & praying for things to fix themselves.
The list goes on. There’s another 5 - 10 items I could easily add. The point remains that we fell way short on governing, on issues where we mostly would have had bipartisan support, and we had worthless messaging.
So who’s fault is this? Primarily our elected officials. And secondarily the nincompoops they hired, both for their legislative staff and their campaign staffs.
The #1 individual responsible is President Biden. He set the direction for Congress, he selected what policies & bills to stress. He directly controls a lot of the party machinery, messaging, etc.
But while he’s #1 in this, keep in mind he had a lot of help in all these bad decisions and all that help needs at a minimum a big kick in the ass and for the ones that provided consistently bad advice, they need to be fired.
If we have the usual suspects say they’ve now learned their lessons and will do better next time, we’re going to lose again in ‘24.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” — Rahm Emanuel