3 mistakes that could haunt the Democrats (video)

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, Democrats will be searching for their souls at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Trump is an exceptionally vulnerable candidate, convicted of crimes, responsible for fraud and sexual abuse, bent on autocracy and more than 87% of the US population. If the Democrats can’t beat him, who can they beat?

The problems with the Democratic Party are evident in Vice President Kamala Harris’s difficulty in overcoming the margin of error in polls of voters in seven key states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. It has clearly improved President Joe Biden’s dismal situation since he dropped out of the race in July. But on paper, it should go much better. Inflation is almost back to normal levels, unemployment is low, gas prices are manageable, and crime is down. These factors usually pave the way for a decisive victory.

Of the two political parties, Republicans have morphed into a raging mob under Trump, fueled by anger, grievance and a primal urge to burn it all down. If Trump loses his second consecutive presidential election, Republicans will face their own reckoning and the prospect that a rabid minority, no matter how passionate, cannot win a national election.

Democrats, however, have barely stepped into the breach and offered ordinary Americans a political haven. Instead, Democrats have gone to the other extreme and left millions of voters feeling alienated by both parties. Here are three mistakes Democrats have made in recent years that will explain what went wrong if they lose in 2024:

The Bernie Sanders effect

The socialist senator from Vermont gained momentum when he ran for president as a Democrat in 2016. He energized young crowds by criticizing “obscene levels” of income inequality. He proposed heavy new taxes on business and the wealthy, which would fund free college and a government health care plan to cover all Americans. Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, but Sanders won 43% of the vote in the primaries, persuading other Democrats that voters were open to radical new ideas to uplift young Americans and those who were lagging behind.

Sanders and other progressive Democrats followed with ideas like the “Green New Deal” in 2019, which would have been a sweeping government takeover of the energy and transportation sectors to address climate change and rectify widespread social inequalities. Most Democrats supported the Green New Deal, even though it failed in a lopsided vote in Congress. Democrats latched onto the idea, seeing it as a winning issue in the 2020 election.

Same with “Medicare for All,” Sanders’ plan for a single-payer government health care program. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, many prominent Democratic candidates supported Medicare for All, including Kamala Harris.

Fast forward to 2024, and it turns out that moderate voters don’t want the massive disruptions that would come with these two gigantic government efforts, even if they support the ultimate goals. As the Democratic presidential candidate, Harris has abandoned her previous support for both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, because she needs centrist voters who prefer incremental improvements to massive government intervention. Sanders showed how to energize America’s most liberal voters, and many other Democrats followed suit, including Harris. What they didn’t explain is the flip side: policies that excite liberals alienate centrists. Harris is struggling with this problem now.

Rejection of fossil fuels

During his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to “end fossil fuels.” He appeared to make good on that promise as soon as he took office in January 2021 by canceling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, siding with climate activists on an emotional issue that was a back-and-forth test of whether you support the cause. Biden was clearly looking to appease progressive Democrats, the Sanders wing, who are passionate about addressing climate change.

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wow It turns out that the entire country is still very dependent on fossil fuels to get around and power their homes. When gas prices rose in 2022, reaching $5 a gallon for the first time, voters naturally thought of Biden’s hostility to fossil fuels and concluded that was why they were paying more for gas. That’s not actually true, but Biden himself acknowledged the image problem he was facing. Biden released oil from the emergency reserve and called on drillers everywhere to produce more. Energy prices are back down, but it’s probably no coincidence that Biden’s approval rating plummeted in 2022 and never recovered. Harris supports all of Biden’s policy decisions and faces the same voter skepticism about energy as Biden.

Opening the border

Biden reversed many of the harsh immigration restrictions that Trump instituted during his presidency, including emergency limits enacted during the COVID crisis in 2020. The result was an increase in all types of migration, including those entering the country illegally. ·legally, with border crossings reaching an all-time high last December. . Many of these migrants ended up in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, traditionally run by Democrats, straining the resources available to deal with the newcomers. Some Democratic mayors and governors began calling on Biden to do something.

Biden finally issued an order last June that sharply limited the entry of migrants. Border crossings have since fallen to levels last seen during Trump’s tenure. The political question is, what took Biden so long? The answer, once again, is that Biden was catering to the liberal wing of his party, which favors looser immigration policies. Harris is now in the awkward position of explaining how the Biden-Harris team went from reversing Trump’s immigration policies to essentially reimposing them.

Trump has captured the Republican Party by appealing to its nationalist culture warriors and essentially driving out those in the center. The Democrats haven’t gone that far, but Biden, Harris, et al. have pandered to their own base, the progressive left, returning to the center only in national elections where they need moderate votes. No wonder many voters view the 2024 presidential election as a choice between terrible and slightly less terrible.

Harris and the Democrats haven’t lost yet. It’s possible that Harris will persuade enough moderate voters that she is one of them after all. If he wins, he could even govern more in the center than Biden, who won the 2020 general election as a centrist but then drifted to the left.

Whoever wins, the lesson for both parties in 2024 is that they have left the moderate voters whose support they craved in the final weeks of the election feeling politically homeless for the other 47 months.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him at X at @rickjnewman.

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