JIM GERAGHTY: Democrats Get a Wake-Up Call about How Unpopular Their Agenda Really Is.
Trump is either going to win the national popular vote or come pretty darn close to winning it, and I suspect that is a scenario that a lot of Democrats are just not psychologically or emotionally prepared to confront. Break out the Legos, cookies, and coloring books.
Don’t underestimate the emotional value of Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote back in 2016. It allowed Democrats to convince themselves, and others, that Trump’s 2016 was a quirk of the Electoral College, a fluke, a reflection of Clinton never visiting Wisconsin and Russians buying ads on Facebook and FBI director James Comey’s late announcement and a million other excuses. Think about how many times you were reminded that Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
Democrats believed that progressivism was still popular — and the traditional midterm backlash of 2018 convinced them that Trump had proven to be so unpopular, they could move as far to the left as they wanted, and the electorate would still always pick them over Trump and his MAGA candidates.
They thought wrong.
Progressivism, liberalism, woke-ism — they will never be the same. They won’t wither away completely. But the Democrats just learned the hardest of hard lessons: The electorate — not just straight white males — doesn’t want their brand of deeply divisive identity politics, deliberate conflation of legal immigration and illegal immigration, policies that reflexively recommend and enact permanent bodily changes for teenagers questioning their gender identity, and basically the entire agenda of the 2019 Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
At the Bradley Impact Fund conference last month, I told the joke about the advertising genius who’s brought in to revitalize the sales of a brand of dog food. He redesigns the packaging, runs a whole bunch of appealing commercials, and gets a bright, vibrant display for the brand right in the front of the supermarket. But as he’s shopping for groceries, he watches a customer walking a dog reach down to buy the other leading brand. Exasperated, the advertising genius goes up to the man and asks why, despite the new packaging, commercials, and display, he bought the other leading brand and not the ad man’s client’s brand of dog food. The customer shrugs and points to his dog, saying “He won’t eat it.”
Democrats, the electorate is just not going to eat your dog food. It doesn’t matter if you raise more money and spend more on ads and have more campaign offices and have more doorknockers and volunteers. The sales pitch isn’t really the problem; the product is.
The zombie version of Henry Luce’s Time magazine is taking it well:
So I guess Trump isn’t getting photoshopped onto the cover as FDR declaring the “New New Deal,” or (as Newsweek did in November of 2012) in a Napoleonic admiral’s jacket and sword huh?
Flashback: Time buries Trump assassination attempt. While their article’s lede from July 27th is “Trump’s ear wound from an assassination attempt at a rally on July 13 quickly became a symbol of solidarity for many of his supporters, and a grim reminder of political violence in the U.S.,” the story’s headline is a dull-as-dishwater, “What We Do and Don’t Know About Trump’s Ear Wound.”
Evergreen:
