JOSH BARRO: Democrats Will Not Win By Changing the Subject.

I strongly recommend Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s cover story for New York magazine, in which he talked to voters into New York City’s outer borough neighborhoods that swung hard toward Trump. In neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations, he did hear complaints about Democrats’ positioning on Gaza. But mostly, the message for Democrats was that they’ll need to move rightward to win this rainbow coalition of disgruntled voters back.

Many voters told van Zuylen-Wood that the government was too tolerant of crime and disorder; one man, who said his daughter’s entry into this country was threatened by Trump’s Muslim ban, nonetheless said he was supporting Trump. (He complained about his local public school having students wear colored shirts to form a human pride flag — an activity he asked to have his children excused from — and said he was moving to a neighborhood in Brooklyn where he could send them to a private, religious school.) But most of all, they complained about the migrant crisis, and in a right-wing way: the government had allowed too many migrants in; the migrants caused quality-of-life problems, from illegal vending to prostitution; the government was prioritizing benefits for migrants over programs for those of us who were already here. This being New York City, these complaints often came from voters who are themselves immigrants. “You can see it all, the boobs out,” one Ecuadorean-American woman, a registered Democrat who voted Republican for the first time, remarked to van Zuylen-Wood about prostitution in Corona, Queens. “That is outrageous. That is what I am telling you — especially the Venezuelans, they came with attitude.”

And when these voters looked around at the Democrats who govern them at the federal, state, and local levels, they saw a party that didn’t even appear to be trying.

Democrats have by and large abandoned the business of governing in favor of unpopular social crusades and punishing heretics.