Tru Dat

No Comments

The good folks at Naked Capitalism came across this post mortem of what is now 8 years of electoral failure by the Democrats, and concludes that a lack of vision, and a complete unwillingness to stand for everything have led to the ongoing rout of the party.

The party establishment has refused to do anything even remotely like an analysis of what went wrong, so these folks did, and they say what I’ve been saying since about 2010.

People will vote for a bad something over a not-bad (good is too strong a word) nothing:

Executive Summary

Sample of Findings

The Party’s Base

  • Aggregated data and analysis show that policies, operations and campaign priorities of the national Democratic Party undermined support and turnout from its base in the 2016 general election. Since then, the Democratic leadership has done little to indicate that it is heeding key lessons from the 2016 disaster.

  • The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.

  • After suffering from a falloff of turnout among people of color in the 2016 general election, the party appears to be losing ground with its most reliable voting bloc, African-American women. “The Democratic Party has experienced an 11 percent drop in support from black women according to one survey, while the percentage of black women who said neither party represents them went from 13 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2017.”

  • One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”

  • “Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

  • The DNC has refused to renounce, or commit to end, its undemocratic practices during the 2016 primary campaign that caused so much discord and distrust from many party activists and voters among core constituencies. • Working to defeat restrictions on voting rights is of enormous importance. Yet the Democratic National Committee failed to make such work a DNC staffing priority.

The full autopsy is here.

The malefactors of the party are on the run right now, even if the number of primary defeats are relatively small.

I hope that  the pressure is kept up in 2020, because the party establishment is definitely running scared.

Leave a Reply