Can the Democrats figure out why they're in the wilderness?

Logically prior question: Can they figure out THAT they're in the wilderness?

It’s become something of a commonplace in political commentary that the Democrats are leaderless, rudderless and clueless. Even with Orange Bad Man as a foil — has there ever been a better one? — they seem stuck in an historically rotten place. See, e.g., this article.

Democrats have become so unpopular that more Americans believe that aliens are among us than agree with the Democratic Party.

Dems are now held in lower esteem than lawyers, undertakers, and car salesmen.

Lower than lawyers?? Dear God in heaven.

Two punishing new polls released [in March] show that the party has hit historic new lows in approval ratings nationwide — with just 27% of Americans saying they like the job Democrats are doing, according to NBC News.

A CNN poll put favorability at 29% — the lowest rating in the 33-year history of the survey; 54% have an unfavorable view.

And this was before the last ten days or so, when all hell has broken loose about the depth, breadth, and danger to the country of the Democrats’ lying and covering up about Joe Biden’s mental incapacity during the latter half (or perhaps more) of his Presidency. The commentariat has started openly to wonder, for example, whether Biden was simply incapable of understanding how much he had lost control of the border, thus creating the issue that, at least as much as inflation, handed the White House to an existentially despised Donald Trump.

Bad as it is for the Dems, I wonder if they get how far it’s gone and how long it’s been brewing. Their friends are trying to warn them; whether it gets through is another matter. Hence I bring you this story from a well-known outlet. It’s not Fox or Instapundit or the Wall Street Journal. The story is from the New York Times.

Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier.

It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback.

The steady march to the right at the county level reveals not just the extent of the nation’s transformation in the Trump era but also the degree to which the United States now resembles two countries charging in opposite directions.

If looking graphically at the “two countries” doesn’t finally get the Democrats’ attention, one must wonder whether the whole party is as far gone as Joe. Here’s the message:

Over the last three Presidential elections, this is where voters have switched to the Democrats:

Over those same elections, this is where voters have switched to Republicans:

This is not a picture of politically tough times. It looks more like a picture of doom.

All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times.

It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.

Not to mention, among other things, that (1) he was indicted for 91 felony counts over four jurisdictions and convicted by Leftist DA Alvin Bragg of 34 of them; (2) shot at, hit, and taken to within an inch of being killed in Butler, PA; (3) survived a second assassination attempt by political critic Ryan Routh in Florida; and (4) had to defeat an attempt by legal academics to push him off the ballot altogether (what could be better for democracy than to erase the opposing candidate from the ballot?) The attempt was rejected by the Supreme Court 9-0.

By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties….

The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Perhaps Trump’s most important achievement, politically, is that he made the Republican Party much more appealing to working class and minority voters than at any time in my life, with the exception of that once-in-a-century political star, Ronald Reagan. The Times expands on this point:

Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

Counties that have become steadily more Republican exist in some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu. Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.

Taken together, the findings represent a blaring alarm for a Democratic Party that long saw itself as championing the working class…

Still, the Republicans shouldn’t become too chipper, not because of the reported shifts and not because of anything else, either. First, the pro-Democratic demographic shifts are in key areas, particularly the increasingly wealthy Atlanta suburbs. That puts Georgia, once a reliably Republican stronghold, up for grabs. The Dems also have signs of life in small but densely populated parts of Wisconsin and Michigan. The same is true in Colorado and Virginia — once swing states in which Republicans had a decent chance, but looking forward, seemingly not so much.

Second and more critical is the message each party has deep down. My sense is that the Democrats have been losing strength in recent times because, increasingly, they lack the talent and the will to blend their message in precisely the right way — to advertise its shiny parts while doing just enough to hide its core: That they don’t like the country very much. More and more, they have let the country see the core for what it is. They’re so ideologically blinkered that they walk right past the fact that most voters don’t see the country that way at all. Perhaps most prominently, they view whites — still a majority of the electorate — and Jews in particular — as oppressors, living high off what they stole starting in (as they have written) “1619” and never really stopping.

There are three main things wrong with that message. First, as a matter of electoral politics, it’s a loser, as the Times’ story shows. Second, it’s divisive and disgusting. Third, it’s false.

Other than that, I have no problem with it. I should note that it does have an advantage to Republicans, if only a chimerical and dangerously short run advantage: It allows them to elect a wrecking ball like Donald Trump.

There’s a lot of stuff for which the Democrats and their decades-in-the-making, “Harvard-is-so-wonderful” culture deserve the wrecking ball. The problem is that, while “Amerika Stinks” defines the Democratic Party right now, “wrecking ball” defines Trump’s Republicans. That might feel good, and sometimes it will be good, for the moment, but the moment won’t last. After that, and starting real soon, the country will need wisdom and vision and the kind of hard discipline Trump has yet to come close to showing.

I asked in my title whether the Democrats will be able to figure out why they’re in the wilderness. Because they need to wise up to survive, my guess is that they will. But they’ve done so much for so long to build their party around contempt for America, race huckstering, and transgender screeching that rebuilding is going to very hard and take a long time. For the good of the country — two viable parties being better than one — we can only hope it happens.