Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The Republican Party \u2014 populated with cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots and deranged conspiracy theorists \u2014 has spent five years alienating women, minorities and young voters.<\/p>\n
The party \u2014 and its entire leadership from the grassroots to Congress \u2014 remains in thrall to a disgraced, defeated, one-term president, who is reduced to issuing increasingly crazed screeds from his exile in Mar-a-Lago. Every day we learn more about Republican complicity in the events of Jan. 6 and their attempts to whitewash an attempted coup.<\/p>\n
The GOP is the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert.<\/p>\n
Sane Republicans are heading for the exits, even as assaults on democratic norms have become a litmus test of loyalty.<\/p>\n
So, now, Democrats need to ask themselves this rather urgent question:<\/p>\n
Why can\u2019t we beat these guys?<\/p>\n
Tuesday night, Democrats lost the governorship of Virginia \u2014 a state Joe Biden won by 10 points \u2014 to a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, who ran up massive margins in rural parts of the state and made inroads into the once reliably blue suburbs.<\/p>\n
There are obvious caveats and rationalizations available: Virginia has a long history of voting against the party in the White House in off-year elections; and Democrats did, in fact, beat Republicans in 2018 and 2020. They control both houses of Congress and the presidency.<\/p>\n
But even with Joe Biden\u2019s slumping poll numbers, Virginia should have been a firewall. As political guru Reuben Rodriguez (who nailed the 2020 results) noted<\/a>, Virginia is a \u201cDem dream.\u201d It has the highest concentration of tuned-in highly educated white people in the country in northern Virginia. It has large African American centers in Richmond and \u201cvery diverse suburbs that are ground zero for Trump disgust.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis,\u201d he tweeted<\/a> hours before the Democratic defeat, \u201cis a state that should not vote red.\u201d<\/p>\n But it did. And thus Virginia became the latest in a series of warning signs for the Democrats, who suffered unexpected losses in congressional and state-level elections despite defeating Trump last year.<\/p>\n So this seems a good time to ask hard questions that I suspect Democrats won\u2019t appreciate.<\/p>\n Glenn Youngkin may have run as a quasi-post-Trumpian candidate, but across the country, Republicans continue to beclown themselves with lies about the election, even as they become more extreme on issues from guns to abortion.<\/p>\n But then why does a new NBC poll give Republicans double-digit leads on issues like border security, inflation, crime, the economy, national security and even on \u201cgetting things done\u201d?<\/p>\n Why are Democrats facing the possibility of a Republican wave in 2022, and \u2014 even more ominous \u2014 the restoration of the Trump presidency in 2024?<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t they beat these guys, even in a state as blue as Virginia?<\/p>\n Democrats have been busy constructing excuses for their lack of success. They blame dark money, gerrymandering, racism, the right-wing media ecosystem.<\/p>\n But none of the self-soothing explanations account for what has been a clear erosion in support not merely in rural areas, but also among suburbanites and Black and Hispanic voters.<\/p>\n Democrats are also learning that without Trump himself on the ballot, they had merely rented some of the suburban votes that had shifted their way in the last two cycles. Running against Trump is apparently not a winning formula when the former president is merely a spectral presence.<\/p>\n Even so, many progressives still seem reluctant to engage in any sort of deeper introspection into why they may have alienated former members of their base. Many prefer to cling to the concept of \u201casymmetric polarization\u201d that blames the widening split solely on conservatives because Republicans have moved farther to the right than Democrats have to the left.<\/p>\n But that view was challenged earlier this year by Kevin Drum<\/a>, who cited studies showing that, in fact, it had been Democrats who had drifted to the left on issues like immigration, guns, religion and gay marriage.<\/p>\n It is not \u201cboth-sides-ism\u201d to point this out. Like others, I have written hundreds of thousands of words about how the Republicans have not only moved hard to the right, but have also gone mad in the process. So this does not suggest any sort of moral equivalence.<\/p>\n The derangement of the GOP, however, has tended to obscure what happened on the left, where elite Democrats have increasingly lost touch with many of the voters who will determine the outcome of the next few elections.<\/p>\n At soccer matches and PTA meetings, or other gatherings of suburban parents, you won\u2019t hear talk of \u201cintersectionality,\u201d or debates about the proper use of pronouns. The words \u201cautocracy\u201d or \u201cauthoritarianism\u201d seldom come up; and if you try to define the terms, it\u2019s as likely as not that people will bring up mask and vaccine mandates, cancel culture and what they see as the overreach of the progressive nanny state. References to \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d are likely to be greeted or with eye rolls or treated as conversation-ending insults.<\/p>\n At times, it seems as if Democrats are speaking a different language than many Americans. This is what veteran democratic strategist James Carville was talking about when he told Vox<\/a>:<\/p>\n You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like \u2018Latinx\u2019 that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like \u2018communities of color.\u2019 I don\u2019t know anyone who speaks like that. I don\u2019t know anyone who lives in a \u2018community of color.\u2019 I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in \u2026 neighborhoods.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this disconnect has been accelerated by the shift in the balance of power and influence in the Democratic party. \u201cLiberal college graduates, especially liberal white college graduates, have gained a sort of hegemony in the nation\u2019s elite media, foundations and NGOs, in academic and cultural institutions and in the staffing of the Democratic party\u2019s infrastructure,\u201d writes Ruy Teixeira<\/a>. \u201cThis hegemony sets the tone for the Democratic party\u2019s commitments and rhetoric on sociocultural issues.\u201d<\/p>\n This has had real world consequences.<\/p>\n Even though Democrats have succeeded in getting a much larger share of college-educated voters, educational polarization has been very much a double-edged sword because they have been losing ground among working-class voters, who greatly outnumber the college-educated electorate. (Nationally, according to 2020 Catalist data<\/a>, the electorate is 63 percent non-college\/37 percent college).<\/p>\n