Tuesday is Election Day, and it appears that California Democrats are willing, in the words of Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), to “fight fire with fire.” Up to 60% of voters plan to vote yes on Proposition 50, according to two recent state polls. If passed, five Democrats could be added to the House of Representatives. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed the legislation to balance the effects of an effort in Texas to redraw the state's congressional districts and add five Republicans.
Gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa told me that he supported Newsom's decision and his plans to vote yes because it is the best way to defend himself against the Trump administration.
“I think we've seen it very clearly: We have a man in the White House who wants to rig an election,” Villaraigosa said. “That's what they're doing in Texas. The legislature has voted. What's different in California is that the people decide.”
It's no secret that the party has been trying to recover since last November.
No matter how unpopular President Trump's economic policies are; As much as videos of ICE raids make people nervous; As awkward as the administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files may have been… the reality is that Americans don't much like Democrats either. So while it's helpful that Proposition 50 provides some defense to the political power the party still holds, without an offensive plan the midterm elections won't deliver the blue wave progressives hope for.
Earlier this week, Politico published a 2024 autopsy conducted by the party titled “Decide to win.”
Supposedly “its goal is to provide the most complete explanation to date of why Democrats lost and what our party must do to win again.” I say supposedly because the words “race” and “gender” were missing from the executive summary. According to the study, since the 2024 elections, “thousands of election results, hundreds of public surveys and academic articles, dozens of case studies and surveys of more than 500,000 voters” have been conducted. And according to “Deciding to Win,” the problem began in 2012, when the party went too far to the left.
I'm not questioning the findings, just the characterization of what the authors found.
In the last three presidential elections (2016, 2020, 2024), candidates campaigned on policies, but the elections were determined by identity in both the media and the campaign. And yet, this Democratic strategy document suggests that talking about gender and race was part of the party's problem in those cycles. But prejudice is not a subplot in American politics; is an important factor whether Democrats mention it or not. The Republican candidate those three years had the support of the KKK newspaper.
Of course, the party needs to continue talking about table issues, but we cannot pretend that the socioeconomic divisions in the United States are the result of chance and not social engineering. There are over 300 counties in this country that have been perpetually poor since 1990. Some are majority white and have historically voted Republican, others are majority minority and vote Democrat. Either way, they have been poor for decades due to policy failure. They do not vote differently based on identity. Having a clear vision of that reality is not being “too awake,” as the report cowardly tries to suggest; is having a holistic understanding of the problems.
Democrats did not forget the working class, as the report suggests. It's just that “working class” is the progressive euphemism for “straight white people.” They use it the same way conservatives and people inside the Beltway say “evangelical Christians.” The idea that immigration rights or policies that help black people are somehow separate from the working class in this country is ridiculous. They are one and the same. Democrats have had a hard time communicating that in the last three elections. Even in victory, under President Biden, voters viewed his universally good economic policies as not helping the “working class” because of the messaging.
It's not a lack of ideas that hurts Democrats. It's a lack of courage, as evidenced by the establishment's unwillingness to back the transformative candidate in next week's New York City mayoral election. Yet history shows us that Trump supporters were neither handcuffed by tradition, transformed by data, nor motivated by reporting.
After President Obama's election in 2008, Republicans did their own “autopsy.” It was well researched and reasoned…and the voters ignored it in 2010 when they had their own ideas. That's when the Tea Party came to power, and in 2014, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was ousted — the first time a sitting majority leader lost a primary.
The base of the party did not wait or play defensively.
People moved and dragged elected officials with them.
And sometimes some officials are left behind. That's what Election Day is really about, anyway: not what was or is, but what could be.
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