How to Alienate Voters and Lose Elections

The Democrats have spent well over two years asking themselves what they did wrong in the last presidential election and how to avoid those mistakes in 2020. But they seem to suffer from a collective learning disability that prevents them from absorbing the obvious: Their party will lose again if they continue to insult the voters by insisting that the president they elected isn’t worthy of the office and that their country was founded on oppression and remains rife with racism, cruelty, and injustice. Yet this false and dispiriting vision seems once again to have become the Democratic Party line.

The lesson the Democrats seem to have learned from 2016 isn’t that they failed to earn the people’s votes, but rather that the electorate didn’t deserve the benign leadership offered by their standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Or, as she herself put it, “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” One would think that, after two years of such self-flattering rationalization, the Democrats would wake up to reality and stop denigrating the people whose votes they must have to win elections.

Instead, they have managed to convince themselves that they lost in 2016 because President Trump and his supporters are bigots. They stand on the floor of the House and refer to the president’s supporters as “just plain dumb.” Democratic representatives appear on talking-head shows and call Trump himself a racist. Democratic presidential candidates accuse him of “using race like a weapon to divide our country against itself.” They even stand in the pulpits of churches and denounce Trump and his supporters. Here is part of a January sermon delivered by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.):

Tyranny in the form of slavery has been the reality in this country before and we must be diligent to ensure it does not happen again.… Americans elected an authoritarian, an anti-immigrant, racist strongman to the nation’s highest office. Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” followers want to return America back to a time where white men and white privilege were unchallenged and where minorities and women were in their place.

Never mind that “slavery has been the reality in this country before” only because the Democrats refused to give up “the peculiar institution,” preferring to fight a bloody civil war rather than simply doing what they knew was the right thing. Forget the inconvenient fact that it was the Republicans who forced through the 13th Amendment, permanently freeing the slaves from Democratic bondage. And we’ll pass lightly over the fact that the party of slavery also denied women the right to vote from 1878 to 1919, when the GOP overcame vehement Democrat resistance to the 19th Amendment.