Take 2002's "Minority Report" starring Tom Cruise. There are some things you know that are just going to happen. Cruise's character rolls a ball across a table, which Colin Farrell catches; Cruise asks why he did that. It's because it was going to fall. The 2022 midterm ball is rolling across the table, and it will fall and shatter the Democratic Party. It's not a question of "if," this is a foregone conclusion.
We're in an economic recession. The baby formula crisis has become a cancer to this administration, real cancer, not the one Joe Biden made up about windshield wipers and the oil industry. Mothers cannot feed their kids. And Joe Biden looked his age when responding to this fiasco. He seemed more lost than usual. It's death by a thousand cuts. Even his most ardent liberal media supporters are now turning on him. With approvals in the mid-30s, a dismal economy, and everyone but "woke" white women fleeing the Democratic Party this year, annihilation awaits. Will this be the cycle that they learn something from their pummeling at the polls?
Not that I hope they do learn anything. An out-of-touch and condescending Democratic Party is what I hope continues since it makes campaigning against them more leisurely. In 2016, it was clear the party knew what was wrong. It did terribly with rural Americans, specifically white working-class voters. Instead of addressing this glaring hole in the Democratic Party base, Democrats doubled down on the people who aren't golden tickets to winning national elections: nonwhites and city-dwellers. What about the suburban vote? Sure, they helped Joe win in 2020, but the five-point shift in the working-class vote is what did Trump in the last election. Also, the suburban vote, by far, is mainly comprised of working-class Americans. It's not some bastion of college-educated elites that Democrats think exists. Ruy Teixeira and David Shor are two liberals who tell it straight regarding the Democrats' latest election obsessions and how they're nonwinners with average voters. Teixeira noted that the sheer number of working-class voters in the suburbs makes the Democrats' 2022 midterm strategy "mathematically challenged."
Democrats have a silly penchant for thinking that their 2020 voter blocs will remain the same for the subsequent two cycles. Independents have seen enough of Joe Biden, along with Hispanics. Not only that, but nonwhite working-class voters are beginning to flee the Democratic Party. So far, feelings supersede facts with current liberal leaders over what resonates with voters. We have an administration trotting out big lies about what a recession is—and it's painfully clear. You can't just change the definition of a word because it makes your boss look bad. That will be the focal point for the Biden team this week. This Thursday, the GDP report will show economic contraction.
To recap, we have a president with approvals in the 30s, high inflation, a recession, and COVID. Biden catching the virus last week is just another part of the ongoing narrative that this White House is a total mess. If history suggests anything, it'll be that "woke" liberals will remain committed to their strategy of trying to elect people by reaching only 25 percent of the electorate.
Now, some people did learn from past election defeats. A group got too left-wing and looney for the electorate, but we'll have to go across the pond. The British Labour Party was a quasi-Trotskyite political force in the 1960s and 70s. It resulted in the party being in the wilderness for almost two decades. They, too, were all about feelings, not caring about the polls, and just doling out crazier and crazier manifestos to British voters. In 1983, they got hammered by Margaret Thatcher and the conservatives. Michael Foot, the then-Labour leader, resigned. He was something of a Bernie Sanders type. There are stories that Labour's 1983 platform was so disastrous that political consulting groups assisting conservatives canceled ad buys in the remaining weeks of that election. Thatcher's party didn't need them. That cycle did see the election of two future leaders of the UK, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who, along with Neil Kinnock, set about modernizing the Labour Party, which started by purging their hardcore left-wing elements. It was clear that Leon Trotsky was not the future of British Labour. Yet, this, too, was an almost decade-long rebuild. There was resistance. Eventually, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair seemed primed to duke it out before the two reportedly hashed out a deal to avoid a bloody leadership contest. Blair led Labour to a landslide 1997 win. Conservatives would not return to power until 2010. If Neil Kinnock sounds familiar, he's the then-Labour leader whose speeches Joe Biden plagiarized during his 1988 presidential run.
The point is UK's Labour knew what was wrong and set about fixing it. It led to a revival. American Democrats don't seem to be taking that to heart. It's funny. In the UK, where socialism is more widely accepted, their left-leaning parties reorganized and crafted a platform that ushered in a near-unbeatable Tony Blair. Democrats don't have a young savior. They need an agenda that is popular before they can find someone who isn't half-dead to sell it.
