Tipsheet

NBC News: Here's Why 2020 was a 'Huge Catastrophe' for Democrats

Joe Biden is probably the next president of the United States, but the "woke" are about to experience a lot of heartbreak. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve gone through maybe half a liquor store lamenting the results of the 2020 election, but like President Trump himself, 2020 was a complicated election regarding bases of support—and it’s one that hallowed out Democrats. Republicans have wanted a broad, multi-racial coalition. Trump did that. Trump got numbers with Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters that Mitt Romney could only dream about. The GOP had a racially diverse, working-class coalition in 2020. Ten million more people voted for Trump in 2020. The support he achieved with Hispanic voters has caused Democrats to quake in their boots, and I doubt, with all the celebration, that a serious reflection will occur. I could be wrong. At the end of all of this, Trump lost because of marginal losses within the voter bloc that still matters—white working-class voters. Yet, let’s go through this again.

The turnout in 2020 was the highest ever, but the GOP gained seats in the House, maintained its bastions at the state-level during a redistricting year, and did pretty solid in the Senate races. We’re slowly seeing the end of the Left’s "demography is destiny" ethos regarding how they win elections to some degree. Shocker—selling an agenda of lower taxes, job creation, and all-in-all being patriotic appeals to all races, creeds, and ethnicities. It’s also causing some operatives to discuss whether it’s time to dial down the culture wars since they’re always on the wrong side of them. This nation isn’t the Democratic Party, which is overwhelmingly a party of snobby, college-educated elites from the city. Around 60 percent of the country doesn’t have higher education, and we’re a nation that has A LOT of guns. We’re also the most religious nation in the industrialized world. It’s all detailed in an excellent piece from NBC News on how 2020 maybe went well for Democrats at the national level but was a complete and total catastrophe everywhere else (via NBC News) [emphasis mine]:

The party fumbled key Senate races, lost ground in the House, and failed to capture state legislatures in a redistricting year despite having the political winds at its back, more money in its bank account and a hyper-activated grassroots movement that had spent four years preparing for this moment.

If this wasn't the year for Democrats to win big, then when?

"It's really hard for our party psychology to learn any lessons when we keep winning" the presidential election, Democratic strategist Danny Barefoot said. "But someone needs to have the hard conversation of saying: It's not enough."

[…]

Of special concern was the party's lackluster showing in state legislative races, not only because the GOP will once again have the upper hand in drawing districts, but also because it revealed a fundamental problem in communicating the Democratic Party's brand.

"We have to demonstrate that we are the party that's on the side of working families," said state Rep. Chris Turner, the Democratic leader of the Texas state House.

[…]

Some worry that the party, once rooted in the working class but now run and funded largely by college-educated liberals, may be losing its touch with blue-collar voters of all races outside major metro areas.

"We're such a Beltway party that we can't even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans in the [Rio Grande] Valley who love Donald Trump," said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. "Biden won, and that's great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe."

White working-class voters started abandoning the party decades ago and some Latinos and African Americans, especially men without college degrees in more rural areas, followed suit this year, flipping a heavily Latino rural county in Texas red after it had voted for Democrats by a wide margin in 2016.

The media will never tell you, but Trump also did well with LGBT voters, clinching almost 30 percent of them. That’s almost double from his 2016 showing. It’s diverse.

Democrats are insanely out of touch with people who aren’t frothing at the mouth liberals. We’ve known this for years, and speaking of those people, yes, you may have hated Trump, but with how the rest of 2020 went for the Left—you’re bound to be disappointed. Nothing huge is going to happen, which I guess is a consolation prize, though you’re never going to convince me that Biden won 2020 fair and square.

We’ve talked about this before: if you’re a die-hard progressive, a hard-core lefty, why would you vote for Joe Biden? Seriously, he’s not going to pursue any of the agenda items you want. He’s not going to defund the police, he’s not all that gung-ho about the Green New Deal, and he’s not for single-payer health care—all three points he made in the first presidential debate. Points that sadly got drowned out since President Trump was a tad too aggressive and didn’t allow Joe to hang himself with his own words. Right now, Joe Biden looks like he’s going to be the next president of the United States. The legal challenges are not going well, and while recounts have been requested in Wisconsin and Georgia, they often don’t overturn the initial result. It would have made much more sense for the progressive slice of the Democratic base to stay home and wait until there’s no Trump to worry about in 2024 and the mood is better suited to make another push for another Bernie Sanders-like candidate. After eight years, the country is tired of the same party in the Oval usually.

So, Biden may have won, but your Chavez-Esque agenda just took another decade long hit. It’s apparent that given how the GOP did overall down-ticket, Trump is not toxic to the brand. And he’ll be back in 2024 if all else fails.