It keeps coming back to the surface. It’s something that pushed black and Hispanic voters to Republicans in 2020. It’s something that was dug up again during the 2020 autopsy. What the hell happened? DC should have a resounding Democratic majority government. Both Houses should be partying like it’s 2009 when Obama was ushered in with an unprecedented 60 seats in the Senate and a solid majority in the House. That didn’t happen. The Senate is a 50-50 split, with Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) or Joe Manchin (D-WV) not gung-ho about going ‘woke’ on the agenda. In the House, Nancy Pelosi is barely hanging onto the majority. The Democrats only have a four-seat majority. There’s not a lot of wiggle room to get cute or take cockamamie progressive ideas for a spin. They’ll try when they can of course, but what happened. Well, three words keep popping up that could continue to haunt Democrats if they don’t get a hold of the fact that being pro-crime isn’t a smart strategy.
Those words are ‘defund the police’ (via WaPo):
For the second time in four years, Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) drew one of the toughest assignments: investigating what went wrong in a disappointing election.
The 2017 after-action review followed even more devastating results: a clean GOP sweep of holding the House while Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans retained the Senate.
[…]
Maloney, the new chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, worked with senior staff to analyze 600 polls in House races last year, matched up against voter files from the November elections, and other state and local data.
Maloney laid out how Democrats simply underestimated the number of hardcore Trump voters and, with more Trump voters in the voting booths, the Republican attacks against the “defund the police” movement proved more potent than Democrats ever anticipated.
“The lies and distortions about defund and socialism carried a punch, but the Republicans think it got them over a 10-foot wall, when Trump’s turnout gave them a seven-foot ladder,” Maloney said in 45-minute interview, exclusively outlining what he calls the “Deep Dive” into the election.
Well, it’s not a lie, Maloney. Your party is trending towards Marxism and there are a lot of folks in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who want to eviscerate law enforcement. If you had a good counterpoint, you would have drafted one and it probably would have worked. It didn’t. Why? Because your party allowed half the country to burn to the ground in leftist mayhem while also spitting in the face of police officers. Last summer was the most expensive in insurance history.
This isn’t a secret. Joe Biden knew the ‘defund the police’ attack line hammered his party down-ticket. Yes, there are polling quirks. And yes, they totally blew the late GOP spike around Election Day. They got the sampling wrong because there’s an issue that might not be fixable. Trump supporters don’t like to talk to pollsters. They also underestimated the strength of Trump voters. While not a majority, they will always be a force to be reckoned with because they’re efficiently dispersed in terms of political geography. David Shor, a 2012 Obama campaign veteran and data scientist who now works for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, mentioned this in his interview with New York Magazine about the 2020 election.
He too said that ‘defund the police’ hurt Democrats and made Hispanic and black voting trends look more like white conservatives. That’s not good. He also noted that the white college-educated liberals need to understand that most voters aren’t like them. They’re not liberal, especially nonwhite voters who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. If white liberals continue to dominate the messaging as they are now, they will lose Democrats tons of votes. Why? Again, white liberals are more ideological than black and Hispanic voters—and the former has layered voting narratives on blocs of voters for which the data doesn’t exist, but it feels good for the ‘woke’ college white liberal. This is America. Do what you want, but this will cost Democrats votes—a lot of votes. So, please—keep causing trouble and spewing idiocy.
