After 12 months of the Brandon Regency, the economy is a wreck. Inflation is 7.5 percent. The price for a gallon of gas is approaching $4.
Insane “pandemic” mandates infuriate Americans. The ballyhooed China Virus vaccines are failing. Illegal aliens are invading at will, only to be released into the heartland. And President Biden appears ready to wage war against Russia.
Understandably, top Democrat strategists are terrified about a major blow-out come the midterm elections in November. And they’ve been terrified for some time.
Dowd in the Times
Maureen Dowd, the dyspeptic columnist for the New York Times, spoke to James Carville, a former torpedo for Bill Cilnton; David Axelrod, a former torpedo for Barack Obama; and Stanley Greenberg, who identified a new species of voter years ago called the “Reagan Democrat.”
“All three Dems are speaking out with startling candor about the impending Repubocalypse,” Dowd wrote:
Many Americans are fed up. The jumbled Covid response has eroded an already shaky trust in government. Inflation is biting. War is looming. Things feel out of control. People are anxious and reassessing their lives. Democrats have to connect with that.…
Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look.
Biden, Axelrod says, has dropped his best asset: “empathy.”
“One of Biden’s strengths is that, at his best, he speaks the language of America, not Washington. But he has been speaking more in the voice of government officials than he has of Scranton Joe,” Axelrod told Dowd.
Right about now, no one is sure whether Biden even knows he’s in Washington, D.C., such is the state of his dementia.
That aside, despite his disastrous policies, “Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it,” Dowd wrote:
Axelrod disagrees: “You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.”
Carville still says what he said at the Vox website in January. Democrats must “not be defined by their left wing or condone nutty slogans like ‘Defund the police,’” Dowd explained:
They should work not to seem like an “urban, coastal, arrogant party” indulging in “faculty lounge politics” that appeal to reason rather than emotion and use “woke” words like “Latinx.”
Carville points to San Francisco as the Democrats’ canary in the coal mine.
“Seventy percent of the people in San Francisco tried to warn us,” he told Dowd about the recall of three leftist crackpots on the school board who wanted to erase the names Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from public schools.
“They’re not popular,” Carville said. He aimed that message directly at them: “People don’t like you.”
American see “confusions and disorder,” he told Dowd. “You’ve got to give people the sense that they may not be all that happy in 2022 but if they vote for the Republicans, they’re going to lose a lot of the things they have now.”
Meanwhile, Democrats apparently think bringing Obama out of mothballs will help their prospects:
In a blunt piece in The American Prospect, Greenberg warned Democrats not to use Obama as a closer in campaigns anymore or to present themselves as the party of Obama.
Once, Democrats believed that Obama’s multiracial coolness would animate his party. But his failure to prosecute any bankers after the near-collapse of the economy solidified fears that Wall Street and Washington were in cahoots.
“Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” Greenberg wrote, adding that Democratic leaders “stopped advocating for workers against corporate excess and stopped challenging the exceptional corruption that allowed billionaires and Wall Street to dominate politics. The result is that the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people, including its own base.”
An Associated Press story’s headline echoed his point: “‘The Brand Is So Toxic’: Dems Fear Extinction in Rural U.S.”
Democrat Retirements
Aside from warnings such as Carville’s about his party’s lurch to the left, another sign that Democrats face a crushing loss is the number of retirements from the U.S. House of Representatives: 10.
In October, FiveThirtyEight explained the problem:
Retiring Democrats, however, appear to be more motivated by electoral concerns. Only five of the 10 retiring Democrats are running for another office, while four currently represent swing seats.… It’s reasonable, therefore, to theorize that fear of losing reelection was a key factor in their decisions to retire.
Beyond that, voter surveys included in the Real Clear Politics average of the generic congressional vote show a solid GOP lead of 4.5 points, 45.5-41.
And the two latest polls, from Emerson and Rasmussen, are much worse for Biden and his party. They show Democrats losing 50-41 and 50-37.
The party has lost five of the last six polls and nine of the last 14.
H/T: Ace of Spades
