A party that abandoned the workers found the workers had abandoned them

H ere’s a measure of what happened in America on November 5, 2024:

  Before Tuesday, no Democrat born after 1986 had ever voted in an election where Republicans won the popular vote. Now, all of them had. They were not entirely sure why.

That insight came from David Weigel of Semafor.

The scale of the Democrats’ defeat — and that too, to a personality as filled with rage and profanity as Donald Trump and his Republican Party — is quite astounding.

Democrats lost Senate seats — in Ohio and Montana. Tammy Baldwin barely held on to her Senate seat in Wisconsin. And there was a welcome Senate pick-up in Maryland, while Josh Stein became Governor of North Carolina.

Otherwise, all the signs are there of a profound rejection of “woke-ism”, as it’s sometimes unfairly demonised. In California, for god’s sake, voters ousted two reformist prosecutors in reliably Democratic counties. They recalled Oakland’s progressive (scandal-hit) mayor. In Arizona, voters said ‘yes’ to a proposal to allow local police to enforce immigration law. In New York, there was a distaste for plans to have a new city diversity officer.

There will be a proper autopsy in the months and years ahead, but the Democratic Party’s problems may be that phenomenon many of us increasingly experience: a tendency to roll our eyes and zip our mouths because it’s not “allowed” to say something or the other. There’s a difference between wokeism and a very real concern and empathy for everybody.

As Bernie Sanders, the senator who cares deeply about equality, equity, and common sense empathy, said in a statement after the devastating election defeat: Democrats shouldn’t have been shocked that a “party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Back in 2021, Bill Clinton’s former election manager, James Carville, pointed out the Democrats’ “messaging problem” (here’s my blog). It was the reason, he said, that they only narrowly defeated Donald Trump, “a world-historical buffoon,” and lost congressional seats and failed to pick up state legislatures. He included “Latinx” and “communities of colour” on a list of words that serve as a separation barrier.

“I don’t know anyone who speaks like that,” said Mr Carville. “I don’t know anyone who lives in a ‘community of color’. I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.”

He was right.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Medium and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 8 November 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Adobe Stock/L9871456.