By: Dan McLaughlin – nationalreview.com – November 7, 2024

Democrats made a lot of bad choices that drove voters away. That’s how ordinary Americans ended up bringing back Donald Trump.

There’s a lot of incredulity this week from Democratic partisans, and a lot of fury and contempt directed not only at Republicans but at the voters. Why did people vote for Donald Trump again, knowing everything we know about him? Why didn’t Republicans stop him from being nominated again?

That sort of thing has been pervasive since Tuesday night, especially in the “Resistance” corner. Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post seethed, “Americans have no one to blame but themselves. Felon and President-elect Donald Trump did not conceal who he was. He did not hide his racism, misogyny, willful ignorance, cruelty or contempt for democracy. At some point, we must acknowledge that our fellow Americans voted for him because of those qualities, not despite them.” Tom Nichols in the Atlantic raged that “those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blamed “misogyny . . . from Hispanic men . . . from black men, who do not want a woman leading them . . . it might be race issues. . . . A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with black candidates.”

Sorry, Democrats, you did this to yourselves. However Republicans may be at fault for choosing their nominee, you were the ones who made the choices that lost this election. A strong majority gave you the White House, the House, and the Senate. They trusted you. And you blew it.

You blew it so badly the voters brought back the guy they fired four years ago. A guy they never particularly liked, and still don’t like (judging by his favorability rating in polls and in the exit polls). A guy who tried to overturn the last election — and the voters disliked you so much, they gave him more support than he had before he did that.

That guy. You lost to that guy.

You won 51.3 percent of the national popular vote in 2020, in a high-turnout election. You didn’t need to persuade a single Trump voter to keep your jobs. You just needed the people who voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris last time to be satisfied with what they asked for.

You didn’t give it to them.

Sure, Biden had challenges land in his lap that weren’t his fault. Inflation was going to be a problem in 2021–22 no matter what he did. Trump had committed to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. The pandemic still raged at the start of his presidency, presenting issues of how to roll out the vaccines and how to get the country back to normal. External crises like the Gaza and Ukraine wars could be affected by American policy, but their underlying drivers came from overseas.

But that’s the job. Every American president inherits messes and unfinished business. Every American president faces troubles abroad. And then they make choices.

It was the choices that undid Biden and Harris and laid them so low that Trump may even end up having won a popular majority to evict them from the White House.

Extremism in Defense of Vice Is No Virtue

The choices date as far back as Barack Obama’s second term. That’s when Democrats responded to a Republican Congress with increasing reliance on executive-branch fiats. It’s when Obergefell convinced them that judicial activism plus elite consensus could shift the culture rapidly, and they embarked on the weird campaign to replicate the success of same-sex marriage with transgenderism, a phenomenon far more odd and alien to most Americans. It’s when Ferguson illustrated the talismanic power to Democrats of the Black Lives Matter movement and elite-culture figures such as Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Spooked by the Bernie Sanders rebellion in 2016, Democrats convinced themselves that their party needed to abandon Clintonian small-ball in favor of more garishly drastic ideological postures. This may have overrated the extent to which the Sanders phenomenon was itself in good part just a sign that people really didn’t like Hillary Clinton. The 2019 primaries were a festival of this sort of thing. Candidates competed to endorse Medicare for All (i.e., the abolition of private health insurance), Court-packing (the proposal of which rocketed Pete Buttigieg into national prominence), fracking bans, and bizarre stances such as taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal aliens and prisoners.

Hardly anyone was a more eager adopter of all of this than Kamala Harris, in ways that would come back to haunt her in 2024’s most memorable campaign ad featuring “a grand slam for a Republican ad: left-wing cultural nonsense, waste of taxpayer money, coddling criminals, and illegal immigration — all in one!” And all in the candidate’s own words on paper and on video. Even at the time, the desperate nature of Harris’s pandering rang insincere to Democratic voters, who flocked in droves away from her campaign.

Democrats tend to dismiss the transgender stuff as an overblown panic involving a tiny segment of the population. But that overlooks two things. First, if it’s not that important, why have they persistently devoted so many public resources, lawsuits, and so much of the communications of their leaders to it? Second, it’s not just an alarming thing that threatens girls’ sports and frightens parents in how it seeks to pry impressionable young people away from their own families; it’s also a symbol of a broader outlook on the world.

In the midst of 2019’s carnival of extremism, the New York Times Magazine published the 1619 Project. Like the work of Coates, this was an elite phenomenon, but one that seeded in the elites a mindset that would become more widely visible.

One man had the good sense, and the credibility from his association with Barack Obama, to call the party back to reality: Joe Biden. Biden spent a lot of that primary season selling himself as the sane, reasonable “just go back to Obama” guy who wanted to save Obamacare, talk about how great America was, laugh off talk of Court-packing and other anti-institutional chatter, and generally appeal to the sensibilities of normal middle-aged and older voters in a liberal party. Older, churchgoing black voters in the South formed the backbone of his comeback after getting overwhelmed by Bernie-ism in Iowa and New Hampshire.

You might think that a man of Biden’s decades of experience in politics would conclude, after having pulled this off, that his bond with black voters was secure and that anything that was too far left for Democratic primary voters was probably too far left for the general electorate. But Biden has never had the spine to stand up to his own party, and by midsummer 2020, the world had changed.

The pandemic turned the country upside-down. Then, the death of George Floyd brought extravagant ideological demands for shows of obeisance to the Coates/1619 crowd. It produced the “Defund the Police” movement that ended up striking even many working-class black and Hispanic voters as rank insanity. Harris, the former prosecutor, was as caught up in the madness as anyone, and raised money on Twitter to bail out Minneapolis rioters. Four years later, she still hasn’t had the good sense to take the tweet down.

In the midst of this, in July 2020, Biden met with representatives of the Sanders camp and signed off on a list of demands (things like the Green New Deal) in a surrender so abject it should have been held on the deck of a battleship. In August 2020, Biden caved to demands that he put a black woman on the ticket to reflect that particular moment’s racial sensibilities (Amy Klobuchar even withdrew herself from consideration, and effectively boxed out Elizabeth Warren, by publicly insisting that justice demanded a woman of color on the ticket). The ranks of the nation’s governors and senators contained only one black woman at the time, so onto the ticket Harris went.

Something else was happening at the same time: At 77, Biden’s age was catching up with him. His return to the national stage in 2019 revealed a man visibly slowed since his vice presidency. Every year since has seen him get worse. The pandemic afforded an opportunity to get him away from the campaign trail, where he had once been a garrulous and tireless font of bonhomie. Habits of protecting Biden from view set in and would become institutionalized in his White House.

The chaotic world of 2020, with its masks and lockdowns and race riots, was a uniquely ill-suited time for a president who carried his own chaos everywhere he went. Grandpa Joe may not have come off as energetic, but he seemed a calm, harmless throwback to a saner world. He’d bring back better times past and not try to create the world anew. Republican warnings to the contrary were disregarded. Voters wanted normalcy.

Choices in Office

The Biden-Harris administration (that name being its own preferred branding) was defined by its choices, and its choices were what did it in.

The biggest one was the long-running conspiracy to pretend that Biden was not in accelerating mental decline as he entered his eighties. Nobody forced his White House to do this. The pretense became laughable, and polls for years on end showed that even Democratic voters didn’t buy it. Then, when Democrats avoided a disastrous midterm in 2022, Biden decided to run again. The wiser heads in the party — the people who ended up having to intervene to force him out in July 2024 — sat by and did nothing.

The structural factors that drove inflation were unavoidable. But again, Biden made choices to back trillions in inflationary spending, while touting “green energy” as the party’s top legislative priority. These choices exacerbated inflation, both by adding to the money supply and by adding to the expected money supply. They also increased the perception that the administration didn’t care that its policies were inflationary.

Biden’s immigration policy was a completely self-inflicted wound, and one that ensnared Harris from early in his term. In her 2019 campaign, she had called for disbanding ICE and denounced a border wall. When Biden rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies (such as Remain in Mexico) simultaneously with naming her as the public face of his border policies, her approval rating plunged, and didn’t recover until she was anointed the nominee. Nobody forced Democrats to use executive power to let a lot more migrants into the country, a move that horrified even progressive big-city mayors. It was a choice. By 2024, every Democrat in the country was running as far from that choice as they could.

Biden took over with the pandemic in full swing. It was a complex situation, but also a fast-moving one, and Biden was in the honeymoon period, had a lot of credibility with senior citizens due to his age, and could point to the vaccines as a reason to revisit policies. Instead, his administration spent a year running interference for the teachers’ unions’ school-shutdown policies while stretching federal authority beyond the breaking point to unconstitutionally order vaccine mandates on most U.S. workers. Those were choices, and they welded Biden to increasingly unpopular blue-state lockdown and mandate policies that were disproportionately despised by working-class voters.

Trump was prepared, and agreeing, to leave Afghanistan. But Biden had no qualms about completely reversing course on all manner of other Trump commitments, domestic and foreign. In fact, Biden came to office determined to end the war. It was Biden’s choice to force the withdrawal ahead of a rigid timeline with a September 11 deadline, and his other choices, that maximized the fiasco. Biden’s approval ratings never recovered from the voters concluding that he was incompetent.

Leaning into the lawfare strategy against Trump was a choice. The Biden DOJ at all times had authority over Jack Smith. A Biden DOJ prosecutor left to work for Alvin Bragg’s prosecution team. Fani Willis’s special prosecutor spent eight hours at the White House the day Smith was appointed. Bragg and Willis are, of course, both elected Democrats. Given its origins and its centrality to Democratic messaging, it was entirely rational for voters to interpret all of this as a deliberate strategy of Biden prosecuting his political opponent over political offenses for political gain. Combined with Democrats suing to try to take Trump off the ballot and a panoply of other offenses against free political speech, lies about election laws, and the like, it’s not surprising that these choices collectively undermined the argument that Trump was a greater threat to liberal democracy and the rule of law than the people trying to lock him up, bankrupt him, gag him, and bar voters from supporting him.

Nobody forced Biden to go all-out bending the law to bail out college debts, a move that was correctly interpreted by non-college-educated voters as preferring college grads to them. Nobody forced Biden to try resurrecting the Iran deal, or building the ridiculous Gaza pier. There was much more, from left-wing antisemitism in protests of the Gaza war to the Justice Department’s 24/7 culture war. It was hard to tell sometimes where the choices ended and the incompetence began, from the Secret Service to the Transportation Department.

The collective impact of these many decisions was not merely to keep Donald Trump’s base and his more reluctant Republican supporters bonded to him, with nowhere else to go. It was also to make large segments of the voting public feel that these people had badly misunderstood their assignment to restore normality and a more traditional liberalism, and had instead brought politics and bad policy into everything from the grocery store to the gas pump to the yeshiva to the local motel full of migrants to the H.R. office forcing shots and racial propaganda on you, to your kids being kept out of school and your daughters facing boys on the basketball court.

At Last at Bay, and Yet Unvaliant

By the summer of 2024, it had all been exposed. Biden was driven from the ticket, and then everybody acted as if none of it had happened. Harris was presented to the public as a completely confected image unrelated to her actual record and capabilities. Faux “joy” proclaimed by a compliant press, which defended her right to refuse to answer its questions. Her incapacity to speak coherently or explain her positions on the simplest questions may not have been a choice, but it was a consequence of a Biden choice that was too late to undo.

Abortion, more popular than its opposition, was embraced with a scandalously gleeful zeal as a substitute for sound economic policy or serious engagement with national security. Harris picked as her running mate a governor who had presided over the Floyd riots, enforced draconian lockdown policies, signed an agenda straight out of the mad season of 2019, and turned out to be a serial liar, to boot.

Harris made more choices of her own after that, but they were constrained by her own limited skillset and by the double bind of needing to simultaneously escape both Biden’s record and her own. She chose to run toward Biden as the only way to run away from herself.

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Source: You Did This to Yourselves, Democrats | National Review