Democrats are wondering why nobody likes them. Evidence is suggesting the shortlived failed experiment of progressivism has come and gone.
https://www.semafor.com/article/11/06/2024/democrats-ask-why-didnt-anything-workDemocrats ask: Why didn’t anything work?
On Wednesday afternoon, as Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election, Democrats confronted the idea that a short progressive era had come and gone.
In Ohio and Montana, two populist Democratic senators who’d always defied gravity succumbed to it. In California, voters ousted two reform prosecutors in deep blue counties – Los Angeles and Alameda – while recalling Oakland’s progressive and scandal-plagued mayor. Arizonans voted to allow local police to enforce immigration law; New Yorkers were on track to reject a new city diversity officer.
All of that unfolded on a map that got redder outside of a few cities and suburbs, and far redder in majority-Latino areas that had rarely voted Republican. 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.
“I would love to see some kind of autopsy,” said Faiz Shakir, the founder of the progressive journalism channel More Perfect Union, and the manager of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “I would worry about a party that said: Let’s move on, let’s fight, let’s get into resistance mode.”
Sanders had urged Democrats all year to reach unlikely voters and emphasize their economic policies, many shaped by him after the 2020 primary defeat. On Wednesday, before Harris addressed supporters at Howard University, he said in a statement that Democrats shouldn’t have been shocked that a “party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” white and non-white.
