The Democratic party has a messaging disaster on their hands. They’ve been hemorrhaging middle class voters for the last eight years and should be moving mountains to win those voters back. Instead, it looks like they’re spending all their energy trying to lock down the vote of the of 22-year-old college student who sits in Starbucks sipping on a Red Eye with almond milk while he uses the iPhone his parents bought him to tweet about the evils of capitalism.
The leftist anti-Trump smear campaign, a.k.a. the resistance, is nothing but ideological kamikaze-ism, which the ever-vanishing mainstream element of the party is more than happy to enable. The Democratic party, by enabling the resisters, is playing hard to the leftists base which goes against every electoral lesson of the past eight years.
After her showdown with President Trump and General Kelly last week, Rep. Frederica Wilson—fresh off politicizing the death of a soldiers and smearing a gold star dad— laughed and said, “I’m a rock star.” The Democrats’ big problem is, she’s right. And Frederica Wilson now has the Progressive intelligentsia opining that White House Chief-of-Staff and gold star father Gen. John Kelly is a racist because he called her an “empty barrel.” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and Joy Ann Reid blamed his invisible, phantom racism on his upbringing without a single example of anything racist he ever did or said in his entire life.
Wilson isn’t the first “rock star” to rise from the ashes of Hillary Clinton’s election defeat. In fact, the resistance has created a veritable Lollapalooza of rock stars. Maxine Waters—affectionately dubbed Auntie Maxine by enthusiastic hipsters— rose to fame thanks to her willingness to call for the impeachment of an elected president without any evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Rock Star. Colin Kaepernick—who has donned a Fidel Castro t-shirt and a pair of cops-are-pigs socks—has been compared to Rosa Parks for kneeling during the national anthem. Rock star. Jimmy Kimmel loves Obamacare and hates the second amendment. Rock Star. Eminem hates Trump. Rock star.
All this nonsense is being embraced by the Democratic Party who’s operating under the fresh, new slogan “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.” They picked that new slogan for a reason. It’s supposed to appeal to the segment of the Democratic voter coalition that has been chewed off by grassroots Conservatism over the last 8 years. In 2008, Democrats were flying high. In 2010, they lost their majority in the House of Representatives. In 2012, President Obama—the king of Democratic voter turnout—failed to recreate his 2008 blue-state coalition losing Indiana and North Carolina. And while states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania remained blue, his margins of victory were cut in half. In 2014, Democrats lost their majority in the Senate. And, of course, in 2016, Donald Trump put together a red state coalition and won more electoral votes than any Republican candidate since 1988.
If Hillary Clinton still doesn’t understand “what happened,” she should take a glance at the exit polls. In 2008, Obama carried voters making less than 100k per year—an overwhelming majority of the population—by 12 percent. In 2016, Clinton won that same demographic by 4 percent. In Wisconsin, 2008-Obama won that demographic by 19 percent. Eight years later, Clinton and Trump split it evenly. The story is similar for Pennsylvania , Michigan, and Ohio. In Minnesota, which nearly went red, Obama won that demographic by 14 points in 2008. Clinton lost it by 2 points.
Democrats abandoned the middle class—a demographic that they were once the champions of—and that cost them big at the polls. That’s why they chose a slogan about jobs and wages. But the slogan isn’t magic. It didn’t spring forth from Jack’s beanstalk beans. The Democrats actually need to behave like they’re jobs and wages party. If they don’t, their slogan may as well be “The Democrats: Everyone is racist but us.”
Who thinks a middle class construction worker in the rust belt applauds kneeling for the national anthem? Anyone? Who thinks accusing gold star dad John Kelly of racism appeals to people making less than $100,000 a year in Wisconsin? Anyone? Who thinks Democrats upgrading their ad hominem arsenal with the term “white supremacist” will resonate with 9-to-5-ers in Pennsylvania? Or that seeing the Ann Arbor city council members taking a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance will win back the middle class in Michigan? A few years from now, the mainstream media will be melting down over how in the hell Senator-elect Kid Rock got elected. This is how! Every time the Democrats embrace leftist nonsense, all they’re doing is pushing 2/3 of the country further to the right.
If they actually spend a day or two caring about jobs and wages, Democrats might make a comeback. They might win back some of that middle class they’ve been working overtime to alienate. If they pretend “rock stars” like Auntie Maxine, Frederica Wilson, Colin Kaepernick, Eminem, and Jimmy Kimmel are bearers of the American, middle-class zeitgeist, they’ll never recover.
Perspectives expressed in op-eds are not those of The Daily Caller.