The Red Wave, And The Democratic Suicide Strategy

This week, reality struck back against Democratic electoral utopianism. Since 2012, Democrats have been convinced that a new, durable, near-unbeatable political coalition was in the making: a coalition largely comprised of college-educated white voters, women, younger Americans and racial minorities. This coalition would overtake the demographically shrinking “old, white majority” and win victory after victory. As Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin wrote for the Center for American Progress in the aftermath of Obama’s reelection, “Obama’s strong progressive majority — built on a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition in support of an activist … is real and growing and it reflects the face and beliefs of the United States in the early part of the 21st Century.” CAP called this new strategy “the culmination of a decades-long project to build an electorally viable and ideologically coherent progressive coalition in national politics.”

Ever since 2012, Democrats have been chasing that chimera. Instead of seeing Obama’s 2012 victory as a testament to Obama’s unique political skill, they have doubled down on the CAP strategy: more progressivism, more race-based politics. When that strategy failed in 2016, they chalked it up to Russian election interference and Facebook propaganda. When President Joe Biden won election in 2020, they announced that their strategy had been vindicated — even though the election was rather obviously a referendum on former President Donald Trump personally, not proof of their strategic brilliance.

And so, Democrats misread the tea leaves. Biden was elected to do two things: be Not Trump and restore a sense of moderation and stability to the White House. He has succeeded in the first, mainly because nobody is Trump. He has utterly failed in the second. That’s because Biden rejected the central premise of his own candidacy, calling for more social spending than any president in history, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban for no apparent geostrategic reason, embracing the radical language of anti-racist activists, cramming down the restrictive COVID-19 policies via the administrative state and characterizing his opponents as bigots and Jan. 6-adjacent domestic terrorists. Biden Mini-Me’s like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia have imitated the strategy.

The result, predictably, was disaster — not just in Virginia, but across the country. In Virginia, a state Biden won by 10 points, McAuliffe went down in flames, a black female Republican became lieutenant governor, a Cuban American became attorney general, and the GOP took the House of Delegates; in New Jersey, a no-name candidate ran