Democrats appear confused about why President-elect Donald Trump won reelection in a landslide and moved 48 states to the right in the process.
The confusion will likely ignite Democrat infighting over the conclusion of their autopsy report. The far left will argue the party did not move far enough left, while the establishment Democrats will argue the far-left policies pushed failed to attract voters.The Democrat losses amounted to the biggest move to the right since Ronald Reagan won in 1980. “Democrats didn’t just lose badly,” Axios reported Friday. “They lost to a convicted felon they ridiculed as a racist, misogynistic fascist — and an existential threat to democracy.”
Some early data Democrats will examine in their autopsy include demographic shifts toward Trump, as Axios detailed:
- One in three voters of color voted for Trump.
- Trump increased his support with Hispanic voters by double digits compared to 2020.
- Trump carried Hispanic men by 10 points.
- Trump improved his support with voters ages 18-29 by 10+ points.
One takeaway for some on the radical-left side of the Democrat party is to blame Hispanic and black voters as misogynists. That theory was first pushed by MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough, who claimed Wednesday on Morning Joe that Harris’s loss was because a lot of black men and Hispanic men have “race issues” and “misogyny.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also endorsed the idea of misogyny as “very very real in this country”:
Misogyny is very very real in this country. As another widely known woman of color in office, you know, I knew that sexism and racism were real, but it was not until I got subjected to a national stage that I actually was shocked at how bad it is. You know, you grow up with it, but there is something about being on the receiving line or just nationally exposed to millions of eyeballs at once that you feel that fire hose and you actually understand how deeply ingrained it is.
A second theory suggests the loss had nothing to do with Trump and more to do with Democrats being victims of inflation.
Former President Obama, the most respected leader in the party, claimed the loss was due to the pandemic and soaring costs, but he did not fault the administration’s policies that facilitated inflation. Costs increased about 20 percent on average across the board after the Biden-Harris administration took power. Harris was a deciding vote in the Senate on a spending measure that fueled inflation.
The “pandemic and price hikes … created headwinds for democratic incumbents around the world, and last night showed that America is not immune,” Obama wrote Wednesday, without faulting the administration’s policies.
Pod Save America podcast co-host Jon Favreau, who worked in the Obama administration, appeared to side with Obama’s assessment. “We don’t know exactly what the explanation is, but a lot of it is pointing to: you have an unpopular president because of inflation and she couldn’t overcome it.”
Jon Lovitt, a co-host with Favreau, agreed and said Trump’s landslide win had little to do with Trump. “This looks much less like for Trump than a vote against people’s frustrations with the current administration and current economic conditions — than it does of any kind of embrace of Trumpism or Trump remarking America, or any grand and sweeping conclusions that some would like to draw.”Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
