Outgoing Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Jaime Harrison believes “identity politics” should remain the Democrat party’s core messaging theme moving forward.
Harrison’s suggestion comes as the party is grappling with why President-elect Donald Trump won reelection in a landslide. Democrats have floated many theories. Some of the theories are here, such as suggesting black and Hispanic voters voted for Trump because they are misogynist.Identity politics is the tendency to view the individual as only a part of a monolithic group within the primary boundaries of race and sex. This perception ignores an individual’s preferences, decisions, and agency. In short, identity politics produces victimhood.
During the 2024 cycle, for example, the Democrat party widely pandered to black men. The Harris campaign offered the specific demographic loan guarantees that were not specifically slated for white women.
Even though Trump gained support among those Democrats considered within their intersectional coalition, Harrison does not appear to understand that pandering to a specific group – instead of all Americans – may have played a significant role in the party’s election failures.The Associated Press reported on Harrison defense of identity politics:People of color need to see Democrats fighting for them, and that “cannot be the excuse for why we win or lose,” Harrison said in a passionate speech to state Democratic chairs meeting in Arizona.
“When I wake up in the morning, when I look in the mirror, when I step out the door, I can’t rub this off,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face. “This is who I am. This is how the world perceives me.”
“That is my identity,” he continued. “And it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.”
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 on Morning Joe that Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss was because many black 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 Lovett, 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 remaking 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.
