Where 2024 Went Wrong

The Daily Escape:

If you’re planning on being a part of the resistance, you need to start from having a few ideas about what went wrong and why in 2024.

Plenty of people have ideas about what we should be doing next. Rachael Bitecofer’s latest “Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party’s Brand” raises a great concern expressed by many Democrats, that the Party no longer identifies with the working class, and the working class isn’t who it used to be. It’s much bigger and much more diverse.

Bitecofer’s big idea is that the culture wars were the prime driver of the 2024 election. The culture wars were created after the era of Individual Freedom that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. The Democratic Party had morphed into an alliance, merging a Party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other civil rights activists forced the Democratic Party to choose: Either preserve their large coalition or end segregation. After the assassination of JFK, LBJ sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. In doing so, this set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party a few decades later.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and they took them. Meanwhile, the Democrats began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans. And the today’s 270 Electoral College map dominated by the handful of swing states became the norm for success in American presidential elections.

From Bitecofer:

“In building their new multi-racial coalition Democrats…turned to something called identity politics. Identity politics is…based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class….as the new Democratic Party became a multi-racial coalition hyper-focused on gaining civil rights for marginalized groups…”

This chart represents the outcome of Democrats following a microtargeting strategy for the past 30+ years:

This one graph tells us exactly why Democrats lost. First and foremost, it tells us that the Democratic Party is a brand “that stands up for marginalized groups.”

Let’s focus on the time window on the graph. As you can see, the Democrats used to have a massive advantage with the working class which began to erode around the time of the Reagan Revolution and round two of Nixon’s Southern strategy. Please keep in mind, the erosion also corresponds with the diversification of America both in terms of ethnicity and gender and reflects in part the backlash to civil rights.

From Bitecofer about the working class:

“Donald Trump just accomplished the same thing by focusing most of his ads on scary trans people and the data don’t lie, millions of ads repeating the sex changes for prisoners broke through.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Now, that’s a great brand to have if you’re…an ideological liberal who cares deeply about the rights of the powerless!! The issue is just about a quarter of the electorate is liberal and psychologically predisposed to care about marginalized groups. The rest of the electorate doesn’t get the warm fuzzies we get from marginalized groups, because most humans are hardwired to prefer in groups over out groups and Republican strategists have exploited this expertly.”

Bitecofer argues that what matters for marginalized groups is policy, and that policy only comes from power. The way to represent marginalized groups is by wielding the power to represent them in majorities, not by identity politics in campaigns.

Bitecofer’s central point is that working class voters no longer primarily vote on economics. They did at one time, but those days were done as soon as cultural issues emerged and segregation was ended by the federal government. Here’s how the working class has grown and diversified over the last few decades:

Can the GOP, a Party financed by industry and bankers, permanently “represent the working class”? Maybe so, if the GOP can keep them distracted enough from the economic warfare they are conducting against them by leveraging grievance politics as a backlash to the Dem’s identity politics strategy.

Bitecofer closes with this:

“If we are lucky enough to get another election in this country, the messaging must focus on telling America the story of what happened to all their money, their rural communities, their paychecks, and their health under Republican Party governance.”

A prime part of the coming resistance is to return the GOP Party back to being at war with working America.

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terence E mckenna

I disagree re the working class and Democrats in this way. Yes, Democrats do champion a host of outsiders and minorities. But there is nothing in this that takes unemployment benefits from workers, nor food stamps, nor makes healthcare more expensive.

What we have instead are basically uninterested and not too bright workers who have been convinced that allowing a serviceman to get a sex change operation impacts their lives.. but as far as I can see, there are only 2.

And even re DEI (which is annoying to me) .. in fact efforts to open up area to all that were one the preserve of the upper middle class – like gymnastics for example, has led to the USA having a superior gymnastics team.

But with so many interests in the Democratic Party, it is easy to find one and to exploit it to voters who I keep thinking of as angry and stupid. (Yes, stupid).

Let’s look at a real world issue – in NYC the jails were full of poor men awaiting trial. in one shameful example, the supposed perpetrator was released because the time served was already equal to what he would have served had he been convicted. Sadly this young man’s life was ruined and he committed suicide.

So NYC (and NJ by the way ) passed bail reform. well in the real world we are learning that the law needs tweaks. But… the right has been able to portray bail reform as a too liberal move.

So the GOP which destroyed unions and spent a sound treasury into debt (in Iraq) someone gets to win elections by exaggerating and lying.

David Price

Great perspectives!
That said, I am humbled by how little I know. And by how surprised by the GOP sweep so many of us were. Most of my friends and family members are long-time solid Dems. Many gave money and/or footwork to the election efforts. All are both dismayed and shocked by the outcome. We libs appear to be more out of touch than we thought.
I have come to believe that simple answers are, at best, only simple. That is to say, they are partial and inadequate. Even the smartest pieces that I have read do not plumb the complexity of why and how Trump garnered so many votes and that he garnered them from all over the electoral map.
Humility, if not the central virtue, is surely an essential one. Discovering how little we understand of our neighbors could be the best take-home we can garner from this sad election.