House Democrats are asking themselves one question after Tuesday’s election stunner: What the hell happened?
In the House, bleary-eyed Democrats were still sorting out the wreckage when they awoke Wednesday with dozens of their members’ races still uncalled and not a single GOP incumbent ousted — an outcome that virtually no one in the party had predicted in a year in which Democrats were going on the offense deep in Trump country.
Even with tens of thousands of ballots still to be counted, shell-shocked Democratic lawmakers, strategists and aides privately began trying to pin the blame: The unreliable polls. The GOP’s law-and-order message amid a summer of unrest. The “hidden Trump voters.” The impeachment hangover. The lack of a coronavirus stimulus deal.
Woke Workplace
The Power Of The White Wing-Wang
The Left, desperate to explain Tuesday's results without abandoning its Narrative, resorts to crazy theories
I’m hearing this morning that control of the US Senate is not the fait accompli that I had thought — that it’s going to come down to the January runoff in Georgia. I hope that’s wrong. I dearly hope that’s wrong.
Meanwhile, Politico reports that the House Democrats are turning on each other with recriminations:
Some corners of the party were also beginning to question the message and tactics at the top, with several Democrats predicting — and some even demanding — a significant overhaul within the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, including possibly even ousting chairwoman Cheri Bustos, whose Illinois race has yet to be called.
Just 24 hours earlier, Democrats including Bustos and Speaker Nancy Pelosi were boasting about the opportunity to expand their majority, with some even predicting they could win as many as a dozen seats in the House by clawing back GOP territory in the suburbs of Texas, Ohio and Illinois.
But by Wednesday morning, party officials and the rank and file were in panic mode as they awaited the results of nearly 20 members of the Democrats’ historic freshman class that handed the party control of the House just two years ago. And already they were saying goodbye to at least a half-dozen of their centrist Democratic colleagues, who were stunned by GOP challengers on Tuesday, including Abby Finkenauer in Iowa and Donna Shalala in Florida.
I suppose we will need to see exit polling to know for sure what happened, but my guess is that the Black Lives Matter rioting and looting played a role. I want to be careful and not engage in confirmation bias, but I’m thinking this morning about Omar Wasow’s academic research looking at the 1960s, and finding that when protests are peaceful, they help Democrats, but when they are violent, Republicans benefit. Simply pointing to this is what got prominent Democratic data guru David Shor thrown out of Progessphiles, the e-mail list of his profession. It was theorized by Shor’s persecutors that anything that spoke ill of the holy riots was a racist aggression, because it devalued the act. Well, my instinct tells me that the results on Tuesday vindicated Shor.
The fact is, the Democratic Party is the party of Black Lives Matter — and not just the good parts. People get this. Saving the all-holy Narrative is going to be the prime directive for the Left now. Here is Charles Blow, a black and bisexual New York Times columnist, soiling himself in public with a hysterical claim that the fact that Trump drove minority turnout for Republicans to a height not seen since 1960 is evidence that white male supremacy is even more powerful than we thought:
After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show.
Let me be specific and explicit here: White people — both men and women — were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump, according to exit polls. To be exact, nearly three out of every five white voters in America are Trump voters.
It is so unsettling to consider that many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, white people are monsters. We get it. This is the New York Times. More:
But, that’s only part of what was shocking to me about the exit polls.
Turns out that blacks and gays voted for Trump in surprising numbers. Naturally they cannot have moral agency if they choose wrongly. It must mean that they were hypnotized by the Power of the White Wing-Wang. Blow:
All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it. It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race. Trump’s brash, privileged chest trumping and alpha-male dismissiveness and in-your-face rudeness are aspirational to some men and appealing to some women. Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.
Does The New York Times, which pays cash money for garbage takes like that, ever wonder why it doesn’t understand this country? As absurd as that diagnosis is — and keep in mind that the NYT would not publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton that reflected the views of half the country on the use of troops against rioters, but it publishes this — I’m telling you that this will be how the progressive elites process the meaning of the vote. They are going to be as reactionary as any 19th century Catholic pope to defend what they consider to be revealed truth. Anybody who thought that the election results would strike a blow against Wokeism in their own workplace, and gain for them space to breathe, is going to be disappointed. It’s going to get worse in the short term before it gets better, because this religious vision dies hard.
James Lindsay, one of the most incisive diagnosers of Wokeness (you must follow him on Twitter if you don’t already), reminds us:
Anybody know how the segregated “listening sessions” at SUNY Buffalo went yesterday?
I’m telling you, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Now is the time to gear up for the fight.
Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.