Finger-pointing vs. Soul-searching
What Makes People Vote For Democrats
The 2024 Presidential Election is over, and the usual suspects are divining what went wrong. The Democratic Party is blaming trans people, the progressive left, pro-Palestine activists, the white working class, Latino men, and insert-easy-to-blame-group here. They no doubt have been listening to the out of touch pundits on CNN and MSNBC tell them that they need to move further to the right. Those of us on the left who don’t have massive megaphones have been trying to be heard amongst all the noise, and we are all saying that the Democratic Party need look no further than a mirror to find the problem. What will it take to get them to listen to us for once?
The American people have been beyond frustrated with the ruling class for decades. That’s why they are attracted to candidates like Trump. He knows what they are upset about, and he says he’s going to fix it. It doesn’t matter that he is manipulating them, he is telling them what they want to hear. Meanwhile, Democrats have broken all their promises to their constituency and taken them for granted. The Democratic base feels betrayed. They see Democrats as hypocrites who make big promises about reigning in the 1% and putting more money in their pockets, but then they pal around with the very people who are destroying the future of American working class. According to Robert Reich, Democrats need to “remake the party into the party of the bottom 90 percent — the party of people who don’t live off stocks and bonds, of people who are not CEOs or billionaires.” He is right.
I had such high hopes for Kamala Harris, but she blew it. Of course, she had a steep hill to climb in such a short time, but she squandered the time she did have. Most people don’t care about how many celebrities you can get to perform at your rallies. They also don’t want to see you hanging out with the daughter of the guy who helped get us into one of the most expensive and disastrous wars in our history. What the American people want to know is simple, and what they want from their candidates is authenticity.
A Democratic candidate can do well if they can answer these questions without pivoting or changing the subject. What are you going to do to prevent our jobs from being taken over by robots or shipped overseas? How do you plan to address our growing problem with school shootings without violating the 2nd amendment? Will you work to eliminate imbalances with our trading partners and encourage investments in American made products? What are you going to do to keep us out of another war? How will you fix our broken education system? It’s that simple.
The next election we have coming up in Washington is the 2026 Midterm Election. We need more Bernies and less Schumers. I am not holding my breath. Still, if we can get the word out maybe some folks will get the message and run for office as 90-percenters. Let’s get to work.