(LifeSiteNews) – Some Democrats have begun to acknowledge that catering to the social agenda of their left-wing base has handicapped the party electorally, but they have yet to take significant steps toward change.
Writing for Time magazine, Charlotte Alter interviewed various Democrats on and off the record for their thoughts on where the party stands after losing to President Donald Trump and the Republicans last November. Despite being lulled into “dangerous complacency” by their ouster of Trump in 2020 and Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms, last fall “(t)hey lost the House and the Senate. Their support sagged with almost every demographic cohort except Black women and college-educated voters. Only 35% of Democrats are optimistic about the future of the party, according to a May 14 AP poll, down from nearly 6 in 10 last July. Democrats have no mojo, no power, and no unifying leader to look to for a fresh start.”
Overall, Alter lamented that the Democrats she spoke with “kept presenting cliches as insights and old ideas as new ideas. Everybody said the same things; nobody seemed to be really saying anything at all.” However, several acknowledged a “need to build a bigger tent. Many moderate Democrats want to sideline the activist groups that pressured elected officials to take unpopular positions. Even many progressives are retreating from the purity politics that reigned in the Trump era.”
“I bear some responsibility for where we are today,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut confessed. “I spent a long time trying to make the issue of guns a litmus test for the Democratic Party. I think that all of the interest groups that ended up trying to apply a litmus test for their issue ended up making our coalition a lot smaller.”
“I’ve heard some folks say, ‘It’s not our policies, we just have to communicate better,’” U.S. Senate candidate Angie Craig of Minnesota said. “It actually is our policies that swing-state voters aren’t with us on. For those colleagues who were calling to defund the police: our voters are not with you on that.”
“We swung the pendulum too far to the left,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York admitted. “We have become more responsive to interest groups than to people on the ground.”
Another Democrat officeholder who chose to remain anonymous even admitted to there being “some sports where trans girls shouldn’t be playing against biological girls,” but his party is “afraid of the blowback that comes from a very small community.” Another suggested (off the record) moderating on abortion: “Refusing to say that even in the third trimester there’s no limits on it, it’s not where the average American is. The really embarrassing truth is Donald Trump is closer to the median voting on abortion than Democrats were.”
Alter cited internal Democrat polling that almost 70% of voters in battleground districts consider the Democrat Party “too focused on being politically correct,” and “more focused on helping other people than people like me.”
In March, a SSRS poll commissioned by CNN found that just 29% of Americans have a favorable view of Democrats, and only 27% of respondents to a new NBC News poll had a favorable view of Democrats. Both findings were driven largely by discontent from within the party.
Part of the reason is the agenda that has come to define Democrats is firmly out of step with the general electorate, as affirmed by numerous recent polls and election results. Sixty-six percent of Americans oppose taxpayer funding for gender transitions, according to an April Cygnal poll, and Pew Research finds that 66% support limiting athletic participation to actual members of a team’s designated sex, 56% support prohibiting transition procedures on minors, and 53% oppose forcing insurance companies to cover transition services.
In fact, exit polling by the pro-Democrat firm Blueprint found that the statement “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the third-biggest reason for why overall voters chose not to vote for her, and the number one reason why swing voters rejected her and voted for Trump instead last November.
During a recent interview, however, Democratic National Committee vice chair David Hogg gave lip service to Democrats needing to do a better job of not making young male voters “ feel like they have to walk on eggshells around constantly because they’re going to be judged or ostracized or excommunicated,” but suggested that means the party needs to enable young people to “focus on what young people should be focused on, which is how to get laid and how to go and have fun” – an ethos that is already embodied by the party’s focus on birth control and abortion on demand.
