Lessons from the Election of the Century
Do Democrats Know Why They Almost Re-elected Donald Trump?
The election is over. Donald Trump lost but will not acknowledge that fact. The 45th president refuses to yield to the 46th. The President has retreated to the White House bunker as he schemes to cause more damage to our country, if that is possible.
The United States was never united and has been broken for a very long time. Egomaniacal members of both parties have so steadily chipped away at the foundation of our country that it finally collapsed under a demagogue named Donald Trump.
It is frightening to view the wreckage after a single election cycle, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Donald Trump did not damage this country by himself. He had a cadre of powerful enablers like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Bill Barr, and the 70 million people who voted for him, most of whom did so twice.
The Democrats are also responsible for his rise to power. The Democratic primary leading up to the 2016 election was shameless as Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her crew worked overtime to make sure the ever-entitled Hillary Clinton got the Democratic Party nomination. Other candidates who were more palatable to Democrats suffering from Clinton fatigue were unfairly hobbled which splintered the party and caused voters who may have felt disenfranchised to stay home.
Defeating Donald Trump should have been the focus of the D.N.C. but Hillary Clinton’s belief in her God-given right to the nomination got in the way. The Democrats lost because voters were tired of the Bill and Hillary show. Neither Clinton acknowledged it was time for them to exit the stage. Their tenure caused long-term damage to a party whose leaders seemed to be in the bag for Hillary, despite an unenthused Democratic electorate sick to death of the Clintons. Millions of demoralized Democrats chose not to vote at all, which greased the skids for Donald Trump’s glide into the White House.
Hillary and the Democrats could not overcome the negative baggage they brought to the table, and their mantra of “Vote for Hillary because she’s a woman and she’s not Donald Trump” was not a persuasive argument. All regular news coverage stopped, replaced with political entertainment shows covering the anomaly that was Donald Trump 24/7, granting him unprecedented TV exposure, literally free of charge. Covering Trump and his antics around the clock was a rating bonanza for the networks, and traffic increased exponentially on Facebook and Twitter. Fox News became state-TV and social media outlets became platforms for disinformation and conspiracy theories “straight outta Russia.” The country’s fall was surprisingly swift.
The Democrats’ traditional constituencies have been increasingly abandoning them at the polls for a reason. The claim that they took their voters for granted for years is a vast understatement. If the Democrats hope to win back their core voters, they better start speaking to those groups instead of at them. They continue to assume too much, like all blue-collar workers want the same things, and all Hispanic voters fit snugly into one monolithic group instead of being a diverse collection of many groups with distinct characteristics and needs.
They should also recognize that African American voters are sick of being ignored and sicker still of constant lip service from the Democrats. They want policies that address their important issues now. Action on their behalf is long overdue and after this last election, it is clear they can exercise their power by choosing to vote in blocks in key swing states, this time pushing Joe Biden over the top. In 2016, a good number of Black voters skipped the election and Hillary lost a very close race she could easily have won with more Black votes.
The Democrats should work overtime now to learn about the citizens whose votes they seek. There are midterm elections coming in two years, and in only a short four years, Donald Trump could rear his corrupt head again. There is no time to relax just because Joe Biden won.
Each political party exists in its respective silo and it is necessary to emerge from those silos to take the pulse of the people living and working in this country. The Democrats are tone-deaf and the Republicans are so drunk with power they have lost sight of what is good for the country they are supposed to be serving. All are either millionaires or billionaires, far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans. That vast economic divide is real but both parties refuse to see the stark contrast in the ultra-privileged lives they lead set against a sea of low-income voters with nearly no net worth.
Democrats can’t seem to figure out why poor and middle-class people identify with a billionaire like Donald Trump. Democratic party leaders see themselves as representing the people at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. Those on the lower rungs constitute the majority of voters in the United States. Democrat Party leaders run campaigns demonizing the “one percent” while many of those Democratic candidates and incumbents occupy that uber-high income bracket. They do not live the life they preach about and do not suffer the injustices of being poor in America. Voters increasingly see the hypocrisy of their message.
Donald Trump threw his wealth in voters' faces and openly bragged about his opulent lifestyle. He traveled in private planes and limousines, yet his message resonated with people who drive a Ford Fiesta and sit in the coach section of the plane. Millions of people without an ounce of wealth voted for Trump twice and one of the biggest reasons they gave was “because he is honest.” Trump has probably lied more than anyone on Earth, but he is still perceived as a truth-teller by millions.
In 2014, Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Trump’s nemesis, said she does not fundamentally care about money and that money is not the metric of success. This from a prominent Democrat and Trump critic who purchased a $10.5 million co-op in the Gramacy Park neighborhood of NYC, occupying an entire floor of the historic Whitman Building. It is easy to claim you couldn’t care less about money when you have access to so much of it.
When they bought the co-op, her husband was unemployed and she worked at her parents’ non-profit foundation, a position created just for her. When Hillary was asked why she took a $200,000 speaking fee from a Wall Street firm for just one hour of her time, she answered, “That’s what they were offering.” Chelsea and Hillary are modern-day Democrats who love to talk the talk but hate to walk the walk. The Clintons do not have a clue about the daily struggles in the lives of average or poor people. Their economic sensibilities are more in line with the ultra-rich Trumps than any blue-collar worker.
The kind of epic dissonance so clear in the Clintons and many other Democrats is what causes voters to distrust everything they say. Instead, voters cling to charlatans like Donald Trump who tell them what they want to hear. For many who voted, or more importantly, who decided not to vote in 2016, they saw little difference in a vote for bombastic Trump or the ever-entitled Hillary Clinton, though there should have been a clearly discernible difference between the two.
Both are selfish, self-centered millionaires who cannot see past their own enormous egos. The voting public may have decided the Democratic Party leaders were more interested in looking out for themselves instead of addressing the needs of the average voter. With politicians from both sides of the aisle primarily concerned about their own political careers and pocketbooks, they left the voters with two bad choices. The country lost its identity because so many of our leaders didn’t care about anything but keeping power or grabbing power.
The Clintons and Democrats like them gave rise to Donald Trump and it has been a disaster for our country. Thankfully, Joe Biden is now the President-elect and received more votes than anyone in the history of our country, but the person who received the second-largest number of votes since the first election in 1788 is none other than Donald J. Trump. We are not out of the woods yet.
