Democrats in Disarray

The blue party is drowning in red ink, in the latest sign of the Democrats’ disarray. The party’s chief fund-raising body is losing big donors, press reports say, and money is so short that leaders are weighing a loan “just to keep the lights on,” as the New York Post puts it. The financial debacle suggests the difficulty Democrats face in responding to the juggernaut of the Trump presidency as the party faces internal roadblocks to moving back to the center. “Bleak” is how the Times characterizes the party’s plight. The finance chief of Vice President Harris’s campaign, Rufus Gifford, says squabbling among top party officials is dismaying the party’s donors — and voters. While they are looking for “fight and leadership,” Mr. Gifford says, “what they are seeing is headline after headline of incompetence and infighting.” The Post reports party insiders lamenting that there is “no clear path or plan.”The Democratic National Committee’s “war chest,” per the Post, stands at less than $18 million — about a quarter of what’s on hand at GOP headquarters. Intramural quarreling is part of what ails the party. The DNC just devoted weeks to deposing one of its vice chairmen, David Hogg, after his effort to shake up the party’s agenda ruffled feathers. “This is worse than some high school student council drama,” says Congressman Mark Pocan.More broadly, though, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the problem facing the Democrats is a refusal to chart a more centrist course after several years of tilting leftward. In contrast with the Trump-era Republican party, which has moved to the populist right in response to the political views of the party’s own voters, the Democrats appear to be in the grip of elite activists who are pushing the party further to the left than its voters necessarily want to go. Analysts suggest this disconnect between the party’s elites and its base are caused in part by the power of what’s known as “the Groups,” as columnist Michael Barone puts it. That’s a shorthand for the collection of far-left activist groups and nonprofits who take up much of the oxygen in Democratic policy debates. Yet the Times’ Ezra Klein reports that these Groups “don’t really represent the people they presume to speak for.” Mr. Klein allows as how liberal Hispanic Groups, say, call for open border policies, yet “Hispanic voters don’t.” He adds that “Black Groups wanted to ‘defund the police.’ Black voters don’t.” The setback that the Supreme Court just handed transgender activists on the question of whether minors should get medical treatments to change their sex is another reminder of how Groups have pushed the party toward policies that are doubted by the majority of voters.Our Larry Kudlow points to this discrepancy when he notes the current state of the Democrats depicts a “sad tale.” He explains that “on all these 80-20 issues,” like “closing the border, deporting criminals, law and order and crime, biological males in women’s sports, denuclearizing Iran, antisemitism and DEI at the elite colleges,” it’s “astonishing” that “Democrats line up at the short end of the stick, every time.”Victor Davis Hanson, too, marvels in our pages that while “the Trump counterrevolution barrels ahead,” the “Democrats keep barking at the moon.” He points to Senator Padilla’s counterproductive outburst during a press conference by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, as but the latest instance in which “Democrats throw temper tantrums to howl nihilistically at everything Mr. Trump says and does.”The head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, recently stepped down from the DNC, warning that the party was “not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities.” In short, the party needs to heed its own voters and tack to the center — and fast. It’s not our aim here to offer unsolicited advice, but it would seem that the prescription for the Democrats is more of democracy itself.

Democrats in Disarray

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