Democrats Don’t Have an Easy Way Out

By Free Republic | Created at 2024-12-11 23:39:53 | Updated at 2024-12-12 02:43:18 3 hours ago

Democrats Don’t Have an Easy Way Out
The New York Times ^ | Dec. 11, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET | Thomas B. Edsall

Posted on 12/11/2024 3:36:51 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

The weakened condition of the Democratic Party leaves it ill-prepared to defend itself against a Republican Party determined to eviscerate liberalism and the left.

Evidence of the fraught state of the party can be found everywhere.

Pew Research asked Democrats and Republicans whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about the future of their party after the five presidential and midterm elections from 2016 to 2024. Republicans in 2024 were more optimistic, 86-13, than after any of the previous four contests, including Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. Among Democrats, optimism fell to 51 percent, while pessimism rose to 49 percent, well below the 61-38 for Democrats after the 2016 election.

Ken Martin, the chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and a leading candidate to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee, acknowledged this erosion of political clout in a memo to party leaders:

For the first time in modern history, the perception that Americans have of the two major political parties switched. The majority of Americans now believes that the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and that the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites. It’s a damning indictment on our party brand.

Polling suggests that Trump is ideologically closer to the median voter than Harris. Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, conducted a post-election survey asking voters to place themselves, Harris and Trump on a scale ranging from zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative). The mean response for Harris was 2.45, for Trump 7.78 and for all voters 5.63.

Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, voiced serious doubts by email about the ability of the...

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

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The weakened condition of the Democratic Party leaves it ill-prepared to defend itself against a Republican Party determined to eviscerate liberalism and the left.

They say that like it's a bad thing.

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