A recent poll found that 32% of Democrats thought that the 2020 was not won fairly. I’m not presently a fan of polls but this is not the result I’d expect given my concerns. I’d expect a much lower number as weighting should drive it down – so this could be an underestimate of how many Democrats think their party cheated.
It could also be a statistical anomaly so we shouldn’t draw the conclusion that there are definitely large numbers of Democrat faithful who hold this view. What we can say is that it’s an indication that the Democrat rank and file is not in line with the Democrat leadership. The reason we can be somewhat confident that this may be true is that it’s not the only such indication.
As much as the legacy media would like to bury the story, there are mass protests against vaccine mandates around the country. These are not likely to just be conservatives with their panties in a wad – they aren’t occurring where conservatives are strongest. These are appear to be local pushbacks – and in heavily Democrat areas.
That could be because the areas where Biden’s press conference edict – that he hasn’t issued an executive order on as of this writing – is being implemented are mostly urban. That makes sense – those are the places where large companies headquarter and large companies are the ones jumping on this bandwagon. Urban areas are also heavily Democrat and correlation isn’t causation.
Thing is, these aren’t tiny protests that might just be the few conservatives in the area. They are fairly large – and that means the locals are involved since outside groups that frequently do that kind of mobilization are definitely leftist at present. The locals are going to be made up primarily of Democrats and Democrat leaning moderates – even if all the conservatives joined in, the numbers are usually too large to just be the conservatives.
But there’s more – union members, sans their unions, are starting to take action. Southwest either has magical weather problems that only affect their planes or they had a massive sick out over the weekend. Unions have heavily backed Democrats for decades but they cannot afford the wrath of their membership. The unions are in between the Scylla and the Charybdis – they need the power of the Democrat party to support them and they need their membership to exist. Unions want both sides happy which is a tad difficult since the Democrat Party declared war on the middle class and that includes almost all union members.
Yes, Big Tech has been playing mind games – and if we’re honest, Google is probably more responsible for the information divide than the legacy media is. But lies only get you so far and eventually, the truth comes out. As that starts to happen – like the revelations about the origins of C19 – people start to question what they have been told. That’s when they start seeking other sources of information.
This gets us to the reason that smart politicians don’t want faked polls. Sure, you can use them as weapons in both policy and elections but eventually, the corruption affects the polls themselves. This is especially true if you do manage to rig an election using misinformation and falsified polls because the elections are used to correct for the defects all modern micropolls have – they are too dang small to be reliable and must be weighted. But if the elections are mucked up then the ‘corrections’ are making the polls worse, not better.
And those are the same polls that election strategy and political strategy are based upon. It’s basically what we saw early on with the Democrats thinking that Twitter was representative when it was in fact left of center by a wide margin. They acted believing that they had far more support than they did – coupled with a number of other mistakes, they ended up losing to Trump in 2016.
Now, the hardcore, Democrat or die, base does in fact still support the party. These are not all crazed leftists – some are the modern equivalent of the old Yellow Dog Democrats. Some are moderates that can’t see themselves ever leaving the party and a lot are True Believers(TM) who simply can’t accept the idea of not being a Democrat.
But the question is, are they the majority of rank and file Democrats? Probably not even the base is that solid anymore but the base is always the minority of a party’s supporters. So what about the rank in file who aren’t ‘blue no matter who’ – or aren’t anymore? That’s probably where the splintering is occurring in the Democrat party. These are largely folks who still don’t trust the Republicans (which aligns them with a part of the Republican base, ironically enough) but are not happy with what their party has been doing. These are the folks the Democrat leadership needs to win back – and now.
But the leadership is disconnected and disoriented. Twitter isn’t the real world and the polls are not representing real voters anymore – which is a BIG problem for elitists who are divorced from their base. The Democrat leadership literally doesn’t know who they need to court – they spend thirty years cramming random, conflicting groups into their ‘big tent’ and have no idea what to do as those groups start pulling apart – and may have no way to find out.
Fringe issues play well to Twitter and Hollywood – they fall flat on Mainstreet. But Twitter and Hollywood combined are only a tiny fraction of the voting population. To win elections, you need Mainstreet – those are the middle class and upper lower class folks who have jobs, start businesses, and build their local communities. They come in all shapes, sizes and colors – Mainstreet isn’t a white enclave like the progressive Democrats think. Mainstreet moved on from the worst of 1950’s a long time ago – and so have many of the people the Democrats claim to represent. Forty-one percent of Blacks have entered the middle class and Hispanics are also taking their place on Mainstreet. What’s killing the Democrats right now is their leadership’s failure to notice that their base has moved on.
It took nearly thirty years for the South to fully abandon the Democrats – party inertia is hard to overcome. It’s less about loving the comfy old party and more about not wanting to be one of ‘Them’, but what we’re seeing now is probably a break in that inertia. So even knowing that they need to court their actual base may not save the current Democrat leadership.
They could follow the Republicans who are systematically replacing their outdated leadership. But that’s a risky move – they’d like to see if the Republicans even succeed first. The Republicans are flat out in better position to do this – and they are being forced into it anyway. The Democrats are in a precarious position between an insane but influential wing of the party that has been allowed far too much leeway to be reined in now and an increasingly disgruntled base. That the Democrats even entertained, let alone tried to enact, a policy that attacks the union membership, is convincing proof that the leadership is not only out of touch, it’s lost the whole plot.
The Democrat leadership was late to the Civil Rights party – which they didn’t really want to attend anyway. But they did see the merit in using Civil Rights as a political weapon and they have used it as an effective cudgel for decades now. Maybe that’s why they are so reticent to give it up that they invent conflicts and try to stir up racial strife. Or maybe they just no longer know how to run a political party – do you offer two chickens in every pot or free sex change operations? They are playing to the fringe and are so fixated on it that they have begun attacking their own base.
That’s the sign of a party in turmoil. That they are currently headed by a man with actual dementia is the sign of a party in its death throes.
