After being shocked by its losses and the GOP’s gains in the 2024 elections, you would think the Democratic Party might pull back from crazy left-wing proposals that were clearly rejected by voters. But a month after Election Day, it is evident the party has not learned its lesson.
The rapid left-wing shift of the Democratic Party culminated in the rejection of President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopular policies and candidacies by voters across the country and across demographics that previously supplied votes reliably for Democrats. Republicans won the White House and the Senate and held control of the House of Representatives. Trump won 46% of Hispanic people and made gains among black voters and women despite running against a black woman, which was Harris’s main selling point in her abysmal, identity-driven campaign.
Trump did this on the back of a campaign message focused on what voters cared about, particularly the economy, crime, and immigration. If you look at the Democratic Party’s policymakers and power players, you can see they are intent on embracing the same failed left-wing policies that have just tossed them from government into opposition.
This has been most obvious on the issue of immigration, where Democrats running states and cities promise they will make protecting illegal immigrants their number one priority and they will fight the Trump administration to keep illegal immigrants in the country regardless of their merits. Gov. Gavin Newsom (CA) vowed to “Trump-proof” California’s policies, including its sanctuary state status, while Attorney General (and potential successor to Newsom) Rob Bonta said he had been thinking about how to protect illegal immigrants for months.
What is it about being a Democrat that makes their lawmakers and law enforces so enamored of lawbreakers?
The statements of the officials mean even violent criminal illegal immigrants will be protected by California Democrats. Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez vowed, “We’re going to send a very clear message that the city of Los Angeles will not cooperate with ICE in any way.” The San Diego Board of Supervisors voted to become a “super sanctuary,” banning local police officers from alerting Immigration and Customs Enforcement when an illegal immigrant is arrested and charged with a crime unless they get warrants that would exempt those violent criminal illegal immigrants from sanctuary protections.
Similar promises have come from Democratic governors and attorneys general in New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, while Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) has had to warn Democratic cities in his state that he will withdraw their state funds if they adopt sanctuary policies.
Reaction to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Most was instructive. Normal people were revolted by the crime even while disliking the healthcare industry.
But prominent congressional Democrats, in their first major messaging after election losses, have argued that the shooter may have a point. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), two Democratic presidential candidates in the last open primary, blamed Thompson and the healthcare industry for the murder. Warren went so far as to describe the crime as “a warning to everyone in the healthcare system.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez justified the shooting because people who have healthcare claims denied view denial as “an act of violence against them,” effectively saying the shooting of Thompson was self-defense. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the most prominent gun control activist in Congress, dismissed the gun crimes of the shooter and instead lectured everyone about healthcare policy.
So, after an election decided largely by voters’ feelings about immigration and crime, And which brought big GOP wins in Hispanic border communities, and in which soft-on-crime Democrats lost in overwhelmingly Democratic cities, prominent Democrats have decided to protect illegal immigrants, even criminals, and downplay cold-blooded murder of people in industries that don’t conform to the Democratic agenda. (Never mind that Democrats were the ones who made the healthcare landscape worse in 2009 with the Affordable Care Act, which both Sanders and Murphy supported).
Democrats trajectory on Capitol Hill continues to be leftward toward what is unpopular and hysterical. House Democrats pushed Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) out as the top Democrat on the prestigious Judiciary Committee in favor of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). Raskin is one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers, trying to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election and suggesting before the 2024 presidential election that it could not be legitimate if Trump won.
Raskin believes every institution must be bent to the will of the Democratic Party, which is why he also wants it to dictate which Supreme Court justices may rule on cases, and to abolish the Electoral College because it has “become a danger.”
Democrats were similarly keen on pushing Instagram socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in charge of the prestigious House Oversight Committee to replace Raskin, with the Democrats on that committee backing her over Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA). It took former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rallying a chunk of the caucus for her ally Connolly (or, just as much, against her former adversary Ocasio-Cortez) for AOC to be blocked, and even then 84 House Democrats backed the celebrity socialist.
Meanwhile, three Senate Democrats are officially pushing to eliminate the Electoral College, which would be less notable if one of those three was not Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the second-ranking Democrat in the chamber behind Democratic Majority (soon to be Minority) Leader Chuck Schumer. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, governor of the second-biggest Democrat-run state, is also in full support of eliminating the Electoral College for its crime of not benefitting lazy Democratic campaigns that want to focus on running up vote totals in Democratic cities like New York City.
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Some Democrats have paid lip service to moderation since the elections. Hochul wants you to believe that she will definitely report criminal illegal immigrants to ICE, as long as they are really dangerous criminals. Newsom is trying to convince people that California is actually the model of government efficiency and eliminating wasteful spending, and that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is copying the Newsom model. But the more reasonable Democrats genuinely interested in moderating the party in some way, such as Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), are few and far between.
It would be difficult to say that Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from the 2024 elections, because it is clear they have learned no lessons at all. The party is still in the grip of the same power-hungry progressive politicians and activists who took minority voters for granted and prioritized the issues of upper-class liberals over working- and middle-class families, resulting in the seismic political and cultural shifts toward the GOP that we saw in November.