On the menu today: We spend a lot of time discussing the reasons Republicans feel nervous and pessimistic about the current primary, the state of the country and the culture, the 2024 elections, and the overall trajectory of the United States. This morning, let’s turn our attention to the Democrats, who on paper should be feeling terrific but don’t. Considering the road ahead, their anxieties are likely well founded.
Trouble in Utopia
At first glance, Democrats should feel like they’re on top of the world.
Former president Donald Trump will face at least two and perhaps four criminal trials and three civil trials before Election Day 2024. The Republican presidential primary is about to enter its demolition-derby stage, in which every non-Trump candidate will face attacks from four directions simultaneously: the front-runner Trump, the other GOP candidates, the Democrats, and the media. Despite a lot of coverage, polling consistently indicates that no more than one out of every five Democrats is interested in voting for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the upcoming primary. The end of Roe v. Wade turned abortion into one of the most consequential and hottest of hot-button issues at the state level. And there are signs that the economy is humming along — GDP was at 2.4 percent last quarter, and the declining GDP of early 2022 appears to be receding in the rearview mirror.
And yet, with an opposition party that always seems to be on the verge of self-destruction — and perhaps some state Republican parties are — many Democrats don’t feel all that triumphant. In fact, it’s quite the opposite — more than a few Democrats feel besieged and anxious. They have sense that their party and leaders are hanging on to their control of the country by their fingernails, and that they’re at risk of soon losing their grip and tumbling into a catastrophe:
- For all their advantages, Democrats don’t control the House of Representatives. Yes, it’s a small GOP majority, with 222 Republicans, 212 Democrats, and currently one impending vacancy in Utah’s second congressional district, where Republican Chris Stewart announced he will resign in mid September to focus on his wife’s health issues. (A special election will be held November 21; this is an R+11 district.) And yes, court-mandated restricting in at least five states — Alabama, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and Ohio — adds another X factor in the battle to win a House majority. But you could argue that redistricting saved Democrats from a worse outcome in 2022, as they won 47.8 percent of the overall votes in House elections and ended up with 48.9 percent of the seats.
- The Democrats have a 51–49 advantage in the U.S. Senate, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can never quite be sure if West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema will vote with the rest of the party, or be sure of the condition of California’s Dianne Feinstein or Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman.
- The U.S. Supreme Court is now likely to strike down or hamper all kinds of progressive policy priorities. Roe v. Wade is overturned; affirmative action at colleges and universities and Biden’s proposed student-debt amnesty are struck down.
And outside the political system, there are significant but hardly discussed signs of a cultural and political pendulum swinging back. Many conservatives believe that progressive forces calling for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — that define human beings entirely through their race, gender, or sexual orientation — are marching relentlessly though every institution in America, turning every human-resources department into a tool of ideological and political indoctrination. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in the past year, the DEI trend hit a metaphorical brick wall and is staggering backward.
Companies including Netflix, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity, and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial-justice commitments…
New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.
Ask yourself if you ever could have envisioned Anheuser-Busch making large-scale layoffs because of a lengthy, ongoing decline in sales driven in large part by the marketing department’s decision to send customized beer cans to Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender TikTok influencer, as part of a social-media ad campaign. It’s anyone’s guess as to how much other companies’ marketing departments or boards of directors are paying attention, and not every backlash against woke or provocative marketing will have the same effect. It’s a lot easier to change which light beer you drink than to change which banks and big-box stores you use, or to tell your kid that you won’t take them to the latest Disney or Pixar film. But all kinds of corporate executives — with fiduciary duties to keep their companies running and profitable in the long term — will look at proposed marketing efforts and ask, “Is this ad going to put us in a Bud Light situation?”
Speaking of Disney and Pixar films, think about what an advantage it is for Democrats and the cultural left to have Hollywood as an ally. Think about all the heavy-handed messaging you’ve seen in all kinds of movies, television shows, and streaming series. Think of the Oscar-bait movies in the fall depicting some heroic multiracial gay handicapped abortionist who wants to save the rainforests, and think of all the clichéd villains: Bible-thumbing hypocrites, violent and racist rednecks, evil and greedy CEOs, and so on.
Well, Hollywood isn’t making anything right now. Audiences won’t notice it for a while because of existing works in the pipeline, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, viewers will see a glut of unscripted reality shows and the lengthy absence of their scripted favorites. And a strike that was meant to prevent Hollywood studios from exploring how artificial intelligence could play a role in the creative process — and, along the way, eliminate jobs — may well be accelerating it, as Netflix and Disney are hiring for a lot of positions involving the development and application of artificial intelligence. The Hollywood Reporter characterizes it as “a hiring spree for AI jobs.” There’s little sign of this strike ending soon; earlier this month, a studio head said they didn’t expect any serious talks to begin until well into the fall. The studios sound like they’re patient and ready to play hardball. One executive says, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” This strike won’t be the end of Hollywood, but it will likely leave it changed and both sides embittered for a long time.
By spending so much time in offline and online echo chambers, Democrats perceive themselves to be more popular than they are and American society to be much more unified behind their agenda and worldview than it is. What’s more, Democrats have proven really bad at recognizing the long-term consequences of their actions. The clearest recent example was Democrats’ cheering Trump’s rise in the GOP primaries in 2016, only to find themselves living with the consequences of a Trump presidency for four years. And we may well be in for a rerun of that dynamic.
The Politico newsletter had this item yesterday:
THE ELECTABILITY INVERSE — Florida Gov. RON DeSANTIS’ recent campaign struggles have gotten so bad that many Biden allies and top Democrats now would prefer to face off against him rather than Trump, Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Tessa Stuart report. Sen. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-Pa.) thinks Trump is the only Republican who could win Pennsylvania, an aide says. “But underneath the liberal schadenfreude over DeSantis’ ongoing struggles during the primary is a sense of deep unease about the possibility of a 2016 redux.”
Fetterman himself may be a good demonstration of that shortsightedness. Democrats, assisted by many media sources who treated questions about Fetterman’s health as some sort of egregious attack upon America’s handicapped, managed to drag the nominee across the finish line in Pennsylvania’s Senate race last year. The Democrats won. . . . And now they have a senator who has great difficulty communicating and has missed 37 percent of roll-call votes so far this year. (This isn’t just because of his time spent at Walter Reed from February to April. Fetterman missed eight out of 40 votes in July.)
In the Washington Post today, Michael Scherer and Marianne LeVine report:
The secret slide deck started circulating in June, intended as a wake-up call to top Democrats in Congress, the White House and state capitals across the country about a dangerous flaw in the Democratic brand.
Based on six months of polling and focus groups, the document showed the party losing badly to Republicans on the most important single issue of voters: the economy. Voters said Democrats focused too much on “cultural and social issues” and not enough on pocketbook issues. The message of “economic fairness” was a loser compared with “growing the economy,” a regular GOP refrain.
(Ahem, this is further evidence that Republican presidential candidates ought to develop a full-spectrum message with particular focus on the economy, and not just “culture war, culture war, culture war.” Look, other people get paid a lot of money to advise campaigns on messaging and on what to emphasize in the candidate’s speeches, media appearances, and advertising. But I see a lot of messaging that seems to be courting a small, extremely online demographic of Republicans, while a lot of ordinary folks, from the Midwest to California, are wondering why their grocery bills are still so darn high when the inflation rate is supposedly improving.)
Democrats can chuckle at how unpopular Trump is, examining the FiveThirtyEight average of national polls and seeing him at 40.2 percent approval and 56.6 percent disapproval. Except . . . by the same measuring stick, Joe Biden is at 40.9 percent approval and 54.4 percent disapproval — not all that different. At least there’s Vice President Kamala Harris, who is at . . . er, 40.2 percent approval and 51.2 percent disapproval.
Finally, the past few weeks have demonstrated that Biden’s image is built on a platform that is developing serious wood rot. The image that helped the president win in 2020 was that he was America’s good old reliable kindly grandfather, taking out the grandkids for ice-cream cones.
Back in June 2022, a White House aide lamented to CNN the difficulty of what Biden had to communicate, and how that didn’t mesh easily with the image he had cultivated. “He has to speak to very serious things, and you can’t do that getting ice cream.” As I observed later that month, “If you can project your persona successfully only when the atmosphere around you is the breezy, carefree fun of an afternoon on summer vacation, you probably shouldn’t pursue the job of commander in chief.”
Well, right now, Biden’s son is looking like a tax-evading crook, and the president is denying the existence of one of his grandkids. You may or may not prefer the term Charlie Cooke used to describe Biden, but there is a gargantuan contradiction between Biden’s folksy, family-comes-first image and rhetoric and his callous insistence that an innocent four-year-old girl living in Arkansas does not count as one of his grandchildren.
And it’s all so unnecessary. The president could easily tell Hunter, “Son, that little girl is your child, and you have a responsibility to help raise her. We’re inviting her and her mother to Camp David or the Delaware beach house this weekend. You don’t get to just walk away from a commitment like that. Children are a blessing, even if they come into this world in difficult circumstances. Don’t punish that little girl for your disagreements with her mother.” But Biden hasn’t done that.
Anyway, Democrats genuinely believe that the fate of the country and of democracy itself rests on the shoulders of the 80-year-old Biden and his ability to maintain the public’s confidence in the next few years.
In that light, who wouldn’t be nervous?
ADDENDUM: Thanks to everyone who watched my appearance yesterday on Meet the Press Now. Speaking off the cuff, I referred to President Reagan’s hemorrhoids instead of the removal of several polyps from his colon. But you get the gist.