If you’re wondering if the Democrats learned the lesson of their disastrous shellacking in Virginia, the answer seems to be a resounding no.
Look no further than White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s attempt to explain away Vice President Kamala Harris’ tanking approval ratings.
‘She is the first African American woman, woman of color, Indian American woman to serve in this job. Woman. I mean, so many firsts, right?’ Psaki said on Wednesday. ‘I do think there have been some attacks that are beyond because of her identity.’
Right?
Earlier this month, Republican newbie Glenn Youngkin ran away with the governorship of a state that voted for Joe Biden by 10 points, tearing what was assumed to be an assured victory from the hands of a former governor and mainstay of the Democratic Party, Terry McAuliffe.
If you’re wondering if the Democrats learned the lesson of their disastrous shellacking in Virginia, the answer seems to be a resounding no. Look no further than White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s attempt to explain away Vice President Kamala Harris’ tanking approval ratings.
Many in the media and the Democratic party blamed outright racism.
‘This is about the fact that a good chunk of voters out there are OK with White supremacy. Let’s call a thing a thing,’ said MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross. ‘Actually, scratch that. They are more than OK.’
But that wasn’t it and Democrats need to learn this lesson.
So, how did Youngkin really do it?
Education got a lot of media attention in the run up to the election; a quarter of voters named schools as their primary reason for turning out. But the most important issue was the economy.
Inflation is at a historic 6 percent; it’s doubled gas prices and shot the grocery bills of American families into the stratospheric triple digits, and many middle- and working-class families are reeling from the rapid dwindling of their bank accounts.
Voters for both candidates named the economy as a top priority, but Youngkin won a resounding victory with those who are struggling; he got the votes of three quarters of Virginians who think the economy isn’t doing well.
Republican newbie Glenn Youngkin (right) ran away with the governorship of a state that voted for Joe Biden by 10 points, tearing what was assumed to be an assured victory from the hands of a former governor and mainstay of the Democratic Party, Terry McAuliffe (left)
Youngkin ran away with fully 76 percent of white Americans without a college degree—a good proxy for who the economy is failing—as well as between 40 and 50 percent of Latino voters and even 14 percent of Black women, a historic number for a Republican.
In other words, the Virginia election at the end of the day was about class. It was about the class of people who the COVID economy has hurt and keeps hurting—working class Americans, small business owners, essential workers, and the downwardly mobile middle class.
These Americans, even those with liberal values, have started to see the Democratic Party as out of touch, no longer the party of the people but the party of the winners, of those whose bank accounts the COVID economy has swollen, whose homes are worth more and who have been able to borrow money at ridiculously low rates and invest, those working from home and saving money on commuting costs and dinners out, who couldn’t travel for two years and now have cash on hand.
Even the question of education in Virginia was one of class. Of course, it was framed as a question of race by McAuliffe and his supporters in the party and the pundit class—as bigoted white voters not wanting the history of American race relations taught to their children. But the truth is more complex.
It was poor and working-class public school parents who were most impacted by the endless school closures of the pandemic, who couldn’t afford the private schools that opened much sooner and who had the most incentive to vote for anyone promising to open the schools and give parents a say.
And even the much-ballyhooed debate about critical race theory is not really about race. It’s not about whether some esoteric Harvard Law School curriculum is or isn’t being taught to children; it’s about whether one has the right to be proud to be American, whether America is defined by its best or worst traits, and which version we are passing on to the next generation.
This, too, is a proxy for class. As Ryan Grim artfully explained at The Intercept, ‘for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party.’ As one woman put it, ‘Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.’
The Democrats lost Virginia because they abandoned the kitchen table issues the middle- and working-class Americans vote on—their economic interests and their right to be proud, patriotic Americans. They abandoned these issues along with working-class voters to lean into the wealthy suburbs under the guise of fighting racism. And when they lost, they smeared Youngkin’s voters as white supremacists.
The wealthy suburbs and a moral panic about race go hand in hand: It is affluent white elites who have assumed a woke worldview that casts all opposition to their policy preferences as racist.
The woke worldview of America as an unrepentant white supremacist state in which racism is the cause for every episode that falls afoul of the progressive agenda was cooked up in academia and spread through our highly educated journalist caste. Given its prevalence in national liberal news outlets, it may seem like this is the viewpoint of half the nation. But it’s actually representative of a tiny, very white, highly-educated minority.
Even the much-ballyhooed debate about critical race theory is not really about race. It’s about whether one has the right to be proud to be American, whether America is defined by its best or worst traits, and which version we are passing on to the next generation.
A recent Pew Research Center study made this clear when it found that just 6 percent of Americans identify as progressives, and just 6 percent of Black Americans; indeed, progressives are the whitest of the subgroups that make up the Democratic coalition.
And it’s these progressives–these 6 percent—who have the most woke views on race, for example, the view that ‘most U.S. laws and major institutions need to be completely rebuilt because they are fundamentally biased against some racial and ethnic groups.’
In other words, wokeness is a smokescreen for class. And until the Democrats can find a way to signal to voters that they are not catering to this highly-educated 6 percent but are wise to the real struggles of everyday Americans—of all races—they will continue paving the way for a mass exodus of middle- and working-class Americans—of all races—to the Republican Party.
Recent events suggest that the lesson has not been learned. Reports about dysfunction in Vice President Kamala Harris’s office were met with woke misdirection. Cable news pundits and the White House press secretary rushed to blame sexism and racism for criticism of the VP.
Meanwhile, in response to a question about the economy, Psaki accused Republicans of ‘rooting for inflation’ while insisting that no economists were predicting a rise in inflation.
On the day that it was announced that 100,000 Americans had died of drug overdoses last year, the Democrats spent hours on the House floor making lengthy speeches about a vile Twitter post that had already been deleted.
It’s just more of the same: Gaslight Americans about the impact of the economy on their pocketbooks while doubling down on what a new college-educated suburban base—which isn’t really feeling inflation at all—is looking for: an obsession with race and identity through a woke lens.
It’s not just Psaki: Every time you turn on your TV, there are the Democrats putting on woke theatrics instead of catering to the economic and social issues keeping Americans up at night.
On the day that it was announced that 100,000 Americans had died of drug overdoses last year, the Democrats spent hours on the House floor making lengthy speeches about a vile Twitter post that had already been deleted.
The post, which depicted a cartoon version of progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden being killed by Republican congressman Paul Gosar, deserved to be condemned.
But where was the outrage over the fentanyl massacring downwardly mobile, hopeless Americans committing suicide out of despair? Where is the outrage for the fact that the price of gas has doubled?
The only mention inflation got from Democrats on the House floor on Wednesday seemed to be AOC’s dismissal of Republicans for trying to distract from the real story: the Twitter post about her.
‘It is a sad day in which a member who leads a political party in the United States of America cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of congress is wrong and instead decides to venture off into a tangent about gas prices and inflation,’ Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez declared.
Meanwhile, the President’s Build Back Better Act, lauded as a pathway to ‘racial equity’ and even ‘tree equity,’ contains a huge bailout for millionaires and billionaires—the second most expensive ticket item in the bill.
Democrats and their defenders often respond to criticism of wokeness as out of touch and a betrayal of working-class Americans by casting critics as ‘conservative’ or ‘old,’ as AOC herself put it. But to suggest that it’s conservative to care about class—about America’s abandoned middle and working classes, of all races—is to cede the most important issues, the issues that Democrats used to care about, to Republicans.
It’s to admit that the Democratic Party is a party for elites. That would be a huge mistake, an admission of utter defeat. There’s still time to turn it around before 2022, if only there is the will to do so.