The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
It shouldn’t have been hard for Kamala Harris. Not against the absurdly toxic politics of Donald Trump. An older Democratic Party, less beholden to the big megaphones on the fringes, would have had an easier time of it.
Harris did her best to move her politics to the center, but she was weighed down by those left-wing purity tests she felt obligated to pass four years earlier. Suggesting that illegally crossing the border might not be a crime haunted her in 2024.
Joe Biden tragically came around late to the idea that seemingly uncontrolled mass immigration was a bad idea. It sure wasn’t the key to Latino voters’ hearts.
Recall that when Barack Obama started expelling migrants who committed criminal offenses, activists condemned him as “deporter-in-chief.” Recall also that Obama became the most popular Democratic president in decades.
How did Democrats become obsessed with transgender issues? Americans who identify with a gender other than the one they were born with represent a minuscule part of the population — about half of 1 percent. They should be treated with sensitivity and respect, but their concerns did not justify the massive coverage on MSNBC or in The New York Times.
Then there was the business with all those strange pronouns — Latinx, for example. Heralded as an effort to be inclusive of people who do not identify within traditional binary references to gender, it confused and irritated ordinary people ordered to start using them. (Note that the practice has been pretty much dropped.)
The #MeToo campaign targeting men accused of abusing women soon devolved into excess. This eroded Democratic support among men of all colors, some of whom felt persecuted. One woman who emerged from the woodwork, an obvious headcase, accused then-candidate Biden of groping her. She got nearly a week of serious coverage in the Times.
A downsized media has fewer hands on deck actually talking to average folk. Their journalists got swayed by the “energy on the left” and turned the boutique concerns covered in its social media into mainstream issues.
As California’s attorney general, Harris had built a reputation for aggressively prosecuting criminal cases. What would have been a virtue in the eyes of most Americans somehow got twisted into putting too many people of color behind bars.
It happens that many people of color live in low-income neighborhoods plagued by gangs and other criminality. That made the defund-the-police nonsense a tone-deaf example of political suicide. The 2020 murder of George Floyd, a clear case of police brutality, rightly shocked many, but so did riots that followed. Squad founder Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez characterized thugs breaking windows at Macy’s as poor people motivated by hunger.
Democratic primary voters, to their credit, got rid of two of the more irritatingly absurd squad members — Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. But the hangover left by the fringe was easy to exploit by a master liar and manipulator like Trump.
Trump’s attempted coup d’etat alone should have made this a cakewalk for Harris. Her move to the center couldn’t survive the mountain of lies and fear-mongering that non-rich Trump supporters believed and may come to regret.
Democrats, meanwhile, must free themselves from the liberal media.
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