Westneat: Sad sack self-reflection

“Let there be no doubt,” declares William Kirk, a conservative Eastside lawyer in a 25-minute video deconstructing GOP woes in Washington state. “We are absolutely getting our asses kicked.”

It’s a disorienting place, where Democrats could be saddled with a broken brand even as they scored their biggest win in Washington state in 80 years. And Republicans are getting their asses kicked even as MAGA is ascendant nationally, controlling all levers of the federal government.

My observation about the Democrats is they’re in a state of shock. Their “brand” isn’t broken so much as their sense of reality. How can it be real that Donald Trump won again?

“Our policy, to most Americans, seems to be aimed at a small group of people that fits certain preordained categories,” Smith said. “It is too narrow in its focus, and it doesn’t help that whenever anybody questions this, the typical response is that the person questioning it has to be some combination of ignorant, bigoted or racist.”

Here in this state, core planks of the party’s policy were just put on the ballot by Republicans, with the express intent to expose them as extremist and defeat them. Instead the reverse happened — voters overwhelmingly endorsed Democratic values on climate change, social safety net programs and taxes on the wealthy.

Inside the Republican tent, they’re having a RINO vs. MAGA circular firing squad. GOP secretary of state candidate Dale Whitaker cut a video saying: “We’ve been told for years and years … that with a moderate we could win over the soft Democrats and independents and win back the governor’s office. We have to be honest with ourselves here: The moderate experiment has failed. It has failed.”

Has it? It seems the Democrats were the ones who ran moderates. Meanwhile the Republicans who did the best were that party’s moderates — Dave Reichert in the governor’s race and Jaime Herrera Beutler for lands commissioner. Both got about 200,000 more votes than MAGA headliner Trump did in Washington.

There wasn’t formal exit polling of Washington state, but since then the pollster DHM Research of Oregon has circled back to do one. So now there’s evidence of who voted which way and why.

The biggest imbalance in the voting, by far, was the gender gap, DHM found. The poll showed that in state and local races, an incredible 70 percent of women backed either all Democrats or mostly Democrats. That’s game over for Republicans, especially as female voters outnumbered men by more than 150,000 statewide.

Meanwhile, 53 percent of men voted all or mostly Republican.

The biggest gender gap was on the capital gains tax. The DHM survey found women voted to keep it by 34 points. (Men did too, by 14 points.) The reasons given were that repealing the tax would cut funding to education and child care, while shifting any cost burden to poorer households. In retrospect, it was a terrible idea to try to resurrect GOP fortunes around a measure that was almost tailor made to alienate the dominant voting group in the state.

“Until we figure out a way to have a massive demographic shift inside the state of Washington, we are going to continue on this death spiral of election results,” concluded Kirk, the GOP attorney.

Seriously, both parties do need therapy. But both could also stand to take a deep breath. Is it really this nerve-wracking for Trumpified Republicans to communicate with, and craft policy for, liberal and moderate women? Or for elitist Democrats to be seen reaching out to working-class men?

Broadening the tent is the oldest strategy in politics. Even Trump somehow did it. I say the parties would do better to skip these mutual identity crises and instead try one neat trick: Learn how to talk to strangers, again.