No kidding! While Americans watch their gas prices and grocery prices rise as Democrats strut around continuing their social justice crusades, is it any shock they have become totally out of step with voters? Just look last month at the Virginia gubernatorial election and it’s pretty clear for the time being that Democrats are out of touch and have totally lost focus with issues voters are concerned about. There was one Democratic pollster warning his party back before Election Day in Virginia but noted at the time Terry McAuliffe already was too far gone to make any meaningful changes.
Now, in an interview with the New York Times, Brian Stryker has another warning for his party to stop focusing on social issues when voters couldn’t care less. When they’re getting eaten alive by inflation, it’s clearly the economy, stupid:
So if you’re advising a Democratic client running in 2022, what do you tell them?
I would tell them that we have a problem. We’ve got a national branding problem that is probably deeper than a lot of people suspect. Our party thinks maybe some things we’re saying aren’t cutting through, but I think it’s much deeper than that.
What is that branding problem, in a nutshell?
People think we’re more focused on social issues than the economy — and the economy is the No. 1 issue right now.
What drives this perception that Democrats are fixated on cultural issues?
We probably haven’t been as focused on the economy as we should be. I think some of that is voters reading us talking about things that aren’t economic issues.
For a lesson in all this, see Republican Glenn Youngkin’s Virginia gubernatorial campaign. His focus was laser-like on issues voters voiced concern over. Education, the economy, Covid mandates, and not much else. On all of those issues, Youngkin took a populist tone of simple things like eliminating the grocery tax in Virginia, removing vaccine mandates on state employees, as well as mask mandates, and listening to parents on education. These are not difficult things to understand.
Democrats, however, focused almost exclusively on being the party of abortion in Virginia, painting Youngkin as a pro-life extremist. That plan backfired spectacularly because it appeared one candidate was obsessed with social issues, and the other was obsessed with things voters actually cared about day-to-day.
Democrats are rushing into 2022 making the same mistake, Stryker argues, and without a course correction, they will amplify party losses rather than mitigate them.
The end result here is that Democrats played the blame game after losing in Virginia. It was white suburban women, it was uneducated voters, it was black voters not showing up, whatever the reason, it was the voters’ fault, not bad messaging or a bad candidate. If your explanation relies on calling voters dumb or racist, you’re not going to get very far with them next time using the same strategy.
Stryker’s overall message is that if Democrats would simply tone down the social justice issues (they won’t), then maybe they’d have a better shot bringing back some of these constituencies groups that went for Biden in 2020 but are swinging back to Republicans in 2021 and 2022.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the loudest voices in their party are also the loudest when it comes to defining their national identity, which is more often than not associated with every left-wing social justice cause you can think of.
