Elections, Mathematics, And The Woke

     I’m a long-time admirer of Virginia State Assemblyman Nick Freitas. He exemplifies something the rest of the Republican Party lacks: courage. He speaks plainly and forthrightly, and he hews to his convictions. There aren’t many other Republicans of whom that could be honestly said.

     (Of course, it’s hard to stand up for something if you lack a spine. A great percentage of Republican politicians appear to have had that organ removed. In all candor, when your overriding priorities are to get re-elected and keep the media from denouncing you in boldface, convictions tend to look like a luxury item. But I digress.)

     Freitas recently had an illuminating conversation with political analyst Christian Hines about the recent leak of the Democrats’ unreleased assessment of why they lost the 2024 presidential election, and a lot of down-ticket races besides:

     If you don’t have thirteen minutes to spare for the video – entirely understandable; I’d never criticize you for it – here’s the gist:

The base of the Democrat Party is insane.

     That assessment – charmingly, Hines calls it an autopsy – could not be released because it says that and nothing else:

     …it's not just that they did crazy stuff; they allowed themselves to be more and more defined by the crazy stuff, and they do seem to understand that to a point within the autopsy. The problem is that they've created a situation within the Democratic party where if you actually implement some of the things, not even all of them, just some of the things that this autopsy is suggesting that they should – to for instance reach out to men or reach out to working-class people – it would devastate the modern Democrat base and the modern Democrat coalition.

     I’ve written about coalition politics several times before. The Democrat strategists’ approach to presidential politics is coalition-based: assemble interest groups, promising to advance their interests, until you reach 50% plus one of the voting populace. This has been the Dems’ approach to national elections since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet of the 17 presidential elections since then, they’ve won only 8 and lost 9 – and one victory was over a “caretaker” president, and two of the losses were to a political outsider who lacked the full backing of his party. From that tally, you might think they’d be looking for an improvement on their approach. The leaked autopsy tells that tale fairly clearly.

     But that autopsy was deliberately suppressed. It was suppressed because its authors were aware that if it were published, the party’s base would rise in a fury. The base is composed of a coalition of hard-left “woke” activists from the furthest reaches of the Democrat Party: the segment that dominates issue activism, fundraising, and primary elections. Alienating any significant fraction of the base would be crippling in the near term. The strategists can’t bear the thought.

     But the base is the problem. The base chooses the party’s nominees. Thus, the nominees are satisfactory to the base, but wholly unpalatable to the larger electorate. They’re especially unattractive to unaligned and weakly aligned voters, who may be as much as 40% of the whole. The mathematics of America’s two-stage elections processes is hostile to that approach.

     The Dems are thus caught in a bind of their own making. That they can’t discuss it openly among themselves is a clear giveaway.

     While the problem manifests most clearly at the presidential level, it can have impact locally as well. State demographics are changing rapidly. This is especially visible in California, which by enacting a 5% wealth tax on billionaires – “We’re only going to do it this once! Cross our hearts and hope to die!” – has driven its wealthiest residents to relocate in massive numbers. A great many are hopping over Lake Tahoe to resettle in Nevada, which has no individual income tax, no corporate income tax, and no capital-gains tax. Given Muslim-socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani’s open hostility toward the wealthy, I would expect the best-heeled residents of New York City to follow suit.

     This may sound like unalloyed good news to conservatives and Republican partisans. It isn’t. If the Democrat Party becomes nationally uncompetitive because of its capture by the “woke,” what incentive will remain for Republican politicians to seek to please its conservative allegiants? Remember also that America’s plutocrats, with a few notable exceptions, have trended politically leftward in recent decades. Their relocation to “red” states isn’t guaranteed to be without unpleasant secondary effects.

     This is something to watch and ponder.