How 'defund the police' sabotaged Democrats on Election Day
Democrats won the White House, whether President Donald Trump wants to face that non-alternative fact or not.
But, as the celebratory confetti and honking car horns settled down, new disputes broke out in the famously factional party over how and why they lost just about everywhere else.
They expected to flip the Senate back from Republican control. But they didn’t.
They expected to gain seats in the House as they did in the 2018 midterms, but instead they lost seats — in some of the same purple districts that they won two years ago.
They seriously hoped a “blue wave” would flip some state legislatures, but, no, not one.
More embarrassing in this year of racial reckoning, the share of Black, Hispanic and women voters won by the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually went down compared with four years ago.
The losses left Democrats pinning their hopes on two long-shot runoffs for Senate seats in Georgia to save them from the sort of gridlock that Presidents Barack Obama and Trump faced with a divided Congress.
In short, the message from voters to Democrats seemed to be, “No, we may not like Trump but we’re not crazy about you guys either.”
What went wrong? Bad messaging caught much of the blame in a heated conference call between House Democrats two days after Election Day.
“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” said a furious first-term Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, in an audio leaked to The Washington Post. Not that the former CIA officer was ever a socialist, but that didn’t stop her adversaries from trying to rebrand her as one.
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