The Centre Cannot Hold
My thinking today is that Biden won all the votes Hillary won plus all the votes she lost to voters who could never imagine voting for a President with a vagina. They didn't expand the base. They just stole some misogynists who twist in the wind between elections like sexist windsocks.
More than a third of the electorate didn't care enough either way to vote.
That would be bad under normal circumstances. But a third of the voting-age population could not muster the energy to vote in 2020 and Trump's a Nazi.
Biden’s weak numbers some argue are attributable to his lack of resonance with Conservative voters and to that I say, who cares? The way I see it, those people double-downed on a Nazi.
Even now, when penning their post-election shitpieces, many liberal pundits are asking out loud if Biden couldn’t have done more to go deeper into red territory.
But why? Why do they make that argument?
The way the Democrats obsess about converting the 24% of Americans who identify as Republicans is a waste of time when you consider the fact that 38% of Americans don't vote at all and those nonvoters are disproportionately young, low-income and struggling.
They are real America, also.
The Democrats try to lean into a center that does not exist under the pretext of winning elections. It fails because the demographic category they most need to appeal to aren't voters at all. They're the 38% of American adults who are eligible to vote but can't or choose not to because our system sucks.
The future of the Democratic Party, if it has one, rests with the young. And I’m guessing if you polled registered Democrats under the age of 40, they'd probably tell you that they don't want to share a Party with Nazis, bigots, and billionaires. They want to build a Party that fights poverty, that legislates in favor of women, and is committed to antiracism.
Austerity in public policy has always been a bipartisan effort as long as it's been tried and the only thing the Democrats haven't tried yet to win voters is stopping it.