What Election Do These People Think We Just Had?

Democrats are inventing wild fantasies about the power of Big Woke rather than confront the failures of their actual approach.

CNN

Democrats have spent the week since Donald Trump’s staggering electoral triumph losing their minds in public.

Everyone is shell-shocked, depressed, looking for answers, and, most importantly, looking for someone to blame. None of that is surprising. When you lose as comprehensively as Democrats just did, the fallout is going to be ugly.

Many Democratic elites appear to have landed on a familiar tactic: blaming everyone’s favorite scapegoat, Big Woke. Everywhere you look, you’ll see someone—often, but not always, on CNN—railing against the far-left extremists that supposedly held the party’s mainstream faction in its vise-like grip in 2024.

There’s just one problem with this: the campaign these insiders are describing bears virtually no resemblance to the actual campaign we all just suffered through. They have simply invented an alternate universe out of thin air.

Take, for instance, Philippe Reines, best known for his twin roles as Hillary Clinton’s longtime enforcer and one of the biggest assholes in Democratic politics. Here he was on CNN last week:

We need to take stock of why we are being held hostage to the far left. No one should be and wants to be kowtowing to the extremes of their own parties that just shouldn't - to the extent that majorities should rule. The majority of Democrats don't agree with the things that we are being tagged with.

[…]Most Democrats I know think there's a huge problem at the border. Most Democrats I know think, frankly, that males at birth shouldn't play in women's sports and vice versa.

There are two strange things about this tedious recitation.

The first is that Democrats, from Kamala Harris on down, were visibly not held hostage to left-wing views on either trans rights or immigration. Harris wouldn’t stop talking about her desire to crack down on undocumented immigration. She constantly touted her support for the far-right immigration bill that Democrats helped craft in the Senate.

And far from “kowtowing” to “extreme” trans people (whatever that bigoted nonsense means), Harris went out of her way to avoid talking about trans rights at all. She wouldn’t even say the word “trans” when asked direct questions about her past policy stances. What message were voters to take from that other than that Harris felt she had something to hide when it came to trans people? As ever, failing to show up for a marginalized community was bad policy and bad politics.

The second strange thing is that Reines was setting himself as some kind of frustrated outsider looking on at the campaign with horror. But he wasn’t at a remove from the Harris team. He played the role of Donald Trump during Harris’s days-long preparation for her sole debate with Trump. (He did the same for Hillary Clinton during her campaign, meaning that he’s 2-for-2 in manifestly not helping people beat Trump.)

Reines had more direct, face-to-face access to Harris than probably 98 percent of the people who worked on her campaign, let alone the broader public. If the far left was calling all the shots on Team Harris, how did Reines—or, really, anyone who was within 5,000 miles of the loser-filled Clinton campaign—even get through the door?

Perhaps Reines was speaking this way because he knew it was a surefire route to get on CNN, which has been crammed with similar Democratic operatives saying similar things over the past week.

For instance, this is what “Democratic strategist” Julie Roginsky told the network:

When we are too afraid to say that “Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable.” But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.

That quote landed so well that Maureen Dowd cribbed it for her Sunday New York Times column. But, again, there’s a problem: the world in which Democrats shied away from criticizing student protesters does not exist.

In the real world, Democrats relentlessly attacked the Gaza campus protests. The White House said that Columbia students were engaging in “hate speech” and condemned their occupation of campus buildings. Biden warned that “dissent must never lead to disorder.” His press secretary compared the protests to the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville and defended the crackdown on the encampments. And Democratic officials across the country happily sent police onto campuses, where they crushed the encampments with brutal force.

Either Roginsky was lying in her characterization of the response to the protests, or she was paying zero attention to what actually happened. Neither possibility is particularly flattering to her credibility.

Finally, let’s turn to some of the elected Democrats coming out of the woodwork to insist that Woke has destroyed their party. Here’s an anonymous House Democrat whining to Axios:

"Democrats just literally attacked everything [Trump] did. We could never agree with anything, never give him credit for anything, could never say, 'Well actually securing the border is a good idea, I just disagree with how he's doing it,'" the lawmaker said.

I feel crazy!!! The Harris campaign’s stance on Trump’s approach to immigration wasn’t “militarizing the border isn’t a good idea.” It was “we love militarizing the border, and we will do a better job of it.” Harris even mocked Trump’s border wall, bragging that Democrats had actually built more of it than he had. In other words, Democrats said, “Securing the border is a good idea, I just disagree with how he’s doing it.” Yet again, this person is just creating a fantasy world to live in.

The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch.  She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most “lethal” military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It’s hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives.

But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed.

Sucks to suck!