Progressive Biden is a threat to his own party
At a time when the Republican Party seems united around Donald Trump and his MAGA vision, the ruling Democrats seem about to tear themselves into pieces. Even with the looming presence of a second Trump electoral triumph, a growing proportion of the party’s traditional constituencies – ethnic and religious minorities, working class people and young people – are detaching from the party.
Perhaps the fear of losing in November will be enough to keep this fraying coalition together. Still, there’s little that will unite the party in future elections. Democrats are polling poorly on big issues like inflation, the border, crime, and national security. Barely a third of the population thinks the country is headed in the right direction. Yet rather than address these concerns, Biden has focused on placating the party’s new political base, educated professionals, through vanity schemes like the massive cancellation of college debt.
As a recent Rasmussen survey suggests, there’s an enormous distance between the core of graduate school educated urban professionals and everyone else on virtually every major issue. Unlike most Americans, this class has benefited from Biden’s wild spending sprees, with most employment growth concentrated in public sector government jobs and largely public-funded health care.
In contrast, the traditionally private sector middle and the working classes buckle under the twin pressures of monopoly power and regulations that increasingly imperil smaller firms. Even young people are shifting away from Biden, who won their votes easily in 2020, and towards Trump. Media accounts may link this to the Palestine crisis but polling shows that young people rank virtually every other issue as being more important. Their concerns are real: one in four Americans overall fear losing their job in the next year.
Jewish Democrats, alarmed by the rise of pro-Hamas forces in the party, are financing bids to take on progressive legislators. Jewish organisations have targeted anti-Israel politicians in the primaries, and won some significant victories in California and Oregon. Mainstream Jewish organisations also seem likely to oust later this month the pro-Palestine New York progressive Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
Most Jews will likely vote for Biden, but support for the Democrats is gradually eroding. After all, Donald Trump managed to boost his Jewish vote from 24 per cent in 2016 to 30 per cent – well above the average for most modern Republican Presidents. The GOP also made gains in the 2022 election, going from one quarter in 2016 to fully one third. A recent Siena poll even showed Trump leading among New York’s large Jewish population. The Jewish vote could play a decisive role in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada. Biden’s handlers seem to have forgotten that unlike Britain or France, there are well over twice as many Jews as Muslims in the US.
More important still has been the movement of minorities away from the Democrats. President Trump’s rally in the Bronx may not be the multi-cultural coronation imagined by MAGA zealots, but the large numbers of Hispanic and Black voters at the event cannot be dismissed. Poll after poll shows that economic squeeze, fear of crime and the uncontrolled border is driving in Latino voters, and even some Blacks, towards Trump and the GOP. Minorities make up over 40 per cent of the nation’s working class and will constitute the majority by 2032.
African-Americans, Biden’s most critical base, have stagnated both in income or wealth during his term. Barely half approve of his overall performance. In 2020 Trump grew his share of black voters from eight to twelve per cent; this year he is polling closer to according to a Wall Street Journal survey a remarkable 30 per cent of black male voters.
The news from Latinos, by far the nation’s largest ethnic minority, is even worse. Trump won a significantly larger Latino vote, particularly in Florida and Texas, in 2020. Republican support among Hispanic voters has grown by 10 points since 2018 and Trump now polls close to even with Biden. Latino voters will likely still favour Biden, but the margin could prove far smaller than it was in the past.
Much the same can be seen among Asians, now the US fastest growing minority. Easily the best educated racial group and highest earning racial group, have fallen under progressive attack for being too successful. Asian students make up almost 20 per cent of Ivies and 40 per cent of the University of California system. They also dominate the elite, competitive academic public high schools from San Francisco’s Lowell High School to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia as well as New York’s Bronx Science.
The Biden Administration Education Department seems determined to undermine this success, pushing to replace merit with racial preferences. This involves changing admissions standards, and weakening educational content, even in medical schools. This is a key issue driving Asians towards the GOP. In 2020 Asian support for Trump rose from 27 per cent in 2016 to 31 per cent. One recent national poll found four in ten Asians saw affirmative action as “racist” and more than half welcomed a Supreme Court ruling outlawing it.
Cultural and lifestyle issues are also accelerating the shift away from the progressives. In San Francisco Asian voters, notably the city’s large Chinese population, have turned against progressive prosecutors, spurred on by a local crimewave. Even white liberals have helped remove similarly progressive district attorneys in the deep blue precincts of Portland and Seattle. It turns out that both minorities and everyday liberals prefer safe streets to dangerous ones and parks occupied by families and children rather than drug addicts and the homeless.
Unless the Democratic center is able to turn back the progressive wing, many moderates and independent voters – the vast majority of the electorate – will look elsewhere. Some will gravitate to mavericks like RFK and even to Donald Trump. Replacing the party of the people with one run by the crazy cadres of the Left seems a sure way to destroy the world’s oldest political party.