In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election on a message that appealed to the masses. His message of bringing back jobs and putting the needs of Americans above all else won him a lot of popularity with working class voters, allowing Trump to win states that are typically Democratic strongholds such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
It was also, apparently, a wake-up call for Democrats who seem to be realizing just how out of touch with the people’s needs their platform and their party at large really is. The Democratic Party has long liked to picture itself as being the party of the working class while alleging the Republican party cares only about big corporations and the rich. When results at the voting booth showed this to not be the case at all, though, Dems were left looking for answers.
Now, it seems as if their answer is going to be a fairly significant overhaul of their platform and message – with the intent to produce a much more populist agenda. In other words, the new motto of the Democrats looks to be, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Sure even the new and improved party platform is sure to be drastically different from Trump’s, but it’s not difficult to see a few key similarities. For one, one of the big three goals of the new platform which were unveiled on Monday was prioritizing domestic job creation – a ship that Trump sailed all the way to the White House.
Even the Democratic party’s new slogan – “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future” parts from Hillary Clinton’s campaign insistence that “America never stopped being great.”
After suffering one defeat after another, there’s really nowhere to go but up for the Democrats and their new agenda. Not only were they defeated in the presidential election, they also lost every single special election in 2017 to replace members of Congress who Trump had appointed to his administration.
Speaking on the most high-profile of these losses, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “When you lose an election with someone who has, say, 40 percent popularity, you look in the mirror and say what did we do wrong? And the number one thing that we did wrong is we didn’t tell people what we stood for.”
Now, Democrats are hoping they will be able to right the ship by the 2018 midterm elections. According to most party strategists, though, party agendas do very little to affect Congressional elections, which are instead won by the candidates themselves.
To make matters even more concerning for Democrats in 2018, they’re going to be stuck playing defense in the Senate. Here, ten Democrats will be fighting to retain seats in states won by Trump in 2016. While the 2016 Congressional race was one that was ripe for the Democratic taking, the 2018 landscape is not nearly as kind to them.
Whether the Democrats’ new message will represent any real change instead of just being smoke and mirrors is something that is yet to be seen. Either way, it does seem that Democrats are finally waking up to the idea that the American people have far bigger concerns than the social justice issues that have become the face of the Democratic party.
In a world where finding a job is difficult and finding a good-paying job is extremely so, interest rates are rising, and threats from foreign powers have never been higher, the American people are much more likely to vote for someone promising to fix things rather than someone who spends the bulk of their time talking about college safe spaces and gender-neutral bathrooms.
One way or another, this is all part of our great democratic process at work. The American people speak with their votes, politicians then either adapt to what the people are saying or become irrelevant. With this most recent shift towards a new, populist agenda, it seems the Democrats are trying desperately to avoid the latter.
~ Conservative Zone
