Are you a wealthy, suburbanite professional? Then today's Democratic Party wants you!



The problem is even the recent official strategy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee acknowledges those aren't the voters they'll be targeting. Their main focus will be targeting the 23 seats held by House Republicans in districts that Hillary Clinton won, plus an additional 10 seats in districts that Clinton narrowly lost.

And what we know about those districts that swung toward Clinton is that they're full of rich people who voted for Romney in 2012. The five Republican-held House districts with the biggest swings toward Democrats in the presidential race in 2016 are in Texas and Georgia. All have average household incomes over $100,000 per year. Three of those five districts are on the DCCC list.

Today's Democratic Party wants Romney voters, and they've been getting them.

You know, people like George W. Bush.

This didn't just happen yesterday. The Democrats have been soliciting high-income Republican voters for decades, and it has been paying off.



In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination. The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.” In the past, Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case.

This switch of voter base is why the Dems will never willingly embrace a progressive economic agenda. Or even radical change on the social agenda.



Pitching one's campaign at anxious white suburbanites with catastrophically mistaken notions about government financing rules out actually fixing most of the crises facing the country. It means running on fiddly little tax credits and pointlessly means-tested small-bore programs, just like Hillary Clinton did.

That's not to say that Dems don't have a Big tent. They pander to both the upper-middle-class and the very wealthy.



The executive director of the Democratic Governor’s Association told Politico in December 2016, “There seems to be a feeling that we need to look beyond the normal folks we always look to, the normal types.” In other words, Democrats will cut out the middle man and elect wealthy donors themselves.

Are you a poor member of the white working-class? Then you likely don't care about things like issues, since you vote strictly by emotions alone like a dim-witted child.

While the Dems don't actually care about economic issues that would improve your life (and why should they, since you are too stupid to care about then either), and Democrats honestly would prefer that you all just died, you are likely a racist and misogynist “deplorable” if you don't vote for the Democratic Party.



This new putative ruling class, notes author Michael Lind, sees its rise, and the decline of the rest, not as a reflection of social inequity, but rather their meritocratic virtue. Only racism, homophobia or misogyny — in other words, the sins of the “deplorables” — matter.

It's hard to ignore the fact that the Dems have been losing a lot of elections with this strategy. So after the devastating 2016 election loss the Dems took a hard look and decided that they haven't rejected the working class enough.



One Georgia-Montana comparison is instructive: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has invested $5 million in Ossoff’s run; the DCCC kicked in about $500,000 to aid Quist.

Those figures raise this question: Which is more valuable, a seat in Congress that represents suburban “elites,” or a seat that represents the newly prized flyover voter, in this case gun-owning nurses and tractor-driving PhDs., city refugees and fifth-generation ranchers, the third-largest landmass in the Lower 48, a sprawling energy and agriculture state with a deep tradition of support for what Democrats once were leaders in: big-hearted, pragmatic populism suited to the rural and urban enclaves of the New West (and maybe even the New South)?

I think the appropriate answer in a democracy should be neither, but the national Democratic Party made a clear choice.

The Dems currently are facing a troublesome progressive insurgency that wants to force the party to reform. The insurgents are emboldened by the undeniable failure of party leadership.

However, even the facts that post-election polls showing the current leadership is driving the party even deeper into the ditch, the elites of the party have doubled down on a strategy that obviously isn't working.

