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In January of 2017, I decided to help out the Democrats by writing an election postmortem for them, since they did not seem likely to do it themselves (or produce an honest document if they did).

A year and a half has passed since I wrote that post. The question that should be asked going into the 2018 midterm elections is whether the facts on the ground have changed since then. In other words, will we start to see a supposed backlash against the Republicans due to anti-Trump hysteria whipped up by the media and the social justice warriors?

To review, the Democrats have been under serious electoral pressure for two decades. Three of the last four elections have been disasters for the Democrats. They lost badly in 2010, 2014, and 2016. 2016 especially was a disaster, because they went all-in on destroying the candidacy of Donald Trump. Every weapon they had in their arsenal was deployed, especially the media. They failed. The GOP did everything they could to help the Democrats derail Trump. They failed too.

The Trump candidacy was a gigantic threat to the Democrats, because he threatened the Democrats voting base. Trump particularly threatened their grip on the old unions and the white working class, which had been ignored by the Democrats for years. The Democrats have been reorganizing themselves among racial and ethnic lines, and the white working class which had once been the backbone of the party was relegated to “the back of the bus.”

Additionally, the US media was and remains the most powerful weapon in the Democrats’ arsenal. The media ensured the Democrats’ message was always received by the general public while making sure the Republicans’ message was distorted, if it was allowed to get through at all. The media had the power to make or break political candidates, a power they’d enjoyed since at least Vietnam, and they reveled in it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2016 election – the media was not able to stop Trump and it was not able to help the Democrats. The Trump election is one of the biggest defeats the media has ever suffered, and their inability to retain the public’s trust suggests the media is losing its power to influence public opinion. “Losing” does not mean powerless, and the media remains dangerous, but their best days are behind them.

The current Democrat formula for victory consists of radical ethnic politics, encouraging the growth of social justice warriors who are ideological leftist zealots, and using the media to promote their own candidates and destroy opposition candidates, both internally and externally. Their main sources of funding come largely out of the pockets of a handful of ultra-radical billionaires such as Tom Steyer and George Soros.

In my 2017 post, I recommended a few steps for the Democrats to take. One of the steps I recommended was the jettisoning of the racial politics and a refocus on “bread and butter” issues which voters actually care about, especially economic issues.

Structurally, the Democrats are completely cut off from the poor and the middle classes. They are also extremely poorly educated (despite their assertions of being the Smartest People in the Room) and don’t understand the basics of how to employ people or manage an economy. Their employment solutions are usually government programs which rarely accomplish what they set out to do, largely because Democrats can’t restrain themselves from stealing the money which is allocated to such programs.

The Democrats are currently run by a small group of rich billionaires, with upper-middle class social justice warriors as the party functionaries and activists, and a large mass of poor people at the bottom who vote Democrat primarily due to tribalism and bribes in the form of welfare. None of these people can connect with the working and middle classes, which make up the largest voting bloc in the United States.

The social justice warriors, while reasonably good at intimidating the party’s political enemies, are also good at alienating voters and creating enemies of the Democrats where none existed before. I have written previously that Trump’s social media operation was strong largely because Trump supporters on the internet were heavily made of up people who had been harmed or alienated by rabid social justice warriors. Had these people not been driven into the arms of the Republicans, the Democrats might have managed to squeak Hillary through in November 2016.

If the Democrats want to start winning elections, they’re going to have jettison the radical ethnic politics and the social justice warrior movement. The issues they focus on such as transgender bathrooms, the environment, and social justice are issues most normal people don’t care about. They must reconnect with average voters and find out what they actually want, and ditch the toxic social justice warriors.

The Democrats have not done any of this. Instead they have doubled down on social justice warrior harassment and intimidation, and also gone all in on impeachment and spreading lunatic conspiracy theories about Russian Facebook ads tricking Americans into voting for Trump.

To no one’s surprise, once the Trump presidency got underway and we began seeing big gains from him on taxes and trade, the Democrats’ lead in the generic polling and the enthusiasm gap started to disappear. The tactics the Democrats are currently using cannot produce long term success for them in elections.

This does not mean the Democrats will never win an election again, or that we can sit back and relax for the 2018 elections. The Democrats’ plan has always been “win just one more election and then pass amnesty to make all future elections irrelevant.”

As things stand now, though, the Democrats are badly damaged and losing support, with no way out for themselves. The trends are against them, and are only getting worse. Until they develop a real plan to improve the economy and ditch the toxic social justice warrior movement, they are going to keep losing.

And here’s an exit question: How long will the Democrats’ paymasters keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a party which can’t win elections, no matter how ideologically friendly it is?