Democrats have conducted a few focus groups following the 2024 election to find out where they’re going wrong and the feedback they got was devastating. Participants indicated that the party is too woke, too elite, and too out of touch with working people.
One participant suggested that the party has become progressive in the same way as college campuses, which is a very accurate assessment. Democrats have adopted much of the woke language and culture of campus progressives.
Overall, the results were not good news for Dems.
Politico reported:
When asked to compare the Democratic Party to an animal, one participant compared the party to an ostrich because “they’ve got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they’re failing.” Another likened them to koalas, who “are complacent and lazy about getting policy wins that we really need.” Democrats, another said, are “not a friend of the working class anymore.”…
“I think what the Democratic elites and their politicians believe is often very different from what the average Democratic voter is,” said a Georgia man who voted for Biden in 2020 but Trump in 2024. “The elites that run the Democratic Party — I think they’re way too obsessed with appealing to these very far-left social progressivism that’s very popular on college campuses.”…
Several participants also raised the transgender attack ad that the Trump campaign deployed against Harris, which showed a 2019 clip of her expressing support for gender affirming surgery for state prison inmates. The ad’s tagline included: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”…
One woman from Georgia who didn’t vote in 2024 said that she didn’t agree with Harris’ “thinking that it’s okay for children to change their body parts.”
All of this suggests that Democrats are going to be in the wilderness for a while.
The real problem for Democrats is that the woke part of the party is kind of their base. How do they separate themselves as a party from their own base?