DISASTROUS DAYS FOR DEMOCRATS
LET’S face it: The past 100 days have been a disaster . . . for Democrats. While much ink has been spilled in the past week assessing President Trump’s first 100 days in office, the Democrats’ abysmal performance has largely escaped scrutiny. So let’s review their record. Democrats spent much of Trump’s first months in office pushing their unfounded narrative of his alleged collusion with Vladimir Putin. But that narrative went up in smoke when Trump launched missile strikes against Putin’s Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad. Then came UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s blistering speech before the Security Council laying the blame on Russia for failing to stop Syria’s use of chemical weapons and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s charge that Russia is arming the Taliban. Suddenly, we’re in a new Cold War with Moscow — which pours cold water on Democrats’ case for Trump-Putin collusion. All that effort at character assassination down the drain.
Most damaging has been Democrats’ seemingly nonstop efforts to further alienate the millions of Americans who twice voted for Barack Obama but switched to Trump last year. Some point to a Post-ABC News poll, which showed that Trump hadn’t expanded his base of support since he took office. Well, he didn’t need to: He won. (And the poll suggested that if the election were held again, he’d not only defeat Hillary Clinton again but win the popular vote this time).
The ones who need to expand their base are Democrats, and they utterly failed to do so. According to that poll, only 2 percent of Americans who voted for Trump regret their votes, while fully 96 percent say it was the right thing to do.
Today just 28 percent of Americans say that the Democratic Party is in touch with the concerns of most Americans today — 10 points behind Trump.
Democrats have made clear their deep-seated contempt for the values of working-class, socially con- servative Democrats who left their party in droves last year. The new chairman, Thomas Perez, has announced that pro-life candidates are no longer welcome in the party: “Every Democrat, like every American, should support a woman’s right to make her own choices about her body and her health. That is not negotiable.”
Democrats are completely focused on placating their frothing, left-wing, anti-Trump base — and the American heartland thinks these people are insane. They see women marching in anti-Trump rallies wearing “pussy” hats. They see left-wing mobs attacking Charles Murray at Middlebury College and trying to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at the UC Berkeley. They see “Bill Nye the Liberal Guy” (honorary co-chair of the March for Science) asking whether people should be punished for having “extra kids.” (Which kid is the “extra” one?) They see a horrible feedback loop of left-wing intolerance for their beliefs and way of life. And they see Democrats pandering to these people.
They also see that Democrats have not even made a pretense of cooperation with the candidate they elected. The Democratic Party is no longer the opposition; it is “The Resistance.” These voters rightly ask: Resistance to what? The answer, they conclude, is resistance to ideas that are not their own. Resistance to the values of Middle America. Resistance to the candidate who promised to fight for them — the “forgotten Americans” the Democratic Party abandoned.
The Democrats’ unrelenting, hyperventilating obstruction of Trump has sent a crystal-clear message to Obama-Trump voters: We don’t hear you. We loathe your president and all of you who put him into office. And we’re going to show you what you can do with your Trump vote, by doing everything in our power to undermine the man you elected.
Cranking out the liberal base while alienating working-class, traditionally Democratic voters didn’t work in 2016. It cost Democrats not only the presidency but the chance to take control of the Senate in a year when the playing field was tilted against the GOP.
Yet for some inexplicable reason, Democrats seem hellbent on doubling down on this failed strategy. Trouble is, in 2018 Republicans are defending only eight Senate seats, while Democrats are defending 25 — including 10 in red states that Trump won. And working-class voters in those states see that Democrats have utter contempt for their choice of president, and thus utter contempt for them.
A hundred days in, these voters remain loyal to Trump. That’s good news for the president. But for Democrats, it’s a disaster.
[Democrats’ ]crystal- clear message to O ba ma-Trump voters: We don’ t hear you.