If you’re a Democrat, please never ever again utter the term Latinx. It oozes smug liberal elitism.
Granted, if you’re Hispanic, go ahead and use the gender-neutral term.
Hint — you won’t.
Just 4% of Latinos like it, according to a recent Pew Research survey. They prefer “Hispanic” (52%) and “Latino” (29%). Most of the others surveyed shrugged and said no sé.
But if you want to keep impressing your educated, progressive friends, please continue. Virtue signaling remains popular with a confined segment of the population still grieving last week’s election loss.
About 46% of Hispanic voters went for Donald Trump, according to an exit poll by Edison Research, up a whopping 14 points up from his 2020 showing.
It wasn’t just Latinos, though. Almost every group shifted right: Black men. White men. White women. Voters without college degrees. Working class people.
Granted, Kamala Harris didn’t have a lot of runway to lift her campaign off the ground. But Democrats stuck with her after Uncle Joe imploded. And the incumbent party was troubled by economic headwinds that have taken down incumbents worldwide for more than a year.
But it seems voters here in the USA and in Georgia just aren’t buying what the Democrats are selling.
Democrats may have been the traditional party of the Little Guy. But Americans are no longer feeling it. Increasingly, people — at least Middle Americans — see Democrats and their progressive doctrine as annoying, preachy and out-of-step.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
Now, you might argue that irritating and condescending are less bad than aggressive and scary. And you’d be right. But here’s where we are.
Many people I know are complaining that Harris’ loss is due to sexism, racism, xenophobia and a host of other isms. Some of that is true, to a point. But many others have switched to the GOP for other reasons. They just don’t think the Democratic Party embraces plain old common sense.
A lot has been made about TV ads tying Harris to supporting sex-change operations for prisoners and having taxpayers foot the bill. It seems only two federal prisoners got such procedures. Not only that, they were court-ordered and the “program” originated during Trump’s regime.
Doesn’t matter.
There’s video from 2019 of the then-California senator nodding in support for it. And the GOP ran with it, placing the ads on nearly every football game broadcast in swing states before the election.
Comedian Bill Maher asked: “Could you get more third-rail words into one sentence than sex-change operations, taxpayer-funded (and) in prison?”
“That ad was devastating, devastating,” said DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, a Democrat with 40 years of politics under his belt. “I don’t think we ever answered it. The ad was beyond the pale. But it hit home. It hurt.”
One could wonder if Harris could have just backed away from the issue when it arose. Must Democrats nod knowingly at every far-out issue pushed by fringe groups?
Credit: Screen grab from ad
Credit: Screen grab from ad
But Democrats fear the social media storms from the far-left’s true believers. So discussions go on and on about “toxic masculinity” and pronouns and men having babies, while large chunks of the population shake their heads and say “Nah.”
Former Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux told me backing away from public support of issues that are losers with moderate and working class voters “is harder than you think.”
Many of the groups underpinning the Democratic Party are intertwined, she said, so if you answer one group’s questionnaire, you’re answering them all.
Candidates, she said, have to “toe the line or you’re a bad person,” Bourdeaux said. “If (candidates) don’t answer on all these issues, they won’t go out and knock on doors for you. ... So I can see why (Harris) she was in a box.”
Bourdeaux is — or more correctly was — a unicorn, a white Democrat Congressperson in the South. And a moderate. She flipped a GOP Congressional seat in Gwinnett County in 2020, but got ousted two years later in a primary against fellow Dem Congresswoman Lucy McBath, who is Black, after GOP redistricting.
“You need more diversity of thought on social issues,” said Bourdeaux, who has annoyed her party’s progressives by saying such things for a while. “The Democrats have not been able to figure out their new coalition. Losing the working class is such a body blow to them.”
In the past year, I’ve noted that local events like the Stop Cop City vandalism and protests at colleges — like Emory — over the war in Gaza would end up helping Trump.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
I called longtime Democratic state Rep. Al Williams, who is Black and upset with the urbancentric direction of Georgia’s Democratic Party. He understands a vast majority of Dem votes come from the cities. But can’t a rural Dem get some love from the party elite?
“Urban folk cannot discuss rural issues,” he said, noting his district, Liberty County near Savannah, has a huge population of military veterans. “Two things we let the Republicans rob from us: They took Jesus and the military.”
“It’s a conservative strain down here,” Williams said. “You can’t just push folk away because they’re a bit more conservative than you.”
The question remains, do Democrats want to win elections? Or remain in a self-induced state of moral superiority?
They can keep arguing about these points while packing boxes as they leave office.
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