Dems are the Zombie Party now
Listen to this article“Wait till next year.”
The Boston Red Sox won four World Series in seven seasons from 1912 through 1918. It took them 86 years to win the next one.
Unless the Democratic Party gets their act together, they are going to be gone from power for a lot longer than that – like forever.
Like every defeated army, bankrupt company and passive aggressive worthless leader (think Saddam Hussein, think Julia Pierson, think Michael Dukakis) the Dems already have taken refuge in their own dream world. It’s called “Wait Till 2016.”
The scenario is simple: Democrats lose midterm elections because they can’t roll out the hard core activists the way the Republicans still do. But they’ve outpolled the GOP decisively in national election numbers in five out of the past six presidential elections. Barack Obama was elected by a historic eight million vote margin in 2008 and in 2012 he stunned the Republicans who expected a win or at least a cliffhanger race by cruising home with a five million margin. History will repeat itself in 2016.
Except it won’t.
Barack Obama was young, fresh and the candidate of hope in 2008. He enjoyed virtually total support from the voting public of 40 million black Americans and an almost equally huge margin among the 40 million Hispanic Americans. He was running after eight catastrophic Republican years against a grizzled old senator whom the public was sick and tired of.
None of those factors will apply to the Dems in 2016. They will all apply against that party and it’s almost certain candidate Hillary Clinton.
Like her former Senate colleague John McCain in 2008, Hillary will be old when she runs, 69 if elected. She has been around forever. To present her as the “Candidate of Change” is ludicrous. Her support among the crucial black constituency of the Democratic Party will be extremely weak, to an unprecedented degree. It will likely be the poorest turn out of black voters for any Democratic presidential candidate since 1956.
The reason for that is simple.
Black Democrats remember the increasingly ugly and desperate race Hillary waged to try and save her unimaginably bungled 2008 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination against the young Barack Obama. Those wounds still fester. Black support will be crucial in contested states from Virginia through Florida and Ohio. Black voters will show their distrust and even disgust with Hillary silently and decisively. With their silence and with their feet. They will not walk to the polling booth.
The Hispanics are another taken-for-granted constituency that will give the 2016 Dems a nasty shock. They are disappointed in what they got from the Obama administration. Clinton has always been tone deaf to them and they deserted her en masse to back Obama in the 2008 primary campaign.
If the Republicans run Jeb Bush, they will have at least a presentable, fresh candidate who can speak and campaign fluently in Spanish, who has a Hispanic wife and son who have both shown real political talent already. With assets like that, the Republicans can easily take a 30 percent bite out of the total Hispanic vote. Maybe even 40 percent.
Dems do love their “turn out myth.” It is the idea that if they just wave their beloved magic wand called “voter mobilization,” then the iniquities of those evil Death Eater Republicans will be banished forever.
You are going to hear a lot more about this “turn out” myth. It is the crutch the Dems always turn to in desperation when they have nothing else left.
The truth is, the turn out magic wand only worked for “Dumbledore” Obama. But he won’t be running in 2016. His own party leadership has rejected him as an albatross. They ran from him in 2014. Hillary will certainly do the same thing in 2016. They won’t learn from their many failures. They can’t.
The Dems eagerly, endlessly preached the virtues of “turn out” in 2004. In the end their candidate John Kerry, an honorable, responsible secretary of state but no whirlwind on the campaign trail, went down to crushing defeat at the hands of George W. Bush. Kerry couldn’t even capitalize on popular resentment of the incumbent, any incumbent. That potent factor too will be running against the Dems in 2016.
Most of all, however, it comes back to the bottom line, Where is the Democrats’ new vision for America’s future? Where are the detailed programs to revive industry, to credibly create scores of millions of well-paying new jobs, battle the drug addiction plague, restore border security, end the financially ruinous drain and bloody cost of wars without end around the world?
Hillary and her fellow Dems are silent about those answers.
They don’t have them.
They don’t have a clue.
Until they wake up and start coming up with those answers, they’ll stay Dead Men (and Women and Gays) Walking, they’ll stay political zombies. They’ll stay The Living Dead.
And no one will be scared of them.
William Dahl is a recent graduate of The College of William and Mary, where he majored in Government and studied abroad in La Plata, Argentina. He has worked for community foundations in Argentina and Miami dedicated to community engagement and prosecution for human rights abuses. A native Virginian, he moved to Baltimore in 2013 to join a financial research firm, where he enjoys being able to write on the side.