In case you didn’t pay attention, and you’re completely excused if you didn’t, the Democrats had an election over the weekend to choose a new party chair.
It’s someone named Ken Martin, and he’s been the chairman of the state party in Minnesota — where Democrat politics produced Tim Walz, Ilhan Omar, and Keith Ellison when it wasn’t treating the police like Bane did in Gotham and opening the windows to enjoy the smell of burning cities.
And lest you think that Ken Martin is cut from a different cloth than the nomenklatura of that party, I can disabuse you of such a notion with alacrity. Here’s a quote…
“The fight right now is against Donald Trump and the billionaires who bought this country.”
Hmmm.
The Democrats have a problem they don’t seem to want to acknowledge. Virtually every poll — and I’ve seen three of them in the last few days — puts their approval rating in the low 30s (31 percent was the last one) and their disapproval rating in the high 50s. (RELATED: Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It)
This isn’t just a verdict on their party leaders, though it is that. They’ve got some real problems with finding a standard bearer.
It’s this bad…
📊 2028 National Democratic Primary (+/- shift vs December)
• Harris – 33% (-2)
• Buttigieg – 9% (-3)
• Newsom – 7% (=)
• Ocasio-Cortez – 6% (+3)
• Shapiro – 3% (-2)
• Walz – 3% (-2)
• Whitmer – 3% (=)
• Klobuchar – 3% (+2)
• Stephen A. Smith – 2% (new)
• Booker – 2%… pic.twitter.com/9Azjt1irek— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) January 30, 2025
There’s an awful lot you can glean from that poll.
For one thing, it tells you that Democrat voters are terribly uninformed. A third of them are for Kamala Harris largely because they don’t even know who else is out there, and a majority of them are for one of the people on that list because of identity politics.
You don’t get good candidates that way. And a primary electorate in which AOC doubles up Josh Shapiro is a really, really unhealthy petri dish from which to grow a relevant party.
This is why it’s considerably more instructive that David Hogg is your new DNC vice chair, or one of them, than that Martin is the chair.
There are few people less appealing or interesting than David Hogg. This is somebody whose sole source of political relevance is the fact that he was not killed in the Parkland, Florida shooting, and therefore he was handed a platform from which to opine about Australia-style gun control.
When any reasonable examination of that terrible event shows that the availability of firearms was far, far less the source of the problem than Democrat policies discouraging or barring disciplinary actions against dangerously deranged students. Not to mention the utter and complete failure of the local police to intervene timely when things went horribly wrong both before and during the shooting.
Hogg has gone around flogging the “Defund the Police” shibboleth. And he still sounds like he did in 2018…
He’s exactly the wrong ambassador for that party.
The Democrats have been here before. They were last in this position in 1988, following Michael Dukakis’s disastrous collapse against George H.W. Bush, but this is a far more severe situation for them than 1988 was. After all, in 1988 George H.W. Bush was elected president, and he was bound to give away the proverbial store to them over the next four years — which he did.
Donald Trump is a different animal altogether, of course. He’s systematically tearing down the entire edifice of “Our Democracy” that the Party of Obama built, whether it’s a demolition of the USAID graft engine, a lopping-off of the FBI’s weaponized leadership, a strategic about-face on foreign policy, or massive changes at the Pentagon. And a whole lot more structural changes to the federal government which dramatically affect the status quo.
All of these are actions that cut into the meat of the power base of the Democrat Party, its easy sources of funding (when the full scope of the graft, corruption, and self-dealing at USAID is known, for example, the outrage of the public will not be easily contained) and the incentives for being an activist in that party.
Because if you consider it, being a performative leftist crank in America is not a bad existence. When Democrats are in power there are cozy sinecures in government — or if not, then in the “private sector,” loosely defined to include non-governmental organizations lavishly funded for purposes that are, at best, ineffectual at achieving honest goals but more likely relatively effective at doing real damage to our national interests.
Or there’s academia. And you can be an utter idiot and still pull down a six-figure job at some university somewhere.
Not to mention the lush consulting gigs that await the well-connected in a Democrat administration.
Until this Trump term, exactly nobody has sought to put a stop to the graft and waste and change that status-quo structure. This one is finally endeavoring to do that. And it’s a major problem for the Democrats. (RELATED: Elon Musk and Chris Murphy: The Old Game Keeps On Failing)
When Martin chose to screech about Elon Musk in his acceptance speech, it signaled a real problem: America likes Elon Musk better than the Democrat Party. Elon Musk makes cars and robots and satellite internet and rockets that can go to space and land on the launch pad. Elon Musk is on the way to rescue stranded astronauts in space.
And Ken Martin hates Elon Musk because Musk wants to scrub waste out of a federal government that is $2 trillion per year in the red.
What’s Ken Martin got to offer instead of that? What’s David Hogg got?
Some of the other vice chairs are even less appealing. For example, here’s another one…
I want to bring back and engage our caucuses & councils. I’m the National Campaigns Director of the @AFLCIO. I want to make sure that our message is reaching, working class voters, working families. The issues that count about who we are, knowing our audience and making it happen pic.twitter.com/Ypx9RfPLmY
— ArtieBlanco (@ArtieBlancoSays) January 31, 2025
A Mexican community organizer for a union who speaks about the loathsome Harry Reid as some sort of sleazeball demigod.
And another one…
.@malcolmkenyatta has been a key leader in protecting voting rights, expanding worker protections, enacting common-sense gun safety policies, & rooting out government corruption and waste.
Raise a #CupOfJoe to the new DNC Vice Chair!#DemsUnited pic.twitter.com/EL3psVTCgJ
— TizzyWoman 🗽 ☮️ ~ Keep moving forward (@tizzywoman) February 2, 2025
A gay state rep from a deep-blue legislative district in Philadelphia who also thinks the secret is “organizing.”
I’ve said this, but the Democrat Party has been built, since Barack Obama took it over in the runup to the 2008 cycle, off of a 20th century socialist model of “community organizing.” Meaning, that their foundation isn’t trying to meet voters where they are and craft a policy agenda that is relevant to national success and widespread popularity, but instead to pull together a coalition of the most aggrieved, most disaffected, and most motivated rent-seekers and supplicants to government that can be found.
Everything Obama did before getting into elective politics was about not making anyone’s lives better but instead making them angry enough about their station that he, as the organizer of those disaffected and underprivileged souls, might have the political power to move local officials. And that’s what he bequeathed to the dimestore wannabe Obamas now taking over the remnants of that party.
They’re where they were in 1988 when the final vestiges of pointy-headed Northeastern liberalism were being packed away only to make a meek comeback in the person of the hapless John Kerry in 2004 before Obama’s rise. Except, what saved their relevance following Dukakis’s disaster was the Bill Clinton “New Democrat” revamp of 1992.
Let’s not oversell that, of course. Clinton’s resuscitation of the Democrats would never have happened but for the nonstop betrayal by Bush 41 of his own base, much of which abandoned him for Ross Perot’s third-party run in 1992 and 1996. And, Clinton’s first policy initiative was to let his wife have a crack at imposing a national socialized medicine scheme on the country, which was paid off in a historic mid-term blowout loss to Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans. Furthermore, Clinton was about as unideological a power-seeker as was possible to have. Following that 1994 defeat, the response by his team was, as Dick Morris later noted, that “we’re all Eisenhower Republicans now.”
But at least Clinton understood the value of a thorough re-brand, and the Democrats were a party willing to try it in 1992.
Those conditions don’t really exist now.
Trump is bound to be awfully controversial in this term. That’s who he is and it’s also who he needs to be given the challenges in front of him. But what’s easy to predict is that he’s going to fix a lot of things everybody knows are broken, and that will redound much to the good for his party going forward even if the voters turn on Trump personally (and some will, but certainly not most, given the loyalty of his base).
But no matter how controversial he might be, there will still be the contrast between Trump’s reforms and the absolutely broken government Joe Biden left him on Jan. 20. People won’t forget that.
And they also won’t forget their disdainful treatment at the hands of the DEI and climate change lunatics, or the obnoxious and even deadly transgender mob, or the Mexican flag-waving illegals now blocking streets across the country protesting very popular deportations of illegal-alien criminals. Or any of the other recent or current abuses of the Hard Left that Obama invited in as the active ingredient in Democrat politics.
Like Clinton, Obama was a talented politician. Unlike Clinton, Obama — and especially with Biden, his defective puppet, “governing” in his stead the past four years — wrecked the place.
Until they shake off his legacy, Obama is going to haunt the Democrats. And you do not shake off Barack Obama’s legacy with a derivative Deep State leftist social-media motormouth like David Hogg or community-organizing identitarians like Artie Flores and Malcolm Kenyatta as key voices in the room.
There’s a reason they’re in the wilderness. It’s the same reason they’re going to be there for a while. Until this changes, until they learn something, that’s a dead party walking. And America needs it to be.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Five Quick Things: Scenes From a Commonsense Revolution
Pharmahontas on the Warpath at the RFK Jr. Hearings
Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It
