JUST STOP, DEMOCRATS -- YOU'VE DONE ENOUGH 2024 ELECTION POST-MORTEMS

Here's a headline that appeared at Politico this morning:

Gosh, where could they have possibly gotten that impression?

I'll say it again: Democrats, if you don't want voters to think your party is "weak and woke," stop saying that it's "weak and woke" every time there's a microphone in your face. If voters have a bad impression of your party, maybe you're the problem.

This is a new 2024 post-mortem:

The nine-month, 21-state research project is ... aimed at solving the Democratic Party’s electoral challenges after their sweeping losses in 2024. It was funded by Democracy Matters, a nonprofit aligned with flagship Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, and backed by months of polling, dozens of focus groups and message testing.

It's not to be confused with the 2024 post-mortem we were all talking about last week:

Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report....

The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings....

Democrats need to stop doing so many damn post-mortems, and they need to stop publicly proclaiming that the party is in trouble. It would help if every Democrat ran on a set of serious, bold ideas that would improve people's lives, which is the approach Zohran Mamdani is winning on. The ideas don't need to be the same all over the country, but they shouldn't be the beveled, focus-group-tested mush that's likely to result from all these post-mortems.

On other issues, they could try being proud of themselves, rather than ashamed. Both of the post-mortems I've cited say that the issue of trans scholastic athletes is seriously hurting Democrats, even though the Democrat listed in the Welcome report as having the most impressive "performance relative to expectations in [his] most recent election," Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, has won two statewide elections while remaining supportive of trans athletes. What would happen if more Democrats refused to flinch -- or made the GOP's obsession with trans people the issue? I love what Don Scott, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, says here about Winsome Earle-Sears, the trans-obsessed GOP candidate for governor in his state:

Scott: Her whole race is about policing bathrooms. They’re the pee-and-poop caucus. That’s all they do—they police where kids are going to the bathroom. They’re not worried about where kids are learning or what they’re getting out of school.

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) October 23, 2025 at 6:26 PM

Maybe you think that's not a message for general consumption. (Scott says this on a liberal podcast). But in the case of another issue on which Republicans are presumed to have an advantage -- crime -- why aren't Democrats talking the way Maryland governor Wes Moore does at the end of the following clip? I don't like the fact that in the middle of this clip Moore does what Democratic consultants tell all Democrats to do -- he uses the word "distraction" and pivots to kitchen-table issues -- but the end of this is straight fire:

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Moore says:

If [President Trump] really wants to address the issue of violent crime, he just needs to look at what we've done in the state of Maryland over the past two and a half years, where when I first became governor in 2022, Baltimore was averaging almost a murder a day. Now, the homicide rate in Baltimore is nearly a fifty-year low and we have watched how the state of Maryland has essentially helped to lead the country in drops in violent crime, in drops in non-fatal shootings, in drops in carjackings. So, if he truly wants to understand how to lower crime, he should pay attention to what we're doing in the state of Maryland. And I did it without ever having to once operationalize our National Guard to do municipal policing.

There have been crime declines in Democratic cities and states all over the country since 2020. If I were the Democrats, I'd be producing clips of mayors and governors across America making that point, showing safe neighborhoods, citing crime-drop statistics, and adding -- to the accompaniment of chaos scenes from Trump's occupations -- "and we did it without tanks in the streets or turning neighborhoods into war zones."

Republicans are vulnerable. Donald Trump's job approval is 41% in a new ABC/Washington Post poll, and his disapproval rating is 59%. His numbers are the same in a new CBS poll, and are 43%-55% in a new NBC poll. The Welcome report laments the fact that Democrats are increasingly seen as too liberal, while the percentage of voters who think Republicans are too conservative declined in recent years:

But look at the dot in the upper right corner of the Republican chart. That's where Republicans are now. So Democrats should treat Republicans as extremely out of touch.

These post-mortems lament the fact that Trump made inroads with Black, Hispanic, and young voters in 2024, while retaining his strength among non-college-educated voters, But look at the Post/ABC poll. Trump's approval-disapproval numbers among Blacks are 16%/84%. They're 34%/66% among Hispanics, 33%/66% among 18-to-29-year-olds, and 42%/59% among those who never attended college.

It's not November 2024 anymore. Democrats should stop acting as if it is.