The Democrat party is facing such a host of seemingly intractable problems — structural, financial, legal, and ideological — that it will be close to a miracle if it survives after this year’s midterms. The below-deck shuffles — encouraging illegal alien votes, manipulating the census, making crooked voting almost impossible to check, and stuffing their pockets with illegal contributions through ActBlue and pay-to-play schemes of USAID and NGOs — are all suddenly being exposed and blocked.
Empty Pockets
Jeff Childers has done a thorough job explaining the party’s terminal crisis. Being short of funds is a good start.
The Laundromat is Closed
Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.
Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”
The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.
The RNC has no debt and, as of March, has almost $117 million in cash on hand. The DNC has about $13.9 million cash on hand, but with $18.4 million in debts/loans owed. (By my arithmetic, that means the DNC is broke and faces a significant disadvantage in November.)
An Honest Census
The 2020 Census seriously miscounted the population. The Obama administration “scrambled real population data and distorted political representation.”
@StephenM: “The combination of illegal alien apportionment, flawed censuses, and unconstitutional racially gerrymandered districts created an artificial 40-plus House seats for Democrats.” and the overthrow of the U.S. government in 2020.
Meaning: Unless Democrats can segregate congressional districts based on race, count illegal aliens in the census, and end requirements to show an ID to vote, they are obsolete — dead and gone.
By the way, they admitted it because they got caught.
Add to an honest accounting the fact that blue states are hemorrhaging residents who are fleeing to red states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, and you can see where the power shift leads.
Structural Problems: A Gerontocracy and an Odd Assemblage of Disparate Factions
The party’s leaders are increasingly old and clinging to ideas that have proven unworkable and unpopular. The party’s central theme is opposition to Trump in everything, even the privately financed, long-needed ballroom. Sure, some of their fans and consultants have warned them to become more values-oriented — and given the president’s continued victories across the board, that’s sage advice. But they can’t take it, as Childers details.
They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.
Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half. [snip] Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.
Sensible voters want secure borders, effective policing, and men kept out of women’s bathrooms. The party can advocate for none of these without losing the fringe 11% essential to their present hodge-podge of support. And don’t even hint that they should support what the vast majority want — honest, accountable election systems — because for decades their viability depends on chaotic, crookedly run ones.
The Virginia and U.S. Supreme Courts this week just compounded the Party’s problems.
Briefly, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, in clear contradiction to her campaign promises, tried to put over a lobster-shaped gerrymander of the state to turn her party’s 6-5 district advantage into a ten-seat one. In doing so, she bypassed the independent redistricting commission, rushed a dishonestly worded constitutional amendment after over a million Virginians had already voted, and established procedures in clear violation of the state’s constitution. In doing so and defending their action in court, the Virginia Democrats blew in the neighborhood of $70 million dollars at a time when, as I have explained above, the party coffers were quite bare. The state court threw out the redistricting. The Virginia Supreme Court decision is not subject to U.S. Supreme Court review as Bill Shipley so clearly explains.
In the meantime, some Republican states, inspired by this attempted grab, decided they’d redistrict before the midterms, too.
In a sloppy pleading that misspelled both “Attorney” and “Virginia,” the state seeks to undo the state court ruling. I can’t imagine they will succeed in that.
Adding to the Democrats’ troubles, the Supreme Court ruled that the Voting Rights Act did not compel the creation of majority-minority districts and, in fact, the Constitution banned creating districts based on race. The combination of Spanberger’s aggressive and illegal play and the clarification of the VRA spurred more Republican states to redistrict, and Republicans may enter November with an eight-seat advantage. (The Cook Report projects Republicans will net +8 House seats from redistricting alone. To win in November, the Democrats will need to flip 11 or more seats, which seems very unlikely.)
Pollster Frank Lutz seems to concede the Democrats have lost any usual midterm advantage.
The Republican wins may be locked in for 2026, but 2028 is another story. Democrats are already laying the groundwork to go scorched-earth. Republicans who so far haven’t budged over the last year may also hop in, especially the Southern states that don’t seem likely to redraw before November, like Georgia.
“It’s not over until it’s over,” said Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust who drew Texas’ map last summer.
On the horizon, the Democrats’ disadvantages may grow even more than they have already. The drive for voter IDs and restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as increased scrutiny of voter rolls and prosecution for election malfeasance, continues. Further, the Biden administration turned off the fraud detection switch for four years, and we are promised that the billions of dollars fraudulently disbursed are being tracked down and the results made public.
Gavin Newsom’s Brilliant Strategy
Of course, in arguing that the Democrats are in something of a death spiral, I may have overlooked the genius of California’s governor. You’ve heard of the Roman plan to keep the populace on your side — give them bread and circuses. Gavin’s shrewd plan is to give them disposable diapers.
He plans to spend $20 million in taxpayer dollars to give 400 diapers to each of the 100,000 families with newborns. Math is always very hard for Democrats. The state will be paying 8-10 times more by giving out diapers instead of giving people cash to buy the diapers themselves. On the other hand, doing it this way means Gavin’s and his wife’s friends will get their “beaks in,” as Tony Soprano would say. Give it to an NGO and pay its officers munificently for distributing the diapers — otherwise these friends of the Newsoms could profit only by arming themselves and holding up the 100,000 families buying diapers at Costco.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 