Progressives Don’t Want to Learn From Their Mistakes

Most progressives seem to be doubling down on their claims that misogynistic, racist, fascist-like Donald Trump will doom the nation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC) claimed, “We are about to enter a period of fascism and authoritarianism.” For MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Harris lost because white women were unwilling to vote for a black woman: “This will be the second opportunity that White women in this country have had to change the way that they interact with the patriarchy.” She continued, “If people aren’t receptive to it, and if people vote more party line, or more on race than on gender, and on protecting their gender, there’s really not much more that you can do.”

What AOC, Reid, and most other progressives ignore in their post-election assessments is why so many Latinos voted for Trump, including a majority of Latino men. The data shows that among black voters, the leakage to Trump was modest, and Harris still obtained 84 percent of the black vote. What this misses was the decline in black voter turnout. 

This decline in turnout was most apparent in Philadelphia. There, Harris obtained 47,000 fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, while Trump’s vote total increased by less than 10,000. Similarly in Detroit, Harris’s shortfall was 60,000, while Trump only gained 24,000. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the 524 counties with the highest share of black residents, total votes fell by 3.8 percent. More generally, in counties that Biden won in 2020, total votes declined by more than 4 percent — while those won by Trump increased by almost 4 percent. Nationally, the black share of the total vote in 2024 was only 11 percent, down from 13 percent four years ago. As a result, much of the leakage of black voters was due to their decision to not vote at all rather than vote for Trump. For progressives, like Barack Obama, it was chalked up to the misogyny of black men who were unwilling to vote for a black woman.

The decline in black voting is a repeat of the 2022 elections. In an earlier article, I noted:

In NYC, 90 percent of black voters selected Hochul. However, voter turnout plummeted. This decline was most dramatic in the Bronx, the poorest and most nonwhite borough, where it declined from 36% to 24% while it remained the same outside New York City. In Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit, turnout fell 10 percent to 12 percent beneath 2018 levels while turnout increased in the rest of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Bernie Sanders highlighted this working-class rejection: “[It]should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” He continued, “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

The problem for Democrats is that giving any priority to working-class initiatives would undermine the identity politics that energizes the party’s base. As a result, white professionals who provided the backbone of Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, now ignore his views. For these white professionals, black and Latino men voted for Trump, not because of anti-working-class policies, but because of their misogynist attitudes and the misinformation they absorbed.

This rejection of working-class priorities was most evident in the last New York City mayoral election. The educated, white professional class backed Maya Wiley, who campaigned on defunding the police. She received less than one-fifth of the black vote — with the eventual winner Eric Adams receiving more than three-fifths. It demonstrated they had little regard for stemming the high crime rate in black neighborhoods where residents overwhelmingly rejected any cuts in policing. 

Sanders’s stance was also present after the 2020 election. As a New York Times reporter put it, “Conor Lamb, who survived a Republican challenge in Pennsylvania, says Democrats were given a message on Election Day: Backlash to progressive policies risks killing their House majority.” Unfortunately, the congressional progressive caucus did not heed Lamb’s advice. Nor did they take seriously the evidence provided over the last year by political scientist and commentator, Ruy Texeira, that Democrat policy priorities were not viewed positively by a large share of working-class Americans. 

My fear is that the Democrat party will remain captive of the progressive left, unwilling to sacrifice its identity politics agenda. Indeed, this was the tone of Kamala Harris’s concession speech. At no point did she even suggest that Democrats should listen more to American working people or learn from mistakes made. Instead, she only urged continued resistance. I fear that centrist Democrats are too few to steer the party away from its current priorities and only a defeat in the 2026 midterm elections would force it to seriously rethink its positions.

Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of a forthcoming book, Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come?

READ MORE from Robert Cherry:

Supporting the Hamas Fantasy of Israel’s Destruction

Would a Harris Presidency Help Blacks?

How Best To Fulfill King’s Aspirations

The post Progressives Don’t Want to Learn From Their Mistakes appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.