How Trump’s Democratic conspirators delivered, with gusto | Opinion

By James McQueeny
To Democrats, their Presidential election loss is a baleful Mourning in America.
But there’s a disingenuousness at play here, much like that of Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca, who professed to be “shocked” that there was gambling in Rick’s Café — as he was stuffing his winnings into his pocket.
In so many ways, Trump should have invited Democrats up to his West Palm Beach podium election night to give them credit for his victory, too.
They worked four years to make it possible with their woke-joke excesses that overran their traditional patronage protection given by the middle class with their family values in a relationship dating back to FDR.
In an op-ed for this publication on July 11, I urged Joe Biden to quit the race, saying that any Democratic ticket with the name Biden or Harris on it would lose. Harris would be unable to shake off Biden’s incumbency fleas, I argued, which, by and large, is exactly what transpired. In fact, she even trailed most of Biden’s high water state numbers from four years earlier in the critical swing states.
Democrats should have opened their convention to the several fresh governor-candidates, who could have paired up with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer as their vice-President to forge a ticket that would have had a far better chance at beating Trump.
But, no, when Biden did bail, Harris afterwards campaigned as if she was only too happy to be spending an inheritance which this ticket switcheroo really was. She failed repeatedly to conceive and promote change.
Polls showed voters were begging for it. Inexplicably, her campaign let Trump cloak himself as the change-maker.
This was never more dramatized than when she appeared on “The View,” the afternoon women-dominated and friendly to her talk show. Asked a puff-ball question about how she would differ from Biden, she couldn’t come up with any difference. Say what?
I found other Democratic party tells abounding long before the actual campaign ensued which really rankled the base – such as those visions from California of tent cities and smash-and-grab robberies. Republicans did a good job at suggesting it was a horror movie “coming your way soon,” brought to you by politically whacky Democratic legislators and governors. Swing state residents in Nevada and Arizona even had a motto for it: “Don’t Californicate Us!”
Biden, Harris, and Democrats in Congress waffled from being tough on immigration to welcoming hordes that were sloshing their way across the Rio Grande. Although Trump torpedoed the bipartisan immigration reform fixes in Congress to keep the issue alive, nobody pays attention to Capitol Hill proceedings unless you are paid to be there. But voters did see nightly the clown show border control efforts. Harris’ no-show on the scene for an unconscionably long time — even after Biden deputized her to examine the source of the problem — hung as a lingering and negative perception about her ability.
Earlier and longer voting juiced the turnout in suburban constituencies that didn’t quite cotton to Harris as they did for Biden four years before. Democratic urban base performance has been faltering for years now, and the “machine vote” has lost a lot of its sprockets and couldn’t offset suburban party defectors or independents to Trump.
To them, the woke or “progressive” policies championed by Democrats seemed to be taking the party to a leftward drift, and Republicans simply began filling the vacuum in the middle with the middle class. It made the GOP seem “more like us.”
The biggest dog-whistle for a radicalism anathema to this part of the political spectrum were the gender identity wars. The transgender policy consequences of males playing in female sports was vexing. So many people in the Democratic base (and outside it) privately abhor the issue, but are careful about being as PC as possible. That restraint disappears in the voting booth.
My own canary-in-the-coal-mine moment occurred last summer when I was shocked to see the Catholic vote starting to sidle up to such an irreligious figure as Trump.
After Mass one day last summer, I asked the church sexton whether any parishioners had talked to him about this political dichotomy.
“I hear about it frequently, framed in that Ronald Reagan explanation about why he changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican,” he said. “Reagan said, “the party left me!”
James McQueeny is the former Washington bureau chief of The Star-Ledger. He is an adjunct professor and Fellow at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.