By Matthew Rosen
Last edition I commented on the current state of the Culture Wars, so this week I decided to shift over to the Political War. The reason for this is that the last two weeks contained two major revelations that could change the state of both major parties.
First of all, Bernie was crowned King of Democrats: The story of King Bernie began way back in 2012 when President Obama drained all of the DNC’s money in order to win his reelection. By paying for the reelection campaign, paying for consultants, and having Debbie Wasserman Schultz as a terrible chairwoman and manager of the DNC, the party was handed off to Donna Brazile with a $2 million debt in 2016.
You are probably wondering how the DNC’s finances in 2012 directly led to the crowning of King Bernie last week in 2017. Well, it’s quite simple. The DNC decided to handle its debt problem by handing themselves over to Hillary Clinton. Donna Brazile, the DNC chairwoman in 2016, stated that Hillary Clinton controlled the DNC since a year before her nomination. That means from at least the summer of 2015, Hillary has been raising money for the DNC; in turn, 99% of that money went back to supporting Hillary Clinton, while only 1% went towards state parties. Not only did Politico write about this, but Bernie Sanders, his campaign manager, and the Democratic State parties have all accused Hillary of money laundering.
So what? Obama spent all the money and Hillary capitalized on that by controlling the party through money laundering. Fast forward to this week, where the entire party decided to ditch Hillary. Donna Brazile, while previously defending Hillary Clinton during the election cycle, now turned on her and called her hostile takeover of the DNC “cancer.” The chief financial officer of the Clinton campaign basically told Brazile that the primaries were rigged. Lincoln Chafee and Elizabeth Warren also admitted that the DNC rigged the primaries in favor of Hillary. While all of these Democrats defended Hillary to the bitter end while she was in the race, she has officially been uncrowned and DUMPED. I am willing to bet that if Bernie Sanders decided to run again in 2020, he will win the nomination. Also, if Hillary ran again, she would lose and would not have the establishment support that she did before. This comes as a surprise because the Democratic Party has a history of not learning from its mistakes, but this time they finally learned from Hillary’s unpopularity, and basically bowed to Bernie Sanders. They all publicly made the rigging out to be a tragedy and totally came out to vindicate Bernie this last week. Bernie Sanders now has more political power than he ever had and is the current loudest voice in the party. Now what will he do with it?
He could: win the battle by running in 2020, or win the war by becoming a patron, start pulling some strings behind the scenes and endorsing those similar to him. Luckily for us, it is hard to see someone that far to the left (or that far to the right) winning the Presidency, but everyday it seems more and more likely. Either way, Bernie and his coalition will be harder to take down than the Hillary team.
Next, the new Democratic strategy vs Trump- I want to start this subsection by saying Happy Thanksgiving to all! I will be thankful this year that we have Donald Trump as our President, and not Hillary. Despite this, I wish to officially sound the alarms in the GOP in order to emphasize how crucial it is for a new strategy. Let me explain why.
In Virginia, Ed Gillespie lost Northam by almost ten points for Virginia governor. The troubling part is the Republican response of “well that was expected.” While true, it horribly looks over the troubling fact that Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie both got the same percent of the vote, 45%, but Trump only lost by 5 points. In short, what we know is Democratic turnout was much higher than expected. This is consistent throughout all of the elections, including the new Democratic Governor of New Jersey, Democratic gain in Washington, and a gain of fourteen state legislature seats in Virginia, which solidifies Virginia’s transition from red to purple to blue.
The reason for this was talked about in part one of this article: No one came out to vote for Hillary. Unfortunately, the Democrats as a whole have learned from one mistake, and that mistake was endorsing the worst candidate in American history, Hillary Clinton. With Democratic candidates on the ballot who aren’t Hillary, they are seeing a turnout.
The Democrats pulled off this major win last Tuesday by employing a two part strategy that Republicans need to find a way to beat. Step one: Slander Donald Trump on every medium possible, from the mainstream media, to Hollywood, to college campuses. Basically, they saturated everything people see with unreasonable criticism of Trump. When he does something dumb, they will blow it out of proportion; when he does something neutral, they will pretend it’s something bad; when he does something good, they will either spin it or not tell you it ever happened. The most recent example is Trump’s great trip to Asia. All of the good things he did were barely reported, while the one minorly bad thing he did was blown up. This example is a video showing Trump giving too much fish food to the fish. This was made out to be somehow bad, even though President Abe did it first and Trump was just following his lead. So step one for the Democrats is around the clock, 24/7 slandering President Trump.
Step two: Attach all Republicans to the unfairly slandered Trump. The most horrific example of this was the ad against Gillespie that featured a white man with a Confederate flag and a Gillespie bumper sticker trying to run over minorities, which ended with linking him to President Trump, essentially second-hand slandering Gillespie and other Republican candidates.
By implementing both steps one and two, the Democratic Party is artificially keeping President Trump’s approval ratings down by not allowing him to win over more than his base. As a result, Trump will not be able to get a larger turnout than in 2016, while the Democrats can (and will) with Hillary not on the ballot. This poses a major problem for the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 elections.
With Bernie as a vindicated man with support, he has power that he did not have in 2016. The Democrats also have a new strategy to take down the GOP majority and the Trump Presidency. This takedown of all things Trump is scary because President Trump is doing an excellent job, especially considering the failure of Congress. While the Democratic Party is getting crushed in the culture wars (talked about in the last edition), it is shifting in a positive direction when it comes to the political war. Republicans need a new strategy to combat this, or we may be losing our sweeping majorities across the federal, state, and local governments much sooner than we thought.