I Blame the Democrats

For not ‘reading the room’ well.

Photo by Laine Cooper on Unsplash

In a two-party system, the most important voter is the one in the middle. Loose sight of that voter, and the other party will win.

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A nice surprise about democracy in the United States is that at the Federal level one can often see a 50/50 struggle taking place. Not all, but many elections at the Federal level are neck-and-neck, nail-biters. That means the voters from a collective perspective are doing their best to keep both parties at bay. That is a big compliment to voters in the USA; they are politically savvy in a collective manner.

Even today, with the Republicans taking the nation to an extreme situation that most would agree is un-American, the political balance is actually very close to 50/50. The Trump camp ‘just happens’ to control all three places of political power with Presidency, Senate and House.

Clearly, the Democrats will win control back of one and perhaps two of them this fall — it’s near impossible for them to screw up.

Yet looking back, one can see a Democratic party that did not read the room well. Not in 2016, not well in 2020, and not in 2024.

Instead of embracing the center voters, political choices were made that benefited Donald Trump — twice .

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Though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, the political reality in the United States is that the voters are subjected to a voting system that removes fairness from the outcomes. Land mass supersedes voters with, for instance, Wyoming getting two senators for their 600,000 inhabitants and California also getting two senators for its almost 40 million people.

It does not mean a thing to win the popular vote.

Trump won two elections, and the democratic party is to blame.

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The voter in the middle (and in the middle of the country) could not vote in large enough numbers for a woman. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost the elections.

• Trump, an imperfect candidate if there ever was one, won twice from a woman.

Joe Biden winning the 2020 election shows that the voter in the middle can vote for a Democratic candidate against a populist like Trump. Both men being very old put them at an equal footing, and Biden won, probably because the voters in the middle were sick of Trump.

But they walked that choice back to Trump when a female became the Democratic candidate yet again. The voter in the middle could not vote for her.

• Imagine if the Democratic candidate had been male and in his fifties or sixties in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and Trump the Republican candidate.

Trump would have lost all three elections because the voter in the middle would have had a real choice she could have embraced.

Yes, a good number of women did not vote for a woman as president, and they happen to coalesce with the center of men who could not vote for a woman.

• It only takes a small percentage to flip the outcome one way or the other. Our system functions that way; it is not fair all by itself. The voter in the middle decides the elections.

Yet that is not the problem.

The Democratic party not reading the room, that is the problem.

The Democrats put candidates forward that would not win the elections.

• The reason the Democrats did what they did is easy to understand. But… that did not coincide with their reading the room correctly.

The USA ranked 76th in the world in 2019 based on female representation. Clearly, the voters in the USA overall are not in favor of female presidents, but the ones that matter most are the voters in the middle.

Female representation is not as bad as it was around 2000 (one in seven representatives were females back then, before both parties involved themselves in a massive campaign to attract more women), but it is not good enough still.

Compete for a single seat, and the loud mouth can actually win more seats than the gentle type.

The built-in characteristics of our voting system color the results.

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The truth?

The United States has a two-party system. It means that in the long run disaster is courted.

We have the centennial ‘celebration’ of the 1929 Wall Street crash coming up. Our wealthy are wealthy again like they were in the 1920s. The middle class is pushed down (not hungry, not dying, but struggling) and the lower class is oppressed, with too many being hungry, and a disturbing number dying in our eternal civil wars playing out on our streets among gangs and with innocent lives taken out by lone wolves.

• Divide-and-conquer may not win all the time, but it wins too often.

The two-party system does not organize the nation toward long-term stability. With the New Deal, the best decades of the nation took shape after which the Republicans started to bring it down to where we are today (Reagan was the first to take the slippery slope back down to full economic competition instead of regulating society for all).

The Democratic party is to blame. They were not able to correct the steps taken to the right; the nation is not centered around its political center; there is a black hole inside our political system.

People vote for an extreme candidate when the other option is considered undesired by the voters in the middle. It takes just a small number of them to swing the elections one way or the other.

The Democratic politicians do not read the room, and they are not reading the room well still.

[embed]Shaking the Box Just Up or Down How a two-party system will always create a class society.fred-rick.medium.com