DNC Attacks Far-Left Democrats for Election Losses, Does Not Want to Be ‘Freak Show’ Party
The establishment wing of the Democrat party is trying to prevent the radical left from controlling the Democratic National Committee (DNC) after Republicans reclaimed the Senate, White House, and maintained control of the House.
The infighting underscores the lack of leadership among Democrat ranks. The bruising turmoil has reached such a pitch that Democrats have begun to summon enough courage to leak negative comments about Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the once-championed leader of the party.
Democrats will have to elect a new DNC chair in the coming weeks, but that process would appear to demand a consensus on why Trump won in a landslide. A unified consensus does not appear in sight.
Establishment Democrats want their radical left allies to stop pushing the intersectional politics of wokeism, but many on the far left doubled down. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for example, believes Democrats lost big because Hispanic and black voters are misogynists.
“The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” Joseph Paolino Jr., DNC committeeman for Rhode Island, told Politico. “I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day.”
“I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics,” a DNC member from Florida told the outlet. “And you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”
“I do think there’s this whole sentiment that we just went too far out there on identity, and it allowed the Republicans to really attack us at every turn as a result, and that we just essentially did not focus on just the everyday issues of Americans,” another DNC member from California said.
Politico reported on the party’s turmoil:
The race for chair — the party’s first real reckoning with its brutal Election Day outcome up and down the ballot — is wide open, with nearly a dozen names floated as possible successors to replace Jaime Harrison, who is not expected to run again. Potential contenders include some Democrats with formidable resumes, including Wisconsin Democratic Party leader Ben Wikler, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin, ex-White House infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, among others.
Party officials are expected to wait until the next chair is seated, likely early next year, to decide on a formal review of Democrats’ failings in the election. But the recriminations over Harris’ loss to Donald Trump are already reverberating throughout the DNC — and influencing members’ outlook on the chair’s race, the first step the party will take to chart its post-defeat direction.
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President Joe Biden’s Democratic National Committee and his installed chair, Harrison, are by no means considered progressive insurgents. But the body has been subject to tactical shifts before. Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, party officials stripped superdelegates of much of their power in the presidential nominating process, a victory for the left after a primary in which superdelegates overwhelmingly supported Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Today, among at least some members of the party, there is a sense that the party has drifted too far leftward in its messaging.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
