By Matt Rooney
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If you needed further confirmation that the Democrats are under a dark cloud in 2020, Save Jerseyans, you got it last night in Iowa. It’s 7:21 Tuesday morning as I write this and there’s still no confirmation of an Iowa Caucuses winner. Not because the results are super close a la Florida 2000 (Bernie appears to have won a comfortable victory based on the unofficial tallies); old fashioned incompetence and a failed caucus app turned the Democrats’ first big Election 2020 poll into a complete nightmare.
Of course, things were going sideways long before the failures and recriminations presently roiling Hawkeye State Democrats.
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Democrats wasted the first three years of Donald Trump’s first term talking about Russiagate and, now, Ukrainegate. How’s that working out for them? Not well. The end result looks to be a Senate acquittal later this week (after the President’s State of the Union scheduled for Tuesday evening at which time POTUS will have the ultimate platform to frame the situation in his favor).
It didn’t need to be like this. Democrats could’ve focused on something else; an issue like health care, for instance, one which is proven to move voters in battleground states/districts (it did in 2018) and for which national Republicans have yet to coalesce around a plan of their own.
Now it’s too late. The chess board is set. Hatred of Trump – the ultimate lazy ‘base service’ play – took over and completely consumed Democrats’ messaging. That’s the only cognizable Democrat issue at the moment besides socialism, something the party’s leadership would rather not talk about. Trump hasn’t scored a ‘checkmate’ quite yet, but this is definitely ‘check.’
What now?
Russiagate is over.
Ukrainegate will be over shortly.
The primary season is off to a disastrous start. Mayor Pete’s sycophants are already battling the Bernie Bros on Twitter in the wake of the Iowa meltdown. Weeks – no, months! – of trading accusations and recycling conspiracy theories lie ahead. The once heralded “mainstream” Democrat caretaker Joe Biden who some theorized could easily defeat Trump in purple America looks to have not even finished in the top three.
Other Democrats are blaming Iowa’s caucus tradition; call me crazy, but the caucuses seemed to go off well enough until the Dems introduced their app and post-2016 “reforms.” It’s textbook Democrat behavior: take a tradition/institution, f— it up through unnecessary, arrogant tinkering, and then claim the problem was the tradition/institution all along. They’re risking alienating Iowa voters in the process in a state that they could definitely use in their column come November. They’re also going to continue answering questions about their own questionable electoral practices after they’ve already made unproven election interference their #1, #2, and #3 issues for the general election.
More ominous still: according to NBC News, “[t]his year’s level of new participants is well shy of that in 2008, when a whopping 57 percent of Democrats said they had never caucused before.” Only 35%! Well below even 2016 when it was 44%. No enthusiasm. No excitement. Grim.
The implosion is well underway, folks. And this is only stage #2.
Stage #3 will commence when impeachment and Iowa fade from the headlines and casually-engaged Americans start to hear for the first time what this crop of Democrats actually believe.
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