Democrats have a perception problem according to The New York Times, Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward:
After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as “apex predators,” like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive.
Admit it, you smiled when you read that. If you didn’t smile, you lack human emotions.
Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage. Its standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990 — after a defeat that felt like both a political and cultural rejection.
Communities that Democrats had come to count on for a generation or more — young people, Black voters, Latinos — all veered toward the right in 2024, some of them sharply.
The stark reality is that the downward trend for Democrats stretches back further than a single election. Republicans have been gaining ground in voter registration for years. Working-class voters of every race have been steadily drifting toward the G.O.P. And Democrats are increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites, the defenders of a political and economic system that most Americans feel is failing them.
Wait a second. The light bulb just went on. A problem for Democrats is that they are “increasingly perceived as the party of college-educated elites.”
Well, well, well, perhaps there’s a political method to going after elite colleges like Harvard, whether intended for that purpose or not. Trump is picking a fight even Democrats know he will win with the broader electorate regardless of how the courts rule.
Democrats have another problem. Men.
Even the gender gap — which had long benefited Democrats — helped Republicans in 2024 as men swung harder to the right.
Now, top party officials, activists and donors are broadly weighing how to rebuild, and reassessing how to speak to voters, how to listen to them and how to reach those who have tuned out entirely….
For now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.
“Above all, we must shift from a moralizing tone,” it urges.
Yeah, that’s the ticket, that will work. Almost as well as Pajama Boy:
But seriously. As Mike points out, “Treating men like an alien species should work out just great.”
David Hogg actually makes sense here, that shows you how weird things are getting:
DNC Vice Chair David Hogg recently proposed that the left could address their issues with young men by letting them “focus” on what they should be focused on, “which is how to get laid and how to have fun.”
On the other hand:
Dems have been there, done that.
I don’t think they are going to make it.
El Rushbo would call it the “chickification” of the Democrat Party:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Twenty-two women, not a single man, not a guy. There’s not a guy in this picture. And what this picture is, is the Hillary Clinton press corps. This is it.[…]Chickification of the news is exactly right and this is the epitome of it. If you wonder why the Hillary news coverage is the way it is, you simply have to look at that picture. You simply have to find out who it is covering the news about her, and it will tell you everything you need to know. And this is done, by the way, on purpose. The chickification of the news is made up of many facets, but one of the facets is that men really can’t be fair to women. Not that they try to be unfair, but they just can’t fully relate. It takes a woman to understand a woman. It takes a woman to get deep with another woman. It takes a woman to understand. And so, that’s the press gaggle that follows Hillary Clinton around. Print, online, radio, TV — you name it. And it’s better than anything anybody could ever say to explain the type of and the nature of the sympathetic coverage that Hillary Clinton gets. Hillary Clinton is perceived to be a victim. She’s always playing the victim card. She’s always whining about being a woman, or making a point of being a woman — as though that’s somehow an obstacle and it’s punishing in our unfair society. And as a way of equalizing it, everybody covering her also happens to be female. [Transcription via Media Matters]
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