Why He Won

The candidate I desperately hoped would lose has won. Rather than insisting the election was stolen or planning to storm the Capitol in January, I’m going to accept the results and pray for the best. 

To my friends on the right: Congratulations. Truly. I know how strongly you felt about this election. I know you love this country. And I sincerely hope I’m proven wrong about how disastrous I expect the next four years to be. 

To my friends on the left: I know how you’re feeling, because it’s how I feel. Shocked, stunned, sickened, that our fellow Americans would elect a seditious rapist felon. I wish it had gone differently. 

That’s the subject of this article: what my friends on the left need to learn from this election so that things may go differently in the future. Because if the lesson you come away with is “half the country is racist/sexist/stupid/hateful,” you will learn nothing and you will continue to lose elections. Brace yourselves for some tough love. 

First, a few caveats. Some things you can’t help. Global inflation causing prices to rise during your incumbent’s term is just bad luck. Bird flu causing 100 million chickens to be destroyed and egg prices to skyrocket will be blamed on the sitting administration, no matter how irrationally. The 30% or so of the Republican base who believe every wild conspiracy and that Democrats are all evil and want to destroy America cannot be reasoned with. I am not talking about them here.

I’m talking about normal Americans. Independents. Regular Republicans who don’t think Trump is perfect, just better than the alternative. You can appeal to them. If you want to win elections, you must appeal to them. Here’s how. 

Stop being extremists. 

I know. You don’t believe you’re an extremist. (Does anyone?) And maybe you, personally, aren’t. But Democrats in general hold several positions that America—a center-right nation whether you like it or not—despises. 

Immigration. The Biden administration has been terrible on immigration. Despicable as it was, there’s a reason Trump killed the bipartisan border bill: He knew he could run on this issue. In your lefty bubble, you may not have heard the names Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin, or others murdered by illegal immigrants. Rest assured that Americans on the right have heard them. Can you even imagine one of your loved ones being murdered by someone who shouldn’t have been here in the first place? They have imagined it. It’s a powerful motivator. 

If you shrug about millions of immigrants flowing into the country unvetted, you are the extremist, not the 73% of Americans who believe tightening security at the southern border should be an important priority for our government. Scolding them for saying “illegal” instead of “undocumented” will not win you any supporters, either. 

Come up with, and implement, a real, sustainable border policy, or it will continue to bite you.  

Abortion. Many people thought Dobbs would drive a blue wave this election. It did almost certainly have a lot to do with the gender gap this time around, but as we know, it wasn’t nearly enough. And Kamala campaigned hard on a woman’s right to choose. 

It’s true that a large majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Democrats know this, and hammer on it nonstop. What they refuse to acknowledge is that a large majority of Americans also support restrictions on elective abortions based on gestational age. Roughly 65% believe they should be illegal in the second trimester, and nearly 80% want them banned in the third trimester. 

Democrats, to my knowledge, do not support any restrictions on abortion for any reason, at any stage. This is a wildly extremist position, shared by only a handful of nations on earth, including China and North Korea. It’s seen by your fellow Americans as barbaric, and it will continue to hurt you at the ballot box if you don’t moderate your stance. 

(“No one is aborting late-term healthy pregnancies!” I can hear you shouting. Fine. Then you should have no problem banning late-term elective abortions. Right?)

Israel. While Gen Z has been brainwashed on TikTok into wearing keffiyehs and staging their tentifada on college campuses, 80% of Americans still support Israel over Hamas in this war. Sixty percent of us want to continue providing military support at least until the American hostages are released. 

If there’s something Americans hate more than terrorists, I can’t think what it could be. Siding with terrorists is, unsurprisingly, an unpopular position to take.

Putting up with campus antisemitism, and tepid-at-best support for Israel puts Democrats at odds with the large majority of Americans. Stop it.

Trans. You think this issue is being blown out of proportion. Maybe so. But when you make a claim as radical as “human beings can change sex,” you should expect pushback. When you claim to be the party of women, but cannot define “woman,” you should expect derision. When you call trans-identified males “women,” but call women “cervix-havers” and “chest-feeders” and “vagina owners” and “bleeders,” you should expect them to feel insulted and demeaned. When you tell women they must accept males on their podiums and in their prisons and changing rooms and rape crisis centers, you should expect a not-insignificant portion of them (and their husbands and fathers) to tell you to take a hike. When you swear up and down that no one is performing irreversible sex reassignment surgeries on minors, but people can do a 3-second AI search and see that you are either lying or ignorant, you should expect their contempt. 

Sixty percent of Americans say a person’s gender is determined by their birth sex—and that number has been growing steadily for years. 

Americans are generally kind, live-and-let-live people. So go ahead and advocate for trans-identified people to be treated with dignity and afforded the same rights as anyone else. But stop demanding everyone change their language and their science-backed beliefs, and that women give up their own hard-won rights. Stop being an extremist. 

Latinos. Last night I saw a lot of disbelief from progressives that they’d lost so much ground with this demographic. I have only guesses, but I think they’re good ones. 

First, these are voters, therefore they are citizens. They’re here legally. My understanding is that many of them, especially those who immigrated here and became naturalized, resent those living here illegally for not following the rules and jumping through all the hoops they had to. So again, fix your immigration extremism. 

Second, this is a heavily Catholic population. They disagree with you about abortion. Stop being extremist on abortion. 

Finally, they hate the made-up term Latinx. I mean, they hate it. And it’s not Republicans calling them that. Ninety-six percent of American Latinos have never used it to describe themselves. Half have never heard of it, to be fair, but of the half who have, 75% say it shouldn’t be used to describe Latinos or Hispanics. 

White liberals trying to force a more “inclusive” nongendered term onto the speakers of a gendered language against their will is a perfect distillation of how conservatives view you. Knock it off. 

Birth rate. I have the least hope of this one changing in the slighest, but here goes. Our birth rate is the lowest it’s been in a century. Young people are waiting longer and longer to start families—if they ever start families. It’s going to wreak havoc on our economy and society if we do nothing—though it is a good reason to advocate for streamlined, legal immigration.

But while the Millennials and Zoomers of the left have been building their careers and posting travel selfies on Insta and camping out for Gaza and marching for abortion rights, do you know what conservatives and Catholics and evangelical Christians have been doing? Getting married and having babies. And raising them according to their values. 

You can’t expect to win the elections of the future when your opponents are outbreeding you. 

(To be fair, getting married and starting a family young is the extremist route by today’s standards. I just believe this factor could play an outsized role in the not-so-distant future.) 

In conclusion, I’ll repeat that America is a center-right country. The best thing the left can do to win voters is move toward the center. 

Brianna Wu, longtime progressive and Democrat operative, summed it up well on Twitter today:

“Democratic path forward: Jettison the commies, Hamas fans, and designer gender crowd. No more land acknowledgments. No more trying to please everyone. 

We have a point of view. Fight for normal people. Anything that gets in the way of that, we stop doing.”

My friends on the left, you’d do well to listen. Please don’t let this defeat go to waste. Learn from it.