The Democratic Party in Trump's Fascist 2nd Term. Commentary, Ideas & Strategy (+ non Woketicism)

Newsom’s favorability rating surges in California - Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/09/newsoms-favorability-rating-surges-in-california-00681683

There's a lesson in here for the feckless Democrats. I wonder if they will learn it. They probably won't.

 

Newsom is a cautionary tale as well.. While he has definitely improved his standing by out trolling Trump, he also damaged his chances in the Dem primary by going hard to the center by platforming far right talking heads and taking dumps on trans athletes in his podcast.

If it weren't for his initial missteps after Trump's election, he would have been an easy win in the Democratic primary. Now the leftist wing of the party is going to spend the primary dogpiling him and whining that their candidate of choice isn't winning.

 

The leftist wing doesn't typically prevail in Democratic primaries.

They just throw general elections to fascists because they're sore losers with poor political judgment.

On the issues you mention, I actually expect Newsom is much closer to the median Democratic primary voter than you might be thinking. Definitely so on the trans athlete business.

 

I agree with everything you said here.. Particularly the second paragraph about them throwing generals to fascists.

My point is primarily that if Newsom hadn't brought the far right influencers and made the comment about trans athletes (and others) on his podcast, there wouldn't have been a contested Dem primary in 2028 that dragged on into the convention like there was in 2016 and 2020.

That kind of unforced error by someone as politically aware as Newsom is unusual and will come up in the primary.

 

Given the ongoing effects of the 1960s immigration reform, pretty soon “African American” will become confusing too. Any term that encompasses Alex Freeman AND Pat Agyemang under the same umbrella won’t make a lot of sense.

 

Is there much evidence of that? I thought it was generally agreed that most of the people that 'threw' the generals were people, (like @Auriaprottu said), that were socially right-wing anyway, (in that they didn't like gay people or women), rather than 'on the left'.

They were also those elements of the black and latino demographic that were misogynists, so again, not notably 'on the left'.

Where they did shift the outcome was in terms of turnout, where some on the left felt there wasn't enough of a reason to vote what with Harris promising she wouldn't do anything different, particularly in relation to the Gaza genocide. That certainly didn't help.

The Biden/Harris line that people who thought there had been inflation were simply too dumb to realise they were mistaken also didn't help the cause.

 

Ooh - I know the answer to this Alex - what is "woke"?

 

I little of this, a little of that.

But if you look at the vote totals, Trump's national vote increased from 74.2m in 2020 to 77.3m in 2024 (+3.1m), while Harris dropped from Biden's 81.3m in 2020 to her 75m in 2025 (-6.3m). While there was a definite shift towards Trump in 2024, it was "only" an increase of 3.1m votes, while there was a 6.3m shift away from Harris. If we assume all 3.1m that voted for Trump in 2024 came from Biden voters, if Harris had been able to retain the other 3.2m, she would have won the popular vote by a million.

Obviously, winning the popular vote doesn't mean a candidate wins the electoral college, but the general thought is that if the Leftists had voted for Harris like they did for Biden, Harris would have had enough to barely eke out win despite the inroads Trump made.

 

But when you drill down into this data, the critical "swing" states that she lost DID NOT see lower voter participation. It was more that voters in states that likely wouldn't have been tipped by their involvement or lack thereof failed to show up for Kamala. In the critical swing states, they did show in numbers like they had in 2020, but the "vote the bums out!" contrarian contingent won the day.

I think that 2020 was the huge aberration, as we were largely still in lockdown in Oct/Nov 2020, (vaccines arrived a couple months later, and widely by April) ballots were largely mailed, and turnout was uncommonly "high."

I am very worried that our political process in just going to be one of burn and churn every 4 years, with very little accomplished. and anything that gets accomplished is quickly kneecapped.

 

I'm not so sure those were unforced errors. More like purposeful signals.

 

Unfortunately for Newsom, the signal was to people on the Right and at a time when Democrats, in general, were looking for our politicians to stand up to the Right.

 

I think you're overlooking how many normies still want "both sides" to work together, and how many people are really uncomfortable with the idea of trans women competing in women's sports.

Even among Gen Z, who are pretty open to trans causes, only about a third support their participation.

Newsom took the popular road on both by doing the things that you're classifying as an error.

 

There's a more strategic explanation. Newsom is a California Democrat. And worse, a San Francisco Democrat. He needed to send a signal (not during the primary, but long, long before) that he's not what flyover country thinks California and San Francisco Democrats are. He did this. That's what he needed to do.

An alternative explanation (also reasonable) is that he was flailing around for a political direction after Trump's election and was just trying shit out.

These explanations are not entirely mutually exclusive.

 

Well, we don't need to relitigate the entire last US election.

Fact is, Biden did take a 'victory lap' in 2024 about how low inflation was and had previously made rather misleading statements about the situation when he took office.

Obviously, this all has to be considered in the context of the impact of covid and his record, in that sense, was good. I'm not doubting that.

The problem is that when people have to parse the precise wording of, as you put it', 'for most people, their net incomes had risen faster than inflation', that's true for some people but not others and also has to be considered in light of high, and historically rising, inequality so they probably don't feel well off.

It all just sounds pretty cloth-eared, tbh.

 

In general, it's very hard to make sense of the past two US elections with everything that's going on.

 

Defeating fascism by a slim margin isn't defeating fascism at all, especially as independent voters tend to switch sides for the sake of switching more than any particular issue. Better we take our medicine with Trump in charge than someone competent. It's important that Democrats in power think this way not as a framework for looking back, but as a guide to acting forward. They have to do work to make MAGA look poisonous for the next two generations and not just depend on Trump to do it all himself.

 

I'll admit, him being polite, even adulatory, to Charlie Kirk probably bought him a lot of real estate with the IC contingent.

 

Even if this stuff is brought up by a primary opponent in 27-28, this will be seen as ancient history and not move the needle at all. Just about zero percent of the Democratic primary/caucus electorate is going to care about dead Charlie Kirk.