Why Democrats lose (one big reason among several)

I haven't been following the Virginia Governor's race closely. But this PBS report from yesterday sounds like yet another example of the intensity gap. The Democratic Ralph Northam got criticism for calling Trump a "narcissistic maniac" in an ad. Criticism is understandable, because only about 2/3 of the public would recognize that as an obvious statement of fact. So he ran a new ad saying, "As a doctor, nobody ever asks if I'm a Democrat or Republican. They just want my help. So if Donald Trump is helping Virginia, I'll work with him." Awesome. Why Trump is on the minds of Virginia voters picking a governor PBS Newshour 11/03/2017:

And a Latino group ran an ad suggesting that the Republican candidate Ed Gillespie was supporte by white supremacist a******s. So Ed Gillespie the Republican candidate fell all over himself denouncing white supremacists and segregationist voter suppression and ... Oh, wait. That was on Bizzaro World.

Here on Earth Prime, Northam scrambled to say how badly he wanted to crack down on these darkie immigrants and would never allow sanctuary cities in Virginia. Which he had previously supported. So the Latino group stopped supporting him. Can you believe that? They decided they couldn't support a candidate just because he spit in their faces over their most urgent issues?! Utopian hippies, clearly.

It reminds me of the ACORN fiasco, where the Democrats folded to Republican criticism of the voter registration group based on the fraudulent propaganda videos that James O'Keefe put together.

One of the two major parties is just more interested in winning elections than the other one.

Maybe if the corporate Dems can purge all the Sanders supporters from the party, this approach will start working. I mean, they don't have any place else to go, right? It's not like the Democrats have to care about their voting base, they just need to pander to conservative white people, obviously! What could go wrong?

Andrew Sullivan in How the Democrats Are Failing the Resistance New York 11/03/2017, whose left-liberal leanings always have to be viewed with a skeptical eye, rights about the Governor's race. And he blames the Latino hippies for the problem in more-or-less sneering terms:

Enter the resurgent activist left. Yes, the party needs more direct aggression and energy and left-populism. But the Latino Victory Fund, worried about low Latino enthusiasm, put out an ad last week that shows how much of the energy in the party is now dominated by the fight against “white supremacy.” And so the LVF ad would give your average Vox or Coates reader an intersectional orgasm - while dooming the party on the ground. [my emphasis]

Let's pause for a brief moment to reflect on how far right the political "center" has moved when a well-known writer can assume his audience will take it for granted that explicitly criticizing white supremacists has "doomed the [Democratic] party on the ground." [my emphasis]

It depicts a white man in dark glasses in a pickup truck wth Gillespie and tea party bumper stickers, brandishing a Confederate flag, and driving aggressively through a suburban neighborhood, terrifying young Latino and Muslim kids, and forcing them into a back alley. Just as this Republican terrorist seems about to murder the children, the scene changes and we realize that this was all a nightmare for the kids. And they wake up. This, the ad hammers home, is what the “American dream” means for the GOP. Cue to scenes from Charlottesville.

The ad was aimed at Latino voters. But, of course, it went viral, instantly erasing Northam’s relatively clean image, and tripling contributions to Gillespie’s campaign overnight. It helped cement the Trump base’s support for Gillespie. [my emphasis]

It's always the fault of the hippies and those people that Democrats lose, amirite?

It seemed to imply that every Virginia Republican is a terrorizing white supremacist, and makes the fatal Clinton mistake of attacking a swath of actual voters. And, of course, it was about immigration. The GOP are on the smart side of this issue; the Democrats still don’t have a clue. [my emphasis]

Excuse me while I whack my head against the wall ...

In one final flailing, Northam first distanced himself from the ad, and then was shown to have helped finance it. Then the GOP managed to ambush him on the bogus “sanctuary city” issue. [Bogus??] In the closing stages of the campaign, he said he would now veto any attempt to establish such a law-free enclave, a position he had once voted against. Even now, it appears, the Democrats have no practiced response to a GOP attack on this question. They don’t want to offend Latinos, and they don’t want to alienate whites. So they twist in the populist wind. Are they capable of focusing on economic populism and a defense of the working classes against GOP plutocracy? At this point, the answer is no. [my emphasis]

On a quick reading, this might sound like Sullivan actually thinks "economic populism" is a good thing. Well, at least as long as he can use it as a throwaway phrase to trash the idea of defending civil rights. But don't expect to see Andrew Sullivan calling to "expropriate the expropriators" anytime soon.

Also, didn't he just say in the previous sentence that it's a bad thing for the Democrats to "twist in the populist wind"? And, no, I don't know what that means, either.