A few days later, voters across the country, and Kentucky in particular, gave modern liberalism the greatest possible defeat that side of a re-election of Donald Trump. If the South Carolina primary voters hadn’t saved Joe Biden’s February candidacy, the National Democratic Party’s dance with the far-left in November would have resulted in some disaster.
As it stands, centrist Biden saved the day for the Democrats by plucking away from Trump the suburban voters who otherwise made state houses more reddish, shrinking the majority of Democrats in the US House of Representatives to near single digits, and undermining the US Senate Republican control held an unlikely Democratic victory over two races in Georgia the next month.
In Kentucky, where suburban voters are less influential, the results for the Democrats were even worse. “Super majority” no longer adequately describes the Republicans’ control of the General Assembly. The GOP received 13 seats in the house and now holds 75 of the 100 seats in the Chamber. The Republicans moved two Senate seats that were previously occupied by Democrats, who now only have eight seats in the 38-member chamber.
If an honorable, decent official like Joe Graviss can’t win a long-term seat in the Democratic Senate in the district that includes Kentucky’s capital, your party is broken and has problems much bigger than Stosberg’s diagnosis: an unfair twist of the word ” liberal ”by conservative opponents.
Democrats eager to win elections should consider an alternative diagnosis when reviewing the 2020 results: America remains a center-right country and is not ready for extreme liberalism that the national party does not reprimand and even pamper. Rather than blaming Republicans for politically capitalizing on “Defund the Police” nonsense, you condemn the activists who coined the phrase. Stop walking on eggshells so as not to offend this or that branch of identity politics.
Many modern progressives are making the same mistake that basic Christian conservatives made in the 1980s when they tried to use politics to impose their version of morality on the country. The “moral majority” became a less and less influential minority, giving Christianity a bad name. Americans remain free spirits who don’t want to learn how to think and what or not to say, let alone how to feel. The “nanny state” that fired at Republicans a few decades ago is now striking back against Democrats.
Kentucky Democratic Party Chairman Ben Self saw the handwriting on the wall and let the State Party Executive Committee know before the election that he was leaving the post and wisely refocused on beer making, which he excels at . Aside from Andy Beshear’s narrow win over the deeply unpopular Matt Bevin, Self’s tenure was disastrous. He did the party a disservice on the way to the door by allowing the state party’s paid staff to join union groups, which would make much-needed restructuring more difficult.
Self’s successor, Colmon Elridge, at least acknowledged the party’s deep problems in a fundraising email last week.
“As chairman, I will not shrink from the truth – 2020 was not a great year for our party to win elections,” he wrote. “We’ve looked back, licked our wounds, learned lessons, and now we’re moving forward.”
He then asked for a donation of US $ 25 without giving any information about what was learned or how to proceed.
Party insiders, tired of the autocratic, complacent style of Self, tell me that when NGOs are laid off and Kentuckians are listened to, rebuilding must begin. Liberalism, as Stosberg eloquently wrote, is a noble political philosophy and value system, but in order to ever be relevant again, the Kentucky Democrats must reject the way “awakened” activists want to practice and enforce it.
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