All over the blue states, obvious decline and cultural madness are producing anger among Democratic voters. They see that the progressive status quo is a failure, and dysfunction is spreading rapidly. This message is building to a crescendo, but it isn’t turning into politics. That is, it isn’t turning into a rising blue state shift to the Republican Party, or to a growing movement of Democratic Party centrism.
The Democrat mayor of San Jose is currently running for California governor as a problem-solving centrist who acknowledges that Democrats have screwed up the state. He’s consistently polling in the single digits, and his campaign is on life support, while proud far-left lunatics are pulling into the lead among the Democrat pack. Meanwhile, Republican candidates are polling remarkably well in the gubernatorial race, but the GOP still has little to no chance of ending Democrat supermajorities in both houses of the legislature.
The Titanic is sinking, but everyone is voting to stick with a version of the same captain, who’s only “doing a great job” when it’s time to choose the guy who runs the ship.
The brutally stupid cosplay-communist mayor of Los Angeles gets booed when she goes out in public in her dirty and failing city; also, she’s running for re-election, and she’s got a good shot at pulling it off.
The California legislature is currently in a manic state for “trans kids,” that magic category that allows maximum point scoring in the culture wars. There’s no way to exaggerate how obviously insane they’ve become, and I keep muttering about Jonestown and Kool-Aid when I watch legislative hearings. The only way for the state’s lawmakers to become more crazed on the topic would be to run around with garden clippers, personally turning boys into fake girls right there on the sidewalk. “Hold still, kid, I’m a state senator.”
The state capitol is currently flooded with bills to support and extend the sexual mutilation of children. Witnesses at legislative hearings are furious and disgusted, and they’re tearing into the Jacobins who are pushing this sickness.
But notice who this angry witness is: Jamie Reed is a lesbian who has described herself as being “to the left of Bernie Sanders,” and her opposition to the sexual mutilation of children grew out of her long employment at a pediatric gender clinic. She accepts the premise that there are “gender non-conforming kids,” but she opposes the “trans kids” mutilation con because she saw it from the inside, and saw with her own eyes what it did to young people.
As I’ve said before, this is the loudest voice of opposition to trans madness in blue states. But none of these critics of Democratic Party sickness are going to stop voting for Democrats.
Kara Dansky is a Seattle Democrat who moved to Florida, and she writes the TERF Report. (A TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, women who see dudes in dresses as aggressive masculine thieves who are trying to steal womanhood as a costume.) In her latest post, she argues that Republicans “are not going to save us,” and she says this about voting:
Off the top of my head, I can think of three women who either: (1) told me before November 8, 2024, that they planned to vote for Donald Trump; or (2) told me after November 8, 2024, that they did in fact vote for Donald Trump. All over the topic of whether some men/boys are women/girls (they are not). I understand why they did so, but I did not. I wrote in the name of a sex-realist Democrat, rather than cast a vote for either major candidate. I do not regret my decision.
On a growing number of topics, this is becoming the default maneuver: I see that Democrats are wrong on this topic, but I’m not voting for a Republican, and I’ll try to vote for Democrats who are more sane. Note that this is quite obviously not producing a pivot toward sanity among Democratic elected officials.
Democratic Party extremists, meaning pretty much all of them, are losing support. But Republicans aren’t gaining support.
Pick a topic, because this dynamic can be found everywhere you look. I wrote this week about the money-wasting insanity of the SMART train, a taxpayer-subsidized suburban rail line in the northern suburbs of San Francisco. As the writer and lawyer Michael Coffino noted in a book on the project, the proposal to build the thing was vigorously opposed in Marin and Sonoma counties, where Kamala Harris got 80 percent (Marin) and 72 percent (Sonoma) of the vote in 2024. These are deep blue counties, with a culture of activism, and the lawn signs and the bumperstickers on the Subarus tend to make me sigh quite heavily when I visit. It’s the world capital of gentry socialism.
All of the meaningful criticism of the massively wasteful SMART train has come from the left. As Coffino notes, the Marin League of Conservation Voters discussed, in detail, the false environmentalist premises of the effort, and the civil grand juries in both counties have produced a long series of withering reports on the project. There’s no right-wing culture in Marin County, where there’s considerable opposition to taxpayer subsidies for a useless public transportation project. They know the progressive hobby project is a disaster, and they vote for progressives.
In his highly critical book on the project, Coffino argues that the SMART train’s board of directors has become so arrogant and dishonest that it resembles … Donald Trump. Criticizing progressive governance from the left, progressives pivot back to the Orange Man Bad ritual. They can’t lock on the left-side, blue model target.
- Democrat elected officials are destroying [thing here]!
- Therefore, something something Trump something something.
Last year, writing about a successful effort by environmental activist groups to drive ranchers off of public lands north of San Francisco, I attended a panel discussion on the anti-ranching effort that was held at a university in Marin County. It was shortly after Trump’s inauguration for a second term, and everyone sitting in the audience around me before the forum started were talking about their trauma at the agonizing thought that THAT HORRIBLE MAN was the president again. Then the forum began, and the audience was mostly disgusted by the activists, asking them why they were attacking local and sustainable organic agriculture.
Again:
- Passionate commitment to left-wing politics.
- Disgust at the outcome of leftist projects run on leftist premises.
I could go on about this topic at great length – and, ask my family, I often do – but the Republican Party is standing in front of an enormous crowd of voters who are disgusted by the many obvious failures of elected Democrats. Nothing ever happens as a result. Republicans consistently fail to offer an appealing alternative.
A good part of that problem is cultural, and a bunch of affluent suburbanites, especially women, think that voting Republican is low-status behavior: I mean, I’m not some MAGA trash in some trailer park. But the second piece is programmatic, and a Republican Party that doesn’t fight doesn’t deserve to win. When Republicans respond to Joe Biden’s open border with an amnesty bill, for example, what’s the point of voting Republican? Is it an alternative to voting Democrat?
Republicans have to stand for something, they have to argue strenuously against blue model ruin, and they have to propose real alternatives. And they have to stop debating inside a Democrat-established rhetorical framework. Voters see Democratic failure. They don’t see another path, yet, and our election results mostly keep proving that.
Above all, when places run by highly secure Democratic political monopolies are full of people who see that progressive governance has failed horribly, you should start to wonder if every ballot always has a voter behind it, with every one of those voters being a living, conscious person who has the right, as a citizen, to vote. Obvious Democratic failure plus persistent Democratic political security in blue states is an argument for the SAVE America Act, the one thing congressional Republicans refuse to care about.
We have a failed party, with a failed political model and a bunch of disaffected voters, and another party that … exists. In the immortal words of Judge Elihu Smails, “Well, we’re waiting.”
