The Democrats Are Becoming More Extreme

Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left: HERE.

A recent poll showed current Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who had worked in Cuba with the Marxist Venceremos Brigade trailing Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Only 24% of Los Angeles residents approve of the job that Bass is doing, which included the worst wildfires in the city’s history, while 47% disapprove.

If disappointed voters replace Bass with an even more extreme version, that will be in line with what happened in New York City where a widely despised former Mayor Bill de Blasio was, after a one term break to make room for former Mayor Eric Adams, swapped out for Zohran Mamdani, who described him as a role model. Even only 100 days into his term, usually the political ‘honeymoon’ period, Mamdani’s approval rating is at only 43%. And the majority of New Yorkers believe that the city is headed in the wrong direction.

In Chicago, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, widely hated by voters, was replaced with Mayor Brandon Johnson, who made Lightfoot seem responsible, civil and moderate. Johnson’s approval ratings have recently been in the twenties, but the extremist teachers’ union hack may well be replaced by someone even worse. Possibilities include Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez who spoke in front of a burned American flag at a pro-terrorist rally, and would move the city even further leftward.

Democrats are in a downward spiral towards further extremes even as their poll ratings sink.

In Maine, Democrats may well find themselves stuck with Graham Platner, a rich kid pretending to be a fisherman, who boasted of being a Communist, had a Nazi tattoo and praised a Hamas attack. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim who called for abolishing ICE and ‘choking out’ political opponents, who claimed that many in Dearborn mourned Iran’s Jihadist leader, and who has been campaigning with Hasan Piker, a social media influencer who celebrated Hamas and mourned the fall of the USSR, is running neck and neck in the Democrat primary.

This is less of a reflection of the state of the country than of a party stuck with a base of extremists that is pushing into adopting wildly unpopular radical positions.

The party bet everything on two prongs, hating Trump and going far leftwards, but there’s no evidence that voters are responding to either one. President Trump’s approval ratings may be low but even CNN polls are showing that Democrats are trailing Republicans in party approval ratings. Democrat election victories remain largely confined to blue areas and special elections.

Meanwhile, Democrats are rapidly mainstreaming calls to abolish ICE and support for Hamas, as if there were any backing for these destructive agendas outside the farthest of the far Left.

Unfortunately that now includes their own party.

Even when Democrats run as moderates, they soon pivot to their extreme agenda items.

In Virginia, newly elected Gov. Abigail Spanberger, chosen by the bedroom communities of Northern Virginia, who won by pretending to be a moderate, had her approval rating sink after she mistook the victory as a mandate for supporting illegal alien criminals, forcing men into women’ s locker rooms and gerrymandering the state to eliminate the political opposition.

Zohran Mamdani, hyped as the new leftist face of the party, is already down to a 43% approval rating into the first 100 days of his political ‘honeymoon’ as most residents believe the city is on the wrong track. But Mamdani wasn’t elected by New Yorkers, but a minority coalition between urban leftists and Muslim occupants, while native New Yorkers mostly sat out the election.

That larger trend of voters sitting out elections in places has worsened extremism

Democrats aren’t winning over voters, they’re convincing voters who might otherwise support there that there’s no point in even bothering because there are no good choices anymore. Gerrymandering provides them with political control while eliminating even the illusion of democracy or choice leading to corrupt one-party states and cities in a state of freefall.

The political failure cycle of urban politics isn’t just making cities worse, it’s making politics more extreme. Voters elect increasingly radical politicians running on the same old promises of affordability and higher taxes, as if the two were complementary rather than mutually opposed, the equally paradoxical pledge of equality through equity, along with endless free government services. The DSA and other socialist groups are in ascendance, cashing in on the frustration of voters, rather than bearing the brunt of the backlash for the woke misery they made.

The urban political failure model, what some used to call the failed ‘blue state model’ is driven by three entangled causes. Politically competitive areas have been disappearing as politics consolidates its cultural control over entire areas. Between gerrymandering, demographic identity politics cracking and voter harvesting, once Democrats seize control of a local political system, it’s rarely competitive again. And Democrat primaries tend to trend leftward as the voters most likely to show up for primaries lean further leftwards.

This isn’t just the fault of Democrats, who have surrendered their party’s identity to socialists and marxists, but Republicans, who have forgotten how to talk about these issues.

Republicans who run for office in blue areas have also forgotten most of the lessons learned by their predecessors in the Reagan era who actively made the case that left-wing policies were bad. Instead they either veer between trying to run as apolitical moderates and promising to do a better job of fixing homelessness, creating jobs and running public schools, or virtue signal strictly rightwards without connecting the conditions that everyone hates to the policies that everyone keeps voting for.

Affordability isn’t a problem in New York City because of the rich, but because a vast regulatory bureaucracy has set out to make all aspects of life, including housing, more expensive to squeeze out the middle class and replace economic independence with government dependency. Homelessness isn’t a problem because of the high cost of housing, but because leftists rebranded mentally ill drug addicts as victims of the high cost of housing, fought all efforts to institutionalize or imprison them, and instead built a social services machine that has made billions from promising (and always failing) to get them off the streets.

Most voters don’t identify homeless programs, criminal justice reform or housing affordability as leftist policies. They may be able to identify higher taxes as a socialist position, but since these are aimed at the ‘rich’ and are presented as necessary for solving the assorted manufactured social problems, like homelessness, or funding the free government programs, like free childcare, that they are tempted by, they decide to side with the Left. Hapless conservative candidates get into arguments about the impact of taxing the rich on the economic base and thereby play into the hands of the socialists, fighting the fight on their terrain.

Meanwhile, crime, affordability and education continue to worsen.

Even more conservative Republicans fail to make the case that their leftist opponents didn’t fail because they were “naive”, a term they still apply to the likes of Zohran Mamdani, and incompetent, but because they are radicals who deliberately set out to make things worse to profit from the ruin. And until they make that case, they won’t be able to connect with voters.