Woke doesnt win and other big surprises of Democrats 2020 race so far – New York Post

Voting tells politicians, and the press if theyre capable of getting the message, what citizens will tolerate and what they wont. The Democrats havent voted yet, but the candidates have been campaigning for more than a year and just had their last debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Thats time enough to learn some useful things. The first is that voters Democratic voters have a limited appetite for free stuff. Many candidates have been promising free college and free health care and offering free Ben & Jerrys ice cream.

Sounds good at first, as when Sen. Elizabeth Warren backed Sen. Bernie Sanders Medicare for All proposal. But the refusal of the I-have-a-plan-for-that candidate to say how shed pay for it didnt fly. And when she did answer that question, that flopped, too, and she fell back on saying it would be delayed till her second two years or second term.

The second thing weve learned is related: As blogger Glenn Reynolds puts it, Go woke, go broke.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, former Rep. Beto ORourke, Sen. Kamala Harris, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro and Sen. Cory Booker all candidates who have taken some moderate stands chose to emphasize how hip they were. They embraced positions like free medical care for illegal immigrants, reparations for descendants of slaves, abortions for men who have transitioned to be women.

These things sound reasonable to fans of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To Democratic primary voters, not so much. All five are now ex-candidates.

Third, identity politics has proved to be a loser, too. Harris and Booker got only single-digit percentages from black voters. Castro made zero progress with Hispanics. Things were quite different in 1988, when Jesse Jackson carried blacks, Michael Dukakis white ethnics, Al Gore Southern whites and Dick Gephardt union members.

Identity politics is big on campus, where you get denounced for wearing a serape on Halloween if you dont have Mexican ancestors. But voters dont care so much.

Harris and Booker failed to duplicate the frisson inspired by Barack Obama in 2008, probably because you can only elect the first black president once.

Fourth, the white college graduates gentry liberals who are, for the first time in history, one of the Democratic Partys largest constituencies, are a fickle bunch.

Black and elderly Democrats have consistently given former Vice President Joe Biden large pluralities, and Hispanic and low-income non-college Democrats have shown some affinity for Sanders. That largely accounts for the buoyancy of support for these 77- and 78-year-old candidates.

But gentry liberals have been bouncing around. They were briefly smitten with Harris after she bopped Biden on school busing. They swooned longer for Warren when she kept repeating, I have a plan for that, and then they were charmed by Mayor Pete Buttigiegs crisp and self-assured articulateness.

The gentry liberals fling with Harris didnt last long, and current polling suggests their crushes on Warren and Buttigieg are over. But theres still plenty of room for these voters to swing decisively in Februarys first two contests, for they are numerous among those who bother to attend the Iowa caucuses and demographically a large share of the population of New Hampshire.

Thats what happened in 2008, when high-education Iowans swung to Obama, which convinced black voters that he, unlike Jesse Jackson, could win whites votes and the nomination. But gentry liberals are hard to gauge because what theyre after is not government aid but morally satisfying reassurances.

Finally, Democrats or their many friends in the press and social media have an obsessive yearning for diversity, which turns out to mean racial quotas and preferences. There is moaning about not having any people of color on the latest debate stage, as if the party had a responsibility to somehow field a group of candidates who are demographically identical to the population.

Actually, the six candidates at the last debate come from a wide range of American backgrounds, reasonably appropriate for a party that, in its 188-year history, has always been a coalition of out-groups.

Whats important is not what the field of candidates looks like but who will be the partys nominee, who will inevitably be of one gender and a limited number of ancestries. That is something Democratic voters have not taught us yet.

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Woke doesnt win and other big surprises of Democrats 2020 race so far - New York Post