Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday in which he declared that Democrats should use the 2020 election to establish “a new Democratic ‘metropolitan majority’ that could last for years.”
The only problem, he said, was that the party was moving too far to the left. “Democrats May Be Blowing Their Chance,” the article is titled.
Emanuel wrote:
The next nine months will present our raucous coalition a rare opportunity to establish a new Democratic “metropolitan majority” that could last for years. We can’t afford to let internecine disagreements about how to reach our common goals get in the way.
…
In recent months both Presidents Clinton and Obama have come under withering criticism—not from conservatives but from Democrats arguing they were insufficiently progressive while in office. Set aside the unforced error of attacking fellow Democrats at a moment when retiring Donald Trump ought to be our singular goal. The underlying critique fundamentally misunderstands how we should judge any given leader’s stewardship of our agenda.
…
The question before Democrats is whether to continue working in the same reform-oriented vein or to embrace the sort of revolutionary strategy that would have tanked in 1992 or 2008, but might work if the electorate is, as some believe, more left today than it is center-left.
Read the full op-ed at the Journal.
The phrase “metropolitan majority” appears to refer to the idea that Democrats’ urban power base is destined to grow as the country becomes more diverse, especially if illegal aliens are naturalized as citizens.
Democrats have predicted the demographic death of the Republican Party in recent years — a prospect that worries GOP insiders as well. President Donald Trump has sought to buck the trend by reaching out visibly to the African-American community in particular and highlighting the economic gains minorities have enjoyed under his administration.
Many Democrats began to worry openly last month, after the Iowa debate, that none of their party’s candidates could win.
“I want to say that tonight for me was dispiriting. Democrats have to do better than what we saw tonight. There was nothing I saw tonight that would be able to take Donald Trump out,” Van Jones, who worked briefly in the Obama administration, said on CNN.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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