A JEWISH MOTHER DISCOVERS THE LIMITATIONS OF SCOLDING.

Elissa Slotkin represents one of the last American High style congressional districts in Lower Michigan, and she's seeing a vision on the road to Zilwaukee.

“You know, the one thing I will say about Donald Trump,” Slotkin began. “He doesn’t talk down to anybody. He is who he is, but he doesn’t talk down to anyone. And I think that there is a certain voter out there because of that who identifies with him and appreciates him.” (This “certain voter,” she noted, is the MAGA enthusiast who appreciates that Trump does not condescend to them while ignoring how he belittles and demeans others.)

That's a Politico fact check, which I have to further fact check by noting that Our President tends to punch upward, at other members of the political class, rather than downward, in the way of Democrats, at Democrat voters.

“It’s not just that he eats cheeseburgers at a big celebratory dinner. It’s not just that he does things that the common man can kind of appreciate. And it’s not even because he uses kind of simplistic language—he doesn’t use complicated, wonky language, the way a lot of Democrats do,” Slotkin said. “We sometimes make people feel like they aren’t conscientious enough. They aren’t thoughtful enough. They aren’t ‘woke’ enough. They aren’t smart enough or educated enough to just understand what’s good for them. … It’s talking down to people. It’s alienating them. And there’s just certain voters who feel so distant from the political process—it’s not their life, it’s not their world. They hate it. They don’t like all that politics stuff. Trump speaks to them, because he includes them.”

Put another way, the common-room commonplaces might be even more off-putting than the policies the Democrats, or at least their vanguardist wing, are pushing.

It has long been perceived that Democrats, in the post-9/11 era, are the party of inclusion and big-tent politics. But Slotkin has begun to question that notion. She fears that Democrats have created a barrier to entry, largely along cultural lines, that makes the party fundamentally unwelcoming to anyone with supposedly retrograde views of the world around them. This is not merely about race and racism. The schisms go far deeper, to matters of faith and conscience, economic freedom and individual liberty. Indeed, for the heavy losses Trump sustained among affluent college-educated whites, he nearly won a second term because of his gains with Black and brown voters. That these Americans were willing to support Trump, often in spite of his rhetoric, reveals an uncomfortable truth for the left. There are millions of voters—working-class whites and working-class minorities—whose stances on social controversies put them out of touch with the Democratic Party. It’s a truth they might be willing to overlook, if only the party could do the same.

That the boffins of the Democrat Party appear to have thought that "mask up, shut up, stay home, and wait for us to print relief checks" would be a winning move probably also contributed, although that's not where the representative is going.

“I remember, long before, literally, Donald Trump was even a twinkle in our eye, the way that people in my life here couldn’t stand political correctness. And I think [this is] the same kind of sentiment,” Slotkin explained. “Because the political correctness is thinking you’re better than somebody else—it’s correcting someone. Now, I happen to believe that we live in a different era, and that we have to be better than we were in previous eras. … But people do feel looked down upon.”

This reality, Slotkin said, “makes it really hard” to understand the results of this election. A postmortem examining demographic trends and policy disagreements cannot register the visceral rejection of today’s Democratic Party any better than the hundreds of preelection polls that were commissioned by the smartest minds in the political business. At the root of our polarization, Slotkin argued, is one half of the country believing it is enlightened and the other half resenting it.

Particularly when the so-called enlightened accompany their smugness with their failures. People notice. Oh yes, people notice.

The race in Florida’s 26th District had been considered an early bellwether: Democrats believed if their incumbent, Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, hung onto her seat as expected, it would portend success throughout the prized battleground state and all around the country. But it was becoming clear, early in the 8 p.m. hour, that Mucarsel-Powell could not overcome Trump’s strength in the area. If this wasn’t entirely shocking, given the competitive makeup of the 26th District, what happened next door in the 27th District caught Democrats totally by surprise. Four years after Hillary Clinton carried the district by 20 points, the incumbent congresswoman, Donna Shalala, fell in a stunning upset to GOP challenger Maria Elvira Salazar.

“It was like, wait a minute—Donna Shalala?” Slotkin recalled. “We knew Debbie Mucarsel-Powell was in a tough race, but Donna Shalala, she had just donated to the party; she had just paid dues, which is not something you do if you’re a front-liner. We all assumed that race was in the bag.”

Gridlock is good. Gridlock with the Queen of Clubs failing to make schneider is even better.

In Slotkin’s view, the notion that millions of voters turned out primarily to vote against Democrats is laughable. To the contrary, they were turning out to vote for Trump and for Republicans, because they know what they’re getting in return. This, Slotkin said, continues to be the underlying difference between the two parties: Republicans, for better or worse, have embraced Trumpism up and down the ballot, whereas Democrats remain fractured and largely incapable of presenting a coherent pitch to the electorate.

“The brand of the national Democratic Party is mushy. People don’t know what we stand for, what we’re about. So, every two years when the new flavor of attack comes out, it’s easy to convince a portion of the population that those attacks are true, because they still don’t know our brand,” Slotkin said. “I think that’s the real strategic problem for the Democratic Party. It’s not any one line of attack; it’s not any one slogan. It’s that the underlying brand is mushy. And until we get that right, until we really work that out, we’re going to have a problem every two years.”

It appears as though the voters, taken together, voted to remove the president and gridlock the national government, whilst the Republican message resonated better in state elections. If that means the national Democrats pay more attention to the interior of the country and less to the aesthetic preferences of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Northeast Corridor, that might be for the good.