By Dave Andrusko
Sometimes the juxtaposition of news stories is so unintentionally revealing it is enough to leave you bent over in laughter. In this case, both come from the pro-abortion down-to-the-last-pixel New York Times. Both were posted today.
First—and I know you will think I am making this up– David Wasserman has a story that runs under the headline “To Beat Trump, Democrats May Need to Break Out of the ‘Whole Foods’ Bubble.”
As you can probably figure out from the headline, the locations where Democrats are strong aren’t enough to carry the day in the all-important “battleground states” which Wassserman defines as “the 10 states decided by less than four percentage points in 2016: Ariz., Fla., Maine, Minn., Nev., N.H., N.C., Mich., Pa., Wis..”
He writes,
In the past decade, Democratic voting strength has become increasingly concentrated in precincts within five miles of current Whole Foods, Lululemon, Urban Outfitters and Apple Store locations. But those precincts made up just 34 percent of the nation’s vote in 2016 — and just 29 percent in battleground states.
Read these back-to-back paragraphs which come a little further into the story.
These high-end retailers and brands, popular with urban millennials and affluent suburbanites alike, are increasingly correlated with which neighborhoods are trending blue. The drawback for Democrats? Just 34 percent of U.S. voters — and only 29 percent of battleground state voters — live within five miles of at least one such upmarket retailer, and the Democrats’ brand is stagnant or in decline everywhere else.
And then…
Once dominant in labor halls, Democrats are more ascendant than ever near galleria malls.
This is a devastating assessment of the current electoral prospects of Democrats. Democrats may clean the Republicans’ clock in places such as California (an ocean of blue), but in competitive states, they are in bad shape and getting worse.
Which leaves Democrats with this painful dilemma:
But the reality for Democrats is if they aren’t able to stop their slide in less elite locales, President Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College could further widen relative to the popular vote.
You get the point. Too many of the “deplorables” live in pivotal states.
What’s the other story? The Democrat Establishment has gone absolutely bonkers at the prospect of “Democratic Socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders heading the ticket.
Under the headline “Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders,” Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein write
Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance.
Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials — all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention — and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.
The quandary is obvious. If Sanders comes to the national convention with a plurality of delegates but not a majority, the superdelegates could deny Sanders a first-ballot victory. On subsequent ballots (under current rules, at least), “all 3,979 pledged delegates and 771 superdelegates would be free to vote for any candidate they chose.”
You can imagine how happy that will make the Sanders’ people.
Final thought. Interwoven in the story are the names of so-called “saviors” who (in theory) could tilt the nominating process in another candidate’s direction, or run themselves. “Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate,” as Virginia Rep. Don Beyer enthused to the Times. Like whom?
“At some point you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,’” he said.
The fact that Beyer is apparently serious illustrates perfectly why it is not a good time to be a pro-abortion Democrat.
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