Would-be pundits and political commentators occasionally think they have devastated their Democratic opponents by pointing out contradictory or “hypocritical” aspects of their policies. “How can Democrats say they favor gay rights but back the Arab Spring, which brought Islamic fundamentalists to power? How can the liberals say they’re fighting for the American worker when they advocate open borders policies that would lower wages?” they often ask.
But there is no hypocrisy in the Democratic Party’s policies, even when they seem to contradict. A simple key can explain how every liberal policy fits into place, even — and especially — when none of them seem to. One fact can allow American citizens to pierce through the political fig leaves and see the naked, partisan truth motivating every Democratic politician, pundit, and spokesperson. One simple reality lets voters look at liberal gaslighting like an optical illusion which, once someone exposes you the trick, is never again a mystery.
The fact is the Democrats organize every single position, plank, and talking point around one unifying principle: Every policy Democrats pursue expands their power. Every position benefits the constituent groups they have identified as their core supporters, increases Democrats’ share of the vote, and tightens the Left’s grasp on power.
Here are just a few examples:
Increasing welfare dependency
President Joe Biden’s top legislative priority is the $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” act, a “transformative” expansion of government health care, taxpayer-funded daycare, and public housing, among other social welfare programs. Studies for decades have shown these programs harm the very people they’re purportedly intended to help … or do they? What if the point is not to help people get out of poverty but to create a stable voting army for the Democratic Party?
That is precisely what social welfare spending does. In a 2019 study published in PLoS One, researchers from Indiana University found that increasing government health care coverage correlated with an increase in the Democrats’ share of the vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections — even in states that did not participate in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion:
We find that a one-percentage-point increase in county health insurance coverage was associated with a 0.25-percentage-point increase in the vote share for the Democratic presidential candidate. We further find that these gains on the part of the Democratic candidate came almost fully at the expense of the Republican (as opposed to third-party) presidential candidates. We also estimate models separately for states that did and did not expand Medicaid and find no differential effect of insurance gains on Democratic vote share for states that expanded Medicaid compared to those that did not.
That aligns with numerous studies tying social welfare to voting for the Democratic Party. The Pew Research Center found that Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to have received food stamps. Curiously, the 2012 poll did not indicate which came first: if Democrats were more likely to sign up for social welfare programs or if people who receive federal benefits were more likely to vote for the party that promises to expand those benefits.
Promoting labor unions, especially teachers unions. Even when it became clear that Democrat Terry McAuliffe was about to lose the Virginia governor’s race because he sided with teachers unions over outraged parents, he couldn’t stop himself: For his campaign finale, he brought in Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Why would he engage in such a clearly suicidal mission? For the same reason Joe Biden regularly promises to create “union jobs”: Because labor unions are a key part of the Democratic Party’s constituency.
Biden won 56% of their vote in 2020. Although rank-and-file union voters has been trending more Republican for years, unions offer so much more than just votes. Labor unions spent an estimated $1.8 billion to benefit Democrats during the 2020 election cycle. That doesn’t include “volunteers” in the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote efforts. In exchange, Democrats create more public-sector jobs, where workers are more than five times as likely to be unionized as in the private sector.
Amnesty for illegal aliens. While Joe Biden may be fixated on his social spending bill, the Democratic Party has been pushed to grant illegal aliens in the United States amnesty and “a path to citizenship” for more than a decade (with an assist from Beltway Republicans). Polls have consistently shown that two out of three Hispanics vote for Democrats; for instance, CNN’s most recent exit poll found that 65% of Latinos voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
What would it mean if two-thirds of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants voted Democrat (especially if there are actually 22 million undocumented migrants in the U.S., as researchers at Yale and MIT believe)? A former labor leader and amnesty activist raised just that question.
A man named Eliseo Medina let the cat out of the bag in 2009. At the time, he was International Secretary-Treasurer of the Obama administration’s favorite labor union, the SEIU, as well as the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Medina told a far-Left conference:
If we reform the immigration laws – it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if you had even the same ratio, two out of three [Hispanics voting for Democrats], if we get 8 million new voters that care about our issue and will be voting, we will create a governing coalition for the long-term, not just for an election cycle?
Letting criminals vote (possibly from prison). The policy of barring convicted felons from voting dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, as The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti reported, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) told Democratic primary voters that currently incarcerated felons should “absolutely” be able to cast a ballot from their prison cells. Sanders knew the topic well: The socialist’s home state of Vermont, as well as Maine and the deep-blue District of Columbia, allows felons to vote from prison.
As it turns out, leftists have studied the issue of letting ex-convicts vote for years, finding it would benefit Democrats and hurt Republicans. A 2002 study, “supported by grants” from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, found that 70% of convicted felons would vote for Democrats in presidential and Senate races, if they could vote. In fact, they would have strongly supported even fringe Democratic candidates who lost 49-state landslides:
[O]ur hypothetical felon voters showed strong Democratic preferences in both presidential and senatorial elections. In recent presidential elections, even comparatively unpopular Democratic candidates, such as George McGovern in 1972, would have garnered almost 70 percent of the felon vote. These Democratic preferences are less pronounced and somewhat less stable in senatorial elections. Nevertheless, the survey data suggest that Democratic candidates would have received about 7 of every 10 votes cast by the felons and ex-felons in 14 of the last 15 U.S. Senate election years.
Multiple studies have come to the same partisan conclusions. “We conclude that in close Florida presidential races, ex-felon re-enfranchisement can change election outcomes in favor of the Democratic candidate, especially when ex-felons are properly informed of their voting rights,” wrote two researchers at California State University-Chico last September.
LGBTQIA+ issues: The Democratic Party has consistently staked out the most extreme positions on transgender issues, particularly granting males access to female showers, restrooms, and intimate facilities, as well as the right to compete against women in sports. That support has not wavered, despite the fact that Americans of all political persuasions — Republican, independent, and Democrat — are less supportive of those policies than they were in 2016.
How have Democrats needlessly arrived at the narrow end of this divisive wedge issue? It benefits a Democratic constituency.
Exit polls show that between 64% (according to the National Exit Poll) and 73% (according to AP VoteCast) of people who identify as LGBT voted for Joe Biden in 2020. (For comparison’s sake, 70% of gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters supported Barack Obama in 2008.) Given Biden’s razor-thin margin in several states, The Washington Post reported, “Had LGBT voters stayed home, Trump might well have won the 2020 presidential election.”
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Ironically, these facts are not in dispute; in fact, when leftists talk amongst themselves, they often don’t bother to hide their base motivation. For instance, at the spring 2019 meeting of the Democracy Alliance, a group of left-wing megadonors openly discussed ways to “change the rules of our democracy,” including the ability “to control redistricting [and] ballot access.”
These are a handful of the policies that Democratic politicians promote, which further their hold on power; there are many others. This article confines itself to raw electoral power. The Democrats’ policies also concentrate the massive power of redistributing wealth in the hands of government. Their economic policies concentrate economic power in the hands of political decision-makers. And they support deep, structural changes to the political landscape that would cancel the voice and votes of American citizens.
But that is another story for another time.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.