Barro: Democrats Deserved to Lose

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Josh Barro has a really good story up at the Atlantic today titled “Democrats Made Too Many Promises.” Barro is a Democrat and definitely not a fan of Trump but the point of his piece is that even though he’s not happy Trump won on a personal level, he believes Democrats deserved to lose. What follows is a long list of broken promises Democratic governors and mayors have made to their voters over the past several years.

…there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, which doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because building a subway line here costs four times as much per mile as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system—the other day, I was on a bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot.” And even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense), they don’t do much about these disturbances, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep troubled people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at pharmacies is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place—that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the “wokest” legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure that people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever.

Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

There’s more but the bottom line is that with a performance history like that, it’s pretty hard to convince people that they shouldn’t take a risk on the the other guy because he’ll make a mess of things.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “Can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic s**t those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch to change all this (or even burn it all down), it didn’t fall flat.

He’s exactly right. There’s a big gap between the kind of adults-in-the-room governance Democrats promise and what they actually deliver. It was true on the national level with President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was true in New York when it came to former governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to portray himself as leading the best-in-class response to the pandemic. It was true in Portland where the city was overrun by violent anarchist, crime and homelessness and it was true in San Francisco and Los Angeles where progressive DAs turned their backs on crime victims and focused all their energy on emptying the prisons. 

It’s not an accident that all of those people have now been removed from office. Andrew Cuomo is long gone. The DAs in San Francisco and Los Angeles have been recalled. The mayor of Portland has been replaced and Biden and his VP just lost the presidential election. There’s only so much fundamental failure people, even progressive voters, are willing to take.

So yes, even if you don’t like Trump you have to admit that Democrats, including Kamala Harris, deserved to lose.