Speaker 1: What's going on.
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the Democrat Party seems to be circling the drain a bit.
It's got people kind of concerned, to the point where
the New York Times turned what were rumblings into a
full on siren. The headline that was bouncing all around
yesterday you may have seen the Democratic Party's voter registration crisis.
The party is bleeding court beyond the ballot box, beyond
the ballot box. So here's how the piece by Shane
Goldmeacker and Jonah Smith begins. The Democrat Party is hemorrhaging
just okay, to be clear, they use the term Democratic Party,
but I just call it the Democrat Party because when
you see how they operate, it's not really democratic. So
the Democrat Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even
go to the polls. Of the thirty states that track
voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans
in Do you want to take a guess how many
of the thirty Every one of them. That's right, every
single state. They have lost ground to Republicans between the
twenty twenty and twenty twenty four elections over the course
of four years. That's what we're talking about here, four years.
A four year swing towards Republicans adds up to four
and a half million voters, a deep political whole that
could take years for Democrats to climb out from. I
would add, if it can, if the party can even
climb out from it. The stampede away from the Democrat
Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and
the reddest states two so basically every state.
Speaker 1: It's all of them.
Speaker 2: This is according to a new analysis of voter registration
data by The New York Times along with a nonpartisan
data firm called L two. For the first time going
back to twenty eighteen, more new voters nationwide chose to
be Republicans then Democrats. Last year, Okay, So twenty eighteen
you had this surge in Republican registrations that was two
years into Trump's first term, and now with his reelection
you see a similar surge in twenty twenty four. Democrats
lost about two point one million registered voters over the
last four years since the twenty twenty election, two point
one million in the thirty States and Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: As well.
Speaker 2: Because all of those thirty states and DC, they all
allow people to register with political parties. The other twenty
states do not register their voters with a political party,
so everybody is just a voter. I guess everyone's unaffiliated,
which I was not aware there were that many states.
Almost half of the states don't have party registration. So
Democrats lose two point one million and Republicans gain two
point four million. Now there are still more Democrats registered
nationwide than Republicans, and that's partly because you have the
big blue states California, which allows people to register by party,
but over in Texas, which is the second largest state,
they do not. Okay, so it's difficult to do like
a national comparison because you have Democrat controlled states that
are very large that make people or allow people to
register by party, and you have very large Republican controlled
states that do not.
Speaker 1: Either way.
Speaker 2: The trajectory is quote unquote troublesome, and there are growing
tensions about what to do about it.
Speaker 1: And I am so here for it. Hmm. Michael Pruser
or Prusser Crusayer. Anyway.
Speaker 2: He tracks voter registration as the director of data science
for Decision Desk HQ, which is an election analysis site.
It's a very good site. By the way. He says,
quote I don't want to say the death cycle of
the Democratic Party, but there seems to be no end
to this.
Speaker 1: There is no.
Speaker 2: Silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is
month after month, year after year. The Ships also previewed
Democratic weaknesses. In twenty twenty four, the party saw some
of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters.
Two constituencies that swung sharply towards mister Trump I saw
this is Zachary.
Speaker 1: Dun Ninny.
Speaker 2: He does data science for Decision Desk h Q as
well also for Yale polling, and he says, at the
heart of the Democratic collapse young white men registering as
Republicans in unprecedented numbers. Gen Z is on track to
be the most pro GOP generation since the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: Gen Z. So here I was thinking gen Z was.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it was mainly the millennials. I was
given the most amount of guffh to over the years.
But gen Z, I like, I apologize. I welcome you
to I welcome you to the fold. There are a
lot of us gen xers that landed here too. So yes,
on the on the the right side of this political spectrum,
so welcome. In North Carolina, Republicans erase roughly ninety five
percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held just four
years ago. Let me say that again, the advantage Democrats
had four years ago has been erased by ninety five percent.
They four years ago they had four hundred thousand more
registered Democrats than Republicans in North Carolina, and now it's
seventeen thousand, and Republicans expect to overtake the Democrats pretty soon.
I think Andy Jackson over at the John Locke Foundation,
I think like he tracks these numbers whenever they get
updated like monthly from the Board of Elections, and his
projection show like this is going to be the Republicans
will become larger than the Democratic Party within the year.
If not within the year, then early next year, definitely
before the twenty twenty four, sorry, twenty twenty six midterm election.
It's just been a constant erosion for Democrats, not just here. Obviously,
you've got the battleground states like Arizona and Nevada and
Pennsylvania significant Democrat erosion. It's worse in Nevada and West
Virginia than it's been here for many years. More and
more voters have been registering as independents or unaffiliated, and
that SAPs both parties' roles, right they're voter rules, and
like in North Carolina, unaffiliateds are actually the largest registration.
Speaker 1: Unaffiliateds.
Speaker 2: Number two is still Democrats, but now about to surpass them.
As Republicans, they've been number three. And remember this is
in a state that has been controlled by Democrats, the
Democrat party machine for a century and a half since
the Civil War. Right they had a lockdown. People who
have arrived to North Carolina maybe listening to this show
and you've only lived here a couple of years, you're
not aware of the background and the history. You did
not get government jobs in this state. Unless you were Democrat,
you made campaign contributions to the party machine, and you
went to vote for the Democrat party boss. If you
were a Republican, you simply did not get hired. I've
told a story before. There's a family member now deceased,
but he worked for state government for like fifty years
and he was told when he went in for the
job interview that he had to register as a Democrat,
flat out told it.
Speaker 1: All right, if you're listening to this show, you know.
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and I know you do too, And you've probably heard
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I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
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New York Times with a big data dive on the
declining fortunes of the Democrat Party. For many years, more
voters have been registering as independents or unaffiliated, sapping both
party roles, but more recently that growth has come mostly
at the expense of Democrats. If you go back to
twenty eighteen midterm election Trump's first term, Democrats accounted for
about thirty four percent of new voter registrations nationwide, Republicans
were only twenty percent. But by twenty twenty four, just
six years later, Republicans have now overtaken Democrats among new registrants.
So in six years, the GOP's share rose by nine
percentage points and the Democratics share dropped by almost eight
percentage points. So now you've got questions about how did
this happen? Got to identify how it happened, so this
way we'll know what to do about it, right, I mean,
if you're the Democrat Party or you're a consultant in
the you know, in the Party of the Jackasses, then
you've got to figure out why this is happening. So
enter Maria Cardona, a veteran party strategist and longtime member
of the Democratic National Committee. And what does she say occurred?
She said, quote, we fell asleep at the switch? Yeah,
I did you.
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's actually I don't think that's what happened.
I don't think you fell asleep at the switch. I've
I've had a pretty good look here in North Carolina
for the last twenty five years of how the Democrat
Party operates, and you know, puts all of these groups
out into the field, registering voters and everything.
Speaker 1: Like, I don't think you fell asleep at the switch. Here.
Maybe she has some other important insight.
Speaker 2: For years, the left has relied on a sprawling network
of nonprofits. These nonprofits go out in solicit donations from
people who do not have to disclose their identities because
they are nonprofits, and then the nonprofits take all that
money from dark money sources, you might say, and they
go out and they register people based on racial profiling.
I'm sorry, no I said that, But here's how the
New York Times said it. They go out to register black,
Latino and younger voters, so racial profiling, right.
Speaker 1: They go to black.
Speaker 2: Areas, they go to Hispanic areas, and then they also
go to college campi and they register voters. Why because
chances are, if you get a pool, you register one
thousand black voters at a particular college campus or some
event or whatever. You register a thousand black voters, chances are,
you know, nine hundred plus of them are going to
register as Democrats.
Speaker 1: Hispanic voters. It's a little bit lower.
Speaker 2: It's somewhere in the neighborhood of usually around sixty percent
or so younger voters. Similar sort of breakout. And so
the groups are technically nonpartisan, but they don't behave in
that way.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: They say, oh, we're just rocking the vote, We're just
getting people to register.
Speaker 1: Why don't you want people to register? Why are you.
Speaker 2: Trying to suppress people and opress people? Right, But the
underlying assumption has always been that if you target these groups,
the data based on profiling is that they will register
as Democrats. And so that's where these quote nonprofits go.
It is done to help the Democrats enter Donald Trump.
He has now blown up those calculations. Why because of
the inroads that he has made with working class, non
white voters, and so ms Cardona says, quote, you can't
just register a young Latino or a young black voter
and assume that they're going to know that it's Democrats
that have the best policies. Maybe because they don't. They
don't they This is you, Democrats. You are going to
be stuck in this doom loop, circling the drain until
you recognize you are on the losing side of these issues,
so many of these issues. And I know you don't
believe that. I don't want to believe it. You cannot
believe it. I know, I know it's hard. You're in denial.
I get it. Not just a river in Egypt. I
get it. But that's the truth. That is the truth. Also,
you're kind of a victim of your own success here
because by getting everybody to focus on racial identitarianism and
running around calling white dudes the oppressors.
Speaker 1: You have now prompted.
Speaker 2: White dudes, young white dudes, to think of themselves by
their racial identity. And if you're calling them the oppressor
and they know from their own personal experience that they
are not, they're not going to like you.
Speaker 1: See. I tried to warn you guys, this is not
a good path to be on.
Speaker 2: But you thought you didn't need all of the deplorables, AKA,
you thought you didn't need it because demographics is destiny,
the replacement theory, which is not from the right, that
was from the left, that was from rouy Tesera talked
about how bringing in immigration, through immigration and birth rates
and all of this, that the old white Republicans are
all going to die off and Democrats will rule forever.
And maybe that's what she's talking about falling asleep at
the switch. But at the core of that is viewing
people by their race first and only, and it has
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that'll last a lifetime. John emails, it's a peat meal.
He says, we get weekly reports about the registration. At
the current rate, the Republican Party will overtake Democrats in
North Carolina by the end of the year. Democrats are
losing registered voters and Republicans are gaining voters. I think
it is going to be deliciously ironic that the Democrats
will become the third largest section of voters under shammeron
Anderson Clayton, who is breezy as I understand it. I
wonder if she's going to throw her sippy cup and cuss.
Why would you wonder that, John. Of course she's gonna cuss.
Of course she is. That's her jam Man. I don't
know if she's gonna throw the sippy cup like that's
you don't want to waste a perfectly good beverage, you know.
Speaker 1: From the text line?
Speaker 2: Let me let me scroll up here, Susanne says, ditto
on the Democratic versus Democrat, Yeah, I use Democrat party.
Jefferson wants to know if all of these registration numbers
include the dead.
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 2: Gray says, then why can't we get more media to
be for our side. Well, that's a whole different topic.
I've I've talked a bit about media.
Speaker 1: Well I've talked a lot about media.
Speaker 2: Okay, guilty is charged, but that is due to sort
of structural issues inside of the profession. And it starts,
you know, in high school basically, and you go to
a journalism school and college is becoming you know, these
credential factories. Basically, journalism used to be a sort of
work in man's profession, you know, the whole ink stained
wretch kind of caricature of who was in media, what
kinds of people did newspaper work, and that sort of stuff.
These these are not, they never really have been for
the most part, you know, high paying jobs, and so
you ended up with you know, people going to college
and amassing more and more debt going then to work
in a newsroom for twenty five thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: You can't afford to pay back your college loans on that.
Speaker 2: So what ends up happening is you have this over
production of the quote unquote elite or as I call them,
the fo.
Speaker 1: Elite, right because it's fake.
Speaker 2: So they're not really elite, but you know they're they're
NEPO babies basically Trustafarians, you know, kids with trust funds,
and they're and really wealthy parents. They're able to get
into the profession going to the Columbia Journalism school, going
you know, a quarter million dollars in debt for that,
with no prospect to be ever able to pay that back.
So you now have to live with financial support from
your parents, your wealthy parents who could afford to send
you there and can afford to basically keep you on
a living stipend while you're uh, you know, while you're
coming up through the ranks, unless of course you are
you know, somebody whose parents are already in one of
these you know, really big legacy media operations, and then you,
as a NEPO baby, you get boosted up above everybody else.
That's like grinding it out in Walla Walla, Washington, right,
And so like I my path here was, you know,
went to Winthrop University, had a scholarship for my grades,
and Winthrop at the time was the cheapest South Carolina
state school, and graduated from Winthrop, worked at a tiny
little station in rock Hill, worked for the NPR affiliate,
landed as a part timer here, became a full timer,
was a reporter, then moved into being a host after
like nine years, so and I've been a host ever since.
But I never had to accumulate all of the debt
I paid off. I think I graduated with about twenty
five thousand dollars in student loan debt, which I paid off.
So the like, I wasn't crippled by that. I didn't
go to Columbia or you know Syracuse, you know mass
colm departments where they charged.
Speaker 1: A ton of money.
Speaker 2: So you got a lot of these ivy leaguers coming out,
and they then populate the quote unquote elite or faux
elite ranks. And when you are coming through that kind
of a privileged lineage, you have a certain ideology and
a lot of them, I feel, are motivated in large
part by guilt. They have a lot of guilt for
the fact that they know deep down that they really
haven't done the work to get them to the positions
that they're in. So I think that that colors a lot.
And they're coming out of a you know, K twelve
system and a collegiate system that has been completely corrupted
with you know, the woke ideology.
Speaker 1: So I think that's why you end up.
Speaker 2: But you look, there are way more There are way
more media platforms now, the democratization of media, right, That's
part of the deal here as well, is that they're
there are tons more voices out there. People can get
a lot more information from various sources, seeing a lot
of stuff on social media, true and false, to be sure.
But the grip that the legacy media used to have
they do not anymore. So I think that is also
driving a lot of this backlash to the Democrats, is
that they keep squeezing the grip tighter and tighter, and
as they do so, more and more voters fall through
their fingers. To mix a metaphor or seven. So there's
a guy quoted in the New York Times piece named
Tom Bonier. I'm gonna call him Bonier, or actually I'm
gonna call him Tom Bonnier, okay, because I don't know
how he pronounces it. And thank goodness, there is an
e or sorry, there is an I before the e
in his last name Bonnier or Bonnier. He's one of
the Democrat parties leading experts on voter registration trends. He
spent much of twenty twenty four downplaying the seriousness of
his parties registration woes. He said in an interview quote,
I was wrong. Yeah, Oh, better luck next time. Bonier,
North Carolina could be the next battleground state. Two tip,
says the New York Times. State record show the edge
is down to less than seventeen thousand voters. Just four
years ago, Democrats enjoyed a four hundred thousand voter margin Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: Maybe on deck.
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Speaker 1: From the text.
Speaker 2: Line, somebody anonymous says, it's not the message, it's the
delivery that the Dems can't get.
Speaker 1: Right, ha ha ha ha. Right.
Speaker 2: The thing to always keep in mind I say this
all the time because the Democrats keep doing it, which is,
anytime they lose, anytime that they're unpopular, they always have
the same response, which is, it's not the substance, it's
the style. That's what they claim. They keep thinking like
our message. Just as in getting through, you control so
many of the cultural institutions by which culture is transmitted,
most importantly K twelve, education, movies, music, the news, legacy
media outlets. You guys control all of these pathways your
message has been received. We are in the middle of
what I have referred to also many times, this is
the preference cascade. People are waking up and realizing now
they have permission to vote for Donald Trump. They have
permission to do the Trump dance and dance to YMCA.
You see these videos that the sororities and the fraternities
are posting and stuff like this. People have now woken
up and realized that they're not alone. They have had
these they've had these reservations, but they have been pressured
either silently or overtly into going along. I did this
story the other day where what was it like eighty
percent or something of college kids said that they did
not speak up for fear of offending people or being
having a different opinion, a non progressive opinion, rewriting papers
just to make sure that they don't get dinged by
their left wing professors. It's the same thing Rosh Limbaugh
tapped into when he got on the air and he
started saying this stuff, and people started saying, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: I thought I was.
Speaker 2: The only one that creates the permission structure that leads
to the preference cascade, which is slowly at first, and
then very quickly. Right, things start building slowly, and then
the damn breaks. The Democrat Party's diminished appeal to men
and younger voters was evident in partisan registration data long
before it became apparent to everyone. In the last election,
Republicans went from I was just actually talking to Kyle
Bailey from our sister station WFNZ. I would say, listen
to his.
Speaker 1: Program, but he's on when I'm on, So like you shouldn't.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't listen to him instead of me unless you
get my podcast. It doesn't matter either way. So and
KB was saying that, like the board, the Disney board
is telling them to like telling the people, like, we
need to create content aimed at young men because we've
lost young men. Yes, why do you think young men
have been lost in all of these Democrat progressive controlled institutions, music, movies,
TV shows?
Speaker 1: Why is that? Why do you think that is?
Speaker 2: Again, when you tell everybody to view things always and
everywhere through a prism of racial identitarianism, you certainly cannot
be surprised when everybody starts doing that. Right, You guys
were playing with fire. People like me were saying, you
do not want this. We do not want a society
to think our identity in this nation is American. That's
our unifying identity. If you want to pick an identity
and you want that to define you. Make it American. Okay,
make it American. But when you focus on these immutable
characteristics of race, ethnicity, where you focus on religion or
your sexual preference or something like who you like to
sleep with and all of this, when you start focusing
so narrowly on these things as identities and telling people
to vote that way, to live that way, to cut
out family members from the Thanksgiving table because of uncomfortable
conversation with Uncle Joe, you can't expect only your target
audience to hear that message and react to it. I
saw this coming, like you're gonna You're gonna convince everybody
to start thinking like this. And you may think, in
you know, twenty thirty forty years, white people won't be
the majority, so ha ha ha, we'll be in charge. Yeah,
But there they are right now. And so is this
really wise? Is that a wise thing to do? Republicans
went from roughly one third of newly registered voters under
the age of forty five to a majority just in
the last six years. The shifts among male voters tell
a similar story, as does the shift among Latino voters.
In North Carolina, specifically, they mentioned in the New York
Times piece the parties share of Latino registrants picking one
of the two major parties declined seventy two percent in
twenty twenty, down to fifty eight percent last year. That's
what Democrats have lost among the Latinos. They're still getting
a majority of the new registrants, but it was three
quarters and now it's a little more than half. That's
a massive erosion, and it's an erosion moving towards a
party that you have been telling these people or who
are registering Republican. You've been telling them that this party
hates them and is afraid of them and wants to
deport them. Despite all of that messaging, that group of
Americans has said, pound sand Democrats, I'm going to go
with that party. That's not a messaging thing. That's a
you thing. That's a you problem, Democrats. So I mentioned earlier,
and I'm going to have to probably pick this up. Well, yeah,
I got about two minutes here, so let me I'll
go back and mention real quick. Earlier I talked about
the sprawling network of nonprofits. They go out, they get
donations from you know, anonymous donors. They then go out
and register voters, and they target profile people basically saying, Okay,
well that's a black person, that's a Hispanic person, that's
a young person, so therefore they're probably going to be
a Democrat, so let's go register them. Now they're they're
technically non partisan, right, but we've all known that they
behave this way. But now the economics of that model
do not work anymore. And they break down the costs
to get registered voters and stuff. And it's one thing
if you can go out there spend a bunch of money,
maybe it costs you fifty bucks of registration or something
to you know, put boots on the ground and get
these registrations. You know, those economics work. But if you're
going to go out and you're going to get i
don't know, a quarter of the black vote that you're
going to register black voters in a quarter from register Republican,
now all of a sudden, your economics don't work so well.
If you used to be able to get three quarters
of Hispanic young voters and now you're only getting half, Yeah,
those economics do not work at all. You're helping your opponent.
Speaker 1: Actually.
Speaker 2: Aaron Strauss, a data scientist who has spent years studying
how to elect Democrats, wrote that the old way of
registering voters might actually backfire. He wrote this actually before
last year's election. This idea of working through nonprofit groups
to enroll young people and people of color in general,
rather than explicitly seeking new Democrats, that is going to backfire,
he said before the last election, because you can't just
use these profile characteristics to determine whether or not they
agree with us, whether they're going to register as a Democrat.
Speaker 1: And so he says, what that means is you have
to go.
Speaker 2: And specifically explicitly look to register Democrats. And therein lies
the problem because you're a nonpartisan nonprofit. You can't do that.
You know who does that, the Party and super PACs.
So the nonprofits now they're facing an existential crisis. Oh
you hate to see it, You hate to see it.
Speaker 1: All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
So if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
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