Fareed Zakaria attributes Kamala Harris’ defeat to misreading public opinion

Noted Indian American journalist Fareed Zakaria attributed the Democratic Party’s defeat to misreading public opinion on everything from immigration and charges against President-elect Donald Trump to DEI efforts and woke identity politics.

Democrats’ colossal losses couldn’t be attributed to one error or a singular oversight, said Zakaria on his show “GPS” Sunday on CNN blaming instead a wider ignorance by the left on key issues that put them at odds and out of touch with American voters.

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Zakaria said Democrats had an opportunity to reclaim political power from Trump after the January 6 Capitol riots when his approval ratings took a hit, “But they blew it.”

The New York Times estimates that Vice President Kamala Harris will lose the national popular vote by about a point and a half, a first for Democrats since 2004,” he told viewers.

Zakaria spelt out three areas where he believes Democrats got it wrong, thereby costing Harris the election.

“The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border” Zakaria said. “An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist. They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years.

The Democrats’ second error, according to Zakaria, was their “overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump.”

“The most egregious of the cases pursued was Alvin Bragg’s one in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of, but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing,” he said.

Zakaria argued that while some of the charges brought against Trump were “legitimate,” the host of them piled on in rapid succession, gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. It confirmed to his base what it had always believed – that over-educated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes,” he said.

Their third mistake, Zakaria continued, was the party’s fixation on identity politics, “that largely came out of the urban academic bubble, but alienated many mainstream voters.” For example, the term “Latinx” was not well received among the Latino community, he said, but divisive identity politics had morphed into an “obsession” on the left.

“There is an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term Latinx only to discover that Latinos themselves think the word is weird,” Zakaria argued. “This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity and made them miss, for example, that working-class Latinos were moving toward Trump.”

“The problem is deeper than one about nouns and pronouns. The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal. Judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.”

Zakaria also admonished Democrats for embracing university “speech codes” and cancel culture, which have “become ways the left censors or restricts that most cherished of liberal ideas, freedom of speech.”

“One simple way to think about the lessons of the election is that liberals cannot achieve liberal goals, however virtuous, by illiberal means,” he concluded.