Democrats’ failure to find a positive message could turn blue wave into a blue puddle

With Election Day just nine weeks from Tuesday, Democrats have high hopes of taking back the House and Senate — yet can’t seem to find a real positive agenda.

They’re relying purely on economic anxiety and Trump fatigue because even as the party establishment and the insurgent left struggle, neither faction has any clue how to win a lasting majority of the country.

The establishment is hobbled by its donor class’s obsessions with such toxic, exotic issues as DEI, trans rights and open borders; the rebels, by the socialist fantasies of the college-centered, downwardly mobile activist class.

Neither wing has much to offer the party’s traditional working-class base nor even black and Hispanic voters, while the hard left’s alliance with Islamists scares many voters toward Republican hands.

Everyone’s trying to speak to “affordability” these days, recognizing that it blows all other issues out of the water.

A recent Americans for Prosperity poll sets out the numbers pretty well: In seven battleground Senate states, 56% of voters named “economy/inflation” as their No. 1 issue, dwarfing issues from immigration to health care to crime.

As the “ins,” Republicans get default blame for this anxiety, but Democrats haven’t come up with any better answers than the ones that only made things worse in the Biden years.

Consider establishment pick Cait Conley’s bid to unseat Rep. Mike Lawler in the red-hot Hudson Valley race: Her platform is the same old farrago of federal interventions from a “public option” for health care to zero-down mortgages to crackdowns on drug-maker “price gouging.”

The left is just as hopeless: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani offers the Soviet-style chimera of city-owned grocery stores, a “rent freeze” that won’t freeze enough rents and the class-war-symbolism of a pied-à-terre tax that his own team is still trying to figure out.

Worse, the Democratic Socialists’ rise rightly scares most voters outside the city; a recent Siena poll shows support for that agenda at just 27% upstate (including upstate cities) and a grim 16% in the suburbs.

On the other coast, the left’s crusade for Prop. 40, the wealth tax of 5% on the paper value of billionaires’ assets, is already sending the Golden State’s remaining golden geese into flight.

And no one can seriously see how bleeding the rich to fund ever more social programs will do anything about the state’s soaring issues of crime and disorder.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ establishment gov candidate Xavier Becerra offers all the innovative ideas you’d expect from a colorless Biden administration apparatchik.

Nor is Democratic thinking outside the deep-blue states any less dreary: That’s why polling shows Dems with only a tiny (1- to 3-point) advantage over Republicans on the economy, no matter the voters’ discontent with Team Trump. 

Voters can expect that handing Congress to Democrats will mostly just mean another round or two of pointless impeachment proceedings, plus defund-the-military antiwar pressures and more social spending that risks bringing back Bidenflation.

The public must also ask why Democrats have exploded into a full-blown civil war over Israel — an issue utterly irrelevant to kitchen-table concerns.

This party can’t even begin to focus on real answers to the worries of the vast majority of Americans, and so is at great risk of seeing its much-desired blue wave subside into a blue puddle.