Michael Goodwin: Democrats’ radicalism is their biggest problem

The release by Democrats of their party’s so-called autopsy on the 2024 election is deservedly getting trashed for being late, superficial and scattershot.

It’s so bad that beleaguered party boss Ken Martin tried to keep it secret by saying it was just a draft written by a part-time volunteer.

Given the shockingly thin research and the lack of a coherent overarching analysis, his reluctance to go public makes sense, although there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he could hide it.

Besides, in keeping with the theory that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn, the report does contain a specific insight that makes it worth reading.

That insight is the focus on a wildly effective television and digital ad run by Donald Trump’s campaign, and what the incident says about Kamala Harris and the party’s radical tendencies.

The Trump ad perfectly sums up the central contrast between the candidates.

It begins with a video of Harris expressing unqualified support for taxpayer-funded surgeries for transgender inmates, including illegal immigrants.

Dem’s radical problem

The Trump ad narrator repeats what Harris had just said in the video, then drops the voice-over bomb: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The ad, one of several featuring the same Harris video, ran repeatedly in swing states and was very effective with voters, according to pollsters.

They found the ads scored in large part because they used Harris’ own words against her.

Moreover, the snappy conclusion spoke not only to the differences on transgender issues, but more broadly about the Dems’ fixation on a leftist agenda, at the expense of the pocketbook issues Trump was hammering away on.

The report said the Harris campaign had rejected a Bill Clinton recommendation that she had to respond to the Trump ads.

But aides reportedly felt the campaign was trapped because Harris was stuck with her own words.

As the report puts it: “If the vice president would not change her position — and she did not — then there was nothing which would have worked as a response.”

What the report said next was also revealing: “Instead, campaign leaders insisted they had to keep the focus on attacking Trump,” it reads.

The sequence neatly sums up both the incompetence of the Harris campaign and the belief in Democratic circles that Trump was so loathsome that all they had to do was to keep reminding voters, and she would win handily.

Their insular view kept them from recognizing how powerful the Trump ads were in using the culture wars to paint Harris as an out-of-touch leftist, and so they never effectively countered his appeal to the working and middle classes.

Even more shocking is that, two years later, their radicalism remains the key problem Dems face.

Their leaders still believe that voters hate Trump as much as they do, without understanding that there are legitimate reasons why he won the Oval Office twice.

Even now, with Trump mired in slumping approval ratings over the Iran war’s impact on energy prices and the economy, Dems keep beating their extreme drums.

Having learned nothing from their lock-step support for Joe Biden’s insane open border policy, they still aim to protect illegal immigrants from deportations, even those who have committed crimes.

They’ve rhetorically turned immigration enforcement into evidence of fascism, and are like demented parrots repeating charges that Trump is the new Hitler.

They also oppose sensible voter ID requirements and remain ready to die on the transgender hill, even when it involves biological males in women’s sports and locker rooms.

And by becoming the anti-Israel party, Dems have helped to foster a wave of antisemitism on college campuses and urban areas.

Across the nation, pols who entered politics as moderates are bowing to the far left wing that is swallowing the entire party.

Middle schooled

The failure to hold the middle is another indication that Dems learned nothing from Trump’s victory over Harris.

In an interview with The Post last week, Rahm Emanuel, former congressman, mayor of Chicago and ambassador to Japan, summed up the consequences in ways that sounded as if he’s serious about making a 2028 run for the White House.

“A problem for my party is, in the last four years, the only room we were comfortable in was the bathroom,” he said in a reference to the obsession with the transgender swamp.

“If you want to run for president and do the job, you’ve got to be comfortable in the family room, the classroom, the boardroom, the break room, and the Situation Room, not just the bathroom,” he added.

He believes Dems in 2024 “got themselves wrapped around the axle in a cultural cul-de-sac, where we were advocating for a set of issues that may come across as primary to us, but they were secondary to the public.

“We brought the culture wars to our schools and lost,” he added.

He could have cited how the playbook of identity politics led to Harris’ choice of a running mate.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was an absolute dud, but his explanation for why he got the nod reveals the party’s DEI obsession.

After the election, Walz told ABC News that Harris chose him because “I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck” and “put them at ease.”

He described himself as the “permission structure” for white men from rural America to vote for Democrats.

As for the huge inconsistencies in his background and the weird things he said, Walz described himself as a “knucklehead.”

True, but Harris didn’t see that because he checked the only boxes she cared about.