Democrats are circling the drain (08-21-2025--Hour1)

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to dpeakclendarshow dot com, make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, rite to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. So 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. It's all of them. 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. As well. 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. Either way. The trajectory is quote unquote troublesome, and there are growing tensions about what to do about it. And I am so here for it. Hmm. Michael Pruser or Prusser Crusayer. Anyway. 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. There is no. 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. Dun Ninny. 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. Gen Z. So here I was thinking gen Z was. 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. Unaffiliateds. 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. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know. 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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. 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. I don't. 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. Like, I don't think you fell asleep at the switch. Here. Maybe she has some other important insight. 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. They go to black. 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. Hispanic voters. It's a little bit lower. 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. Right. They say, oh, we're just rocking the vote, We're just getting people to register. Why don't you want people to register? Why are you. 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. You have now prompted. 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. See. I tried to warn you guys, this is not a good path to be on. 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 bitten you in the jackass. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina? Just a quick drive up the mountain and cabins of Asheville. Is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, Maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion. 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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. From the text line? 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. I don't. I'm not sure about that. 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. Well I've talked a lot about media. 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. You can't afford to pay back your college loans on that. So what ends up happening is you have this over production of the quote unquote elite or as I call them, the fo. Elite, right because it's fake. 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. A ton of money. 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. So I think that's why you end up. 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. Maybe on deck. All right, you hear me talk a lot about incentives, Right, Well, let's talk about incentive trips, the kind that companies offer employees to fire them up and reward their teams. If you own a business or you work somewhere that offers these incentive trips, first off, good for you. But also there is a custom app that's a game changer for these trips. It's called Incentive trip Kit. Private group messaging, shared photos, or itinerary travel details all built into a single, easy to use app. There's even a traveler locator, so Carl from Accounting doesn't get left behind. The best part about Incentive Tripkit it's totally private. No email captures, no sign ups, no cringe ads. It's simple, clean and secure, and when the trip is over. Incentive trip Kit turns those highlights into a professional storytelling video. So think about it. When you launch next year's incentive trip campaign, that video becomes your greatest motivator. Talk about a return on investment. Right, You got to check out incentive trip Kit for your business. Visit incentive tripkit dot com because great trips deserve even better returns. From the text. Line, somebody anonymous says, it's not the message, it's the delivery that the Dems can't get. Right, ha ha ha ha. Right. 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. I thought I was. 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. Program, but he's on when I'm on, So like you shouldn't. 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? Why is that? Why do you think that is? 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. Actually. 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. And so he says, what that means is you have to go. 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. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. 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 patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetekalanershow dot com again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.