When Will We Democrats Stop Blaming Others?

As a one-time Democratic staffer in the U.S. House and Senate and as a social justice leader who has partnered with public officials, I have spent my career helping to write and pass federal and state laws for racial equality, gender equality, reproductive choice, LGBTQ equality, trans equality, children’s rights and countering gun violence.

I am as upset as anyone you can imagine at what Donald Trump has done, and will do, to laws I had something to do with. And I will fight for those laws with advocacy anew.

Yes, I voted for Kamala Harris. But I cannot, and will not, characterize my friends and allies who voted for Donald Trump as stupid, selfish or prejudiced.

They include liberal Democrats, people of color and pro-choice women whose families could not make ends meet and cried to me about the hardships they faced.

They include Jews whose children were taunted and physically assaulted at schools because they were Jewish, as Antisemitism skyrocketed across the United States without enough consequence.

They include my sister and brother Zionists outraged at the anti-Israel hatred of the extreme left of my Democratic Party, including the Squad, for fomenting the violence on college campuses that threatens the lives of their children.

My lifelong commitment to Israel tempted me to overlook all the domestic issues where I differ with the Republican Party. I could have done so had the Republicans nominated someone else. That’s how much October 7 impacted me.

In the end, I could not get past January 6.

As for the friends and allies I just told you about? Many of them did get past it. It was the hardest vote of their lives. They spent decades fighting for the poor, the oppressed and the disadvantaged. I know because I’ve worked with them in the trenches for justice.

They are not MAGA.

They are not even conservative.

They are lifelong Democrats whose lives were at risk – in perception, reality or both when one is scared – and they were outraged at the callousness of a party that told them they were wrong.

The Democratic Party can keep lecturing them. It can keep stereotyping them with shocking inaccuracy. It can keep alienating them rather than take stock of itself.

And it will lose Presidential elections for a generation to come.