Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) didn’t hold back Wednesday as he took his own party to task following Kamala Harris’s defeat to Donald Trump in the presidential election. Torres, a prominent moderate and outspoken critic of the Democratic Party’s left wing, zeroed in on what he sees as a destructive influence of far-left ideologies that have pushed everyday Americans away from the party.
Watching Harris’s defeat unfold Tuesday night, Torres was quick to call out the denial within the Democratic establishment. “The signs of a decisive defeat were staring us in the face all along,” he posted on X. “We were simply in denial about them or willfully blind to them, substituting magical thinking for actual analysis.” Citing the public’s record-low confidence in the direction of the country under Democratic leadership, Torres pointed out that such unfavorable metrics for an incumbent party have historically led to losses.
By Wednesday morning, Torres had sharpened his critique, blaming the far-left’s out-of-touch policies for driving away voters across the board. “Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police,’ ‘From the River to the Sea,’ and ‘Latinx,’” he said.
According to Torres, far-left activists and policies have done little to address the real concerns of working-class Americans. “There is more to lose than to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world,” he argued, calling the agenda of progressive Democrats “ivory-towered nonsense.”
Later in the day, Torres shot down popular left-wing narratives circulating in the wake of the election loss, such as the notion that white supremacy or misogyny are to blame for Harris’s defeat. “I am going to state the obvious here: vilifying voters of color as white supremacists will not attract them back to the Democratic Party. It will drive them further into Trump’s camp,” Torres said. “The purpose of politics is not to repel but to attract. Condescension is the most powerful repellant in politics. Voters viscerally resent condescension and will punish you for it at the ballot box.”
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3 Responses
true that
This guy has so much seichel how in the world is he a democrat
There are literally dozens of young Dems serving in Congress and at the state level whose views align with Torres and are much closer to the center than the so called “progressives” whose voices and priorities have dominated the party for the last two decades. If the party doesn’t change quickly they will become as irrelevant as the traditional Republican party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.