Democrats Must Ditch ‘Defund Police’ Agenda or Face Defeat in 2022 Mid-terms, Says Pollster

If the Democrats hope to maintain a competitive edge in the 2022 mid-term elections, then they should ditch the “defund the police” agenda, renowned party pollster, Douglas Schoen, told The New York Post.

Issuing a dire warning to the party that it either ditch its activist social justice agenda or perish politically, Schoen told The Post that, “the data says to me that if the Democrats go the progressive route they can lose the House and the Senate overwhelmingly in 2022.”

“The incoming Biden administration has to understand that unless they take a moderate path, that is a likely potential outcome for the Democrats,” Schoen added.

Far from being an off-the-cuff remark, Schoen’s comments were based on analysis carried out by his firm - Schoen Cooperman Research - which spoke to 1,000 respondents in a post-election poll between 8 and 9 November.

In the research, people were asked whether Joe Biden’s apparent victory over Donald Trump was a “mandate for centrist policies” or a “mandate for progressive policies". An overwhelming 62 percent of respondents are said to have come back with the answer “centrist” and only 28 percent said “progressive”.

The pollster’s findings didn’t only have something to say about future elections. The results also found that the Democrat Party was affected down-ballot in the November elections by the progressive wing of the party’s insistence on championing agendas such as “defund the police”, a notion championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a hard-core Democrat and Representative of New York's 14th Congressional District. Of those polled, 35 percent said they felt that issue in particular made them “less likely to vote for Democrats” and 23 percent said it encouraged them to vote for the Democrats.

“The hard-core activists, they like AOC. The rest of the country outside hard-core party activists are not so keen on AOC or her agenda … the question for the Democrats is how to keep the progressives on the reservation without fracturing the party,” Schoen told The Post.

Schoen also said that about seven out of 10 respondents said they agreed with statements calling for moderation within the party, a pathway recently urged by politicians such as Democrat Abigail Spanberger who is the Representative of Virginia's 7th Congressional District.

Following the November election, Rep. Spanberger blamed her party’s poor results in the congress on the social justice agenda being adopted by progressives among the Democrats, such as Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, a member of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party and Representative of Minnesota's 5th Congressional District. Audio was leaked to the Washington Post in early November in which Rep. Spanberger could be heard angrily complaining about the party’s campaign strategy saying, “don’t use the world ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” and that the Dems “shouldn’t say” defund the police. 

This week, former president Barack Obama became the latest public figure to be sniped at from progressives after he voiced his opposition to the defund the police initiative.

“I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like Defund the Police, but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” Obama said during an interview on the Snapchat political show “Good Luck America.”

‘The Squad,’ a trio of progressive congresswomen consisting of Rep Omar, Rep Ocasio-Cortez, and Massachusetts Rep Ayanna Pressley, quickly shot back against the 44th President.

President-elect Biden, during his campaign was quick to make clear that he did not support The Squad’s agenda, saying that he was “totally opposed to defunding the police".