WASHINGTON, DC – Since the Presidential election results from earlier in November, activists and political scientists alike are analyzing data and media perception to answer the question of “what went wrong?” for Kamala Harris, noted Jerry Iannelli, Editor for The Appeal.
Iannelli has now shared an insightful retrospective on the public’s misconception of the Democratic “police defunding” agenda and what it entails for Trump’s new term.
“While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason a presidential candidate lost an election it is incontrovertible that ‘support for law enforcement’ was a key principle of one of the least popular administrations in recent history,” Iannelli explained.
According to national exit polls, NBC News reported, from most of the voters, that they believed Trump to be the “better choice” for public safety.
And according to Iannelli, “unsurprisingly,” conservative commentators “simply lied” and “pretended the Democrats were namby-pamby pacifists.”
Right-wing talking head Bari Weiss implied on Fox News Democrats had a run on “defunding” cops, which, according to The Appeal, was a “falsehood that went unchallenged on-air.”
The Appeal cracked down on what “mainstream Democrats” have done for the last four years, which included some, but not all: elected an ex-NYPD officer to run New York City; campaigned on deporting more people; funneled money and weapons to regimes committing war crimes; oversaw the beatings and arrests of people demanding police reform; and sent more police officers to “wallop” students protesting for Palestinian rights.
Democrats in office, according to The Appeal, were also responsible for working with “major corporate retailers to arrest more shoplifters,” an ongoing issue in California; filing “racketeering and conspiracy charges against police-reform protesters” in Atlanta; making it “easier” to arrest people with mental illnesses in New York and California; defending the use of solitary confinement; and even supporting a “landmark Supreme Court case” to let “cops arrest unhoused people.”
“Democrats spent the last four years running away from police reform,” Iannelli analyzed, adding “Police reform opens up the door to other questions about class, inequality, corporate power, and capitalism that the modern Democratic Party quite literally cannot afford to discuss.”
The Appeal briefly explored Biden’s campaign and how he won the 2020 presidential election, citing the reason for his win to be mainly the fact his platform “still included some significant reforms, including abolishing cash bail, mandatory minimum sentences, and the death penalty,” despite his rejection of the “protesters’ demands to abolish the police outright.”
Democratic strategist James Carville told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a Nov. 9 interview he blamed the Democrats’ 2024 loss on this “defunding the police” slogan, in which, once again, Iannelli emphasized the Democratic Party’s actions up to this point completely undermined the message.
Carville claimed the “defund the police” slogan “killed Harris’s campaign” and called it the “three stupidest words in the English language” and that the 2020’s civil rights protests had left a “stench” on the party.
According to Harris’s 2024 “Issues” webpage, there was a lack of criminal legal system reforms and instead a feature of her conviction rate as a prosecutor and the “billions of dollars the Biden administration has funneled” to the nation’s deportation forces, the international War on Drugs, and local law enforcement.
Iannelli noted Harris “later rolled out a hail-mary proposal to legalize marijuana as her poll numbers tanked” and at one point, bragged about owning a gun in an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
“And yet, after an election last week in which voters all but screamed that the Democratic Party is moving in the wrong direction,” Iannelli wrote. “Centrist and conservative pundits have drawn the opposite conclusion: The Democrats are, somehow, still too soft on crime.”
Iannelli’s position on the overall issue, however, appears to differ from James Carville’s stance, arguing the “pro-cop platform” established by mainstream Democrats seems to have “done nothing but legitimize Republican grievances and hand Trump a bolstered police and surveillance state.”
And despite the losses, Iannelli added “many of the Democratic Party’s staunchest defenders seem to think the only way forward is to become even more like Republicans—rather than offer voters anything different at all.”
“It shouldn’t have taken losing another Presidential election in embarrassing fashion to teach Democrats that Republican voters simply want to vote for Republicans,” Iannelli said, noting, “Or that half-conservative measures don’t work when the other party is happy to outflank you from the right.”
Ultimately, Iannelli believes “funding the police” efforts to also be counterintuitive for the Democrats, concluding it has “done little other than tell those people to sit home” while “funneling money and weapons to a police state happy to help Trump carry out a second term.”
“‘Funding the police’ didn’t just help them lose the presidency,” Iannelli warned. “It handed a dangerous man an even stronger police and surveillance state.”
