Across traditional and social media, in public forums and (no doubt) in private offices, Democrats are licking their wounds from the trouncing they received in last week's elections.

It isn't just that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris lost the Electoral College and the popular vote — the first time a Republican candidate has won the popular vote in two decades — or the fact that she lost all the "swing states," or that Democrats lost their majority in the United States Senate and failed to take control of the House of Representatives.

It's that there were record-breaking demographic swings to the right in this election, rivalling even Ronald Reagan's famous pickup of working-class voters in 1980 and '84 (a group that came to be known as "Reagan Democrats").

Forty-six percent of young voters (18-29) voted for President-elect Donald Trump. He received 43% of the votes of women aged 18-44, 41% of the Hispanic vote, and 15% of the Black vote — including, notably, 30% of young Black men. Fifty-six percent of first-time voters cast their votes for Trump, as did 60% of men who are fathers and 65% of all veterans. Sixty-five percent of Native Americans voted for Trump.

To hear them talk (or whine, to be more accurate), Democrats just don't get it. It must be racism. Or misogyny. Or transphobia. Or just plain old ignorance. Or it's "messaging" — they just didn't do a good enough job at communicating their positions to the public.

It doesn't seem to occur to them that the American public has heard them loud and clear, and that it's their policies that voters rejected.

But that is exactly what happened.

Americans do not want open borders as a surreptitious method of implementing former President Barack Obama's macro-Marxism: transferring Americans' wealth to the world's poor by allowing tens of millions of them into the country and then giving them billions of dollars in free housing, free education, free health care and free groceries, all paid for by American taxpayers while our own citizens struggle.

Americans will not be told that men can be women, and vice versa, and that they must say so or be labeled "transphobic"; nor do they want males in female sports, bathrooms, locker rooms or prisons. They understand that young children are impressionable and easily influenced, and that they should not be placed on drugs that permanently sterilize them, or have perfectly healthy body parts surgically mutilated or removed.

Voters are fed up with schools — public and private — that think their primary mission is to inform children about every conceivable sexual predilection — including their teachers' own fetishes — and to insert pornographic content under the auspices of "diversity" and "inclusion" into school curricula, library books and extracurricular activities, even as American children's test scores in serious, legitimate academic subjects fall, year after year.

Americans are tired of being told that prosecuting crime is "systemic racism" while violent criminals are allowed back on the streets. They are fed up with shoplifting and other retail theft that has cost tens of billions of dollars to businesses and caused the collapse of downtowns.

They are tired of watching the homeless, mentally ill and addicted live and die in the streets — further contributing to the decay of our cities — and being gaslit by leftist activists who insist that is "compassionate" or "progressive."

Americans are furious that our social service agencies have insufficient funds to assist with the needs of veterans, Native Americans, the poor and those suffering after natural disasters, while billions are sent abroad to places like Ukraine, for wars in which we have no serious interest.

Americans will no longer stand for being censored in the name of preventing the spread of "misinformation" by a government that has been actively engaged in creating and disseminating misinformation.

Voters are up in arms about runaway inflation, sky-high fuel and grocery prices, housing shortages and climbing interest rates. They see through the deception behind claims of "climate change" that are used to justify draconian domestic policies choking energy production, banning certain vehicles and appliances and potentially crippling agriculture, while the biggest polluters (like China) escape any consequences whatsoever.

In fact, it's hard to think of a single contemporary Democratic policy for which there is broad support. Even abortion — Democrats' flagship issue this campaign cycle — was a tempest in a teapot. Abortion remains legal in a majority of states: only 13 states have a complete ban; 28 states have legal abortion subject to gestational limits on fetal viability; nine states and the District of Columbia have no gestational limit on abortion whatsoever; and — contrary to the falsehoods promoted by Harris' campaign — every single state permits abortion where a mother's life is endangered, and medical treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies is illegal nowhere.

In the private sector, if a company cannot persuade the public to buy its products or services, it does some serious market analysis and shifts gears as fast as possible. If the CEO and upper management decide to tell consumers they're racists, bigoted, fill-in-the-blank-phobic, deplorable, garbage or just too stupid to realize how great the defective products or substandard services are, the company goes under.

But Democrats owe their present existence to two industries, both of which are largely insulated from public sentiment: government, which extracts financial support by force in the form of taxes, and academia, where tenured faculty can promote the most corrosive, factually baseless and societally destructive ideologies without fear of consequences. Even the news media (or what was once the news media), populated as it is by left-leaning personalities, barely does more than regurgitate Democratic National Committee talking points.

As a result, the Democratic Party has morphed into a self-absorbed blob unable to honestly answer the question, "What went wrong?"

The answer is simple: It's your policies. Americans have seen the consequences of them and want nothing to do with them.

To find out more about Laura Hollis and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Kelly Sikkema at Unsplash