There perhaps has never been a time when the Democrats did a better job of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. After being well ahead in the generic congressional polls, those numbers collapsed early this year along with the Trump/Russia/Collusion narrative. Since then, leftists have been flailing around desperately searching for an issue.

The first act was stripping Second Amendment rights after the Parkland mass shooting, starring soy boy Camera Hogg; Democrats, infamous for short, childlike memories, obviously forgot that this issue might have cost Al Gore the 2000 election. And gun grabbing doesn’t poll any better today. The second act is the treatment of those invading our country (a.k.a. illegal migrants), starring a hapless little Honduran girl used as a human prop by Time magazine (never mind that her father has a good job back home as a boat captain). Now, related to this, Democrats have a new issue: abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

A week ago this was recognized as a fringe idea even among staunch Democrats, the fringiest fringe around, but then something happened: One Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the Democrat establishment by defeating the favored 20-year incumbent, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), in last Tuesday’s Democrat primary in New York’s 14^th district. She ran, in part, on abolishing ICE, so now this has become the “[n]ew rallying call for 2020 Democrats,” as the AP put it.

Now, I really shouldn’t say this — I mean, I really shouldn’t. I want nothing more than for the Democrats to continue marching toward their cliff, but, alas, honest commentary is my bag. And here’s reality: If you leftists think avowed socialist Cortez’s win had mainly to do with abolishing ICE, you’re putting your electoral chances on ice. Cortez won, largely, for a simple reason.

Bigotry.

She had the right profile: a young, female, Hispanic in a district 70 percent non-white — a figure no doubt even higher among its Democrat electorate — and in which the incumbent was a wizened old white fellow (Crowley is 56 and looks 66). It helped that she’s attractive and articulate, but she shamelessly played the group-identity card, too, sending a message that no one should vote for an old white male. She even retweeted the picture of an attorney who expressed the sentiment that “all white people are racist.”

The Washington Post pointed this phenomenon out, by the way, running a Wednesday article titled “The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.” The paper writes, “Democratic voters have been picking women, racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians in races around the country at historic rates.”

Is this a surprise? I wrote years ago about what I dubbed “Cultural affirmative action”; this is the phenomenon whereby people will, often unconsciously, show preference for or advantage members of so-called “victim groups” simply because of their association with those groups. Cultural affirmative action is especially intense among the Democrat electorate, which comprises many who wish to virtue signal and buttress their own self-image by bearing the new “white man’s burden.”

That is, when they are white. Much of that electorate is non-white and Hispanic. Regardless, anti-white bigotry is intense among Democrats, which is why you hear about mythical “white privilege” and the alleged evils of our white ancestors. And if the Left hates that today’s civilization has been shaped by “dead white males,” it’s easy to understand why they wouldn’t want tomorrow’s to be shaped by live ones.

I expounded upon this phenomenon years ago, mind you. When ex-North Carolina senator John Edwards was running against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democrat nomination, I pointed out that there simply was no way the Democrat electorate was going to choose a white man over a woman and a “black” guy. He was wasting his time. And, sure enough, a subsequent poll of all Americans (not just Democrats) bore this out, showing that while Obama’s race made six percent of Americans less likely to vote for him, it made nine percent more likely to do so.    

(By the way, this is why you, Governor Andy Cuomo, and you, Little Big Gulp — a.k.a. soda-warrior Michael Bloomberg — have no chance of capturing the 2020 Democrat nomination. Zero, zilch, nada. You’re being hoisted on your own petards, as your grand political ambitions will be devoured by the politically correct monster you helped create. And, yes, I am experiencing laughing-out-loud schadenfreude.)

As for Cortez, she beat Crowley by a whopping 57 to 42 percent; if Democrats suppose that more than a handful of points of this are attributable to her anti-ICE position, I say they’re crazy. Heck, I’d think that many of her constituents, upon hearing about abolishing ICE, would only ask, “But what about the warming climate?” (to quote an Internet commenter who made this quip).

Moreover, the Big Apple represents the rest of America politically the way it does scenery-wise. If you think you can extrapolate what happened there to most political races, well, I have a forested mountain range in Manhattan to sell you.

Democrats likely have an emotional impediment precluding them from being intellectually honest here: They don’t want to come to terms with their own bigotry (liberals aren’t big on self-knowledge). The reality, however, is that Cortez won over low-information voters by exploiting their prejudices.

But, hey, what do I know? I’m just an idiot oblivious to reality — and a white male, too. So by all means, my Democrat friends, please run on a pro-illegal-migration, anti-ICE platform. A 28-year-old big city socialist thinks it’s a great idea.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com