How do you know Democrats are losing midterms? They’re trotting out Nazi analogies

It’s no fun to look ahead and realize that your party will lose a race, an entire election — maybe even via a massive wave. Both sides know this. Both Democrats and Republicans lose on a semi-regular basis. But as Tuesday night’s drubbing approached, Democrats stooped to a new level of smearing Republicans.

In a speech for John Fetterman, the Democrat running for Senate in a heated race against Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, former President Barack Obama urged people to vote Democratic or lose democracy in total.

[W]hen true democracy goes away, we’ve seen throughout history, we’ve seen around the world, when true democracy goes away, people get hurt. It has real consequences,” he said.

Later, Obama added: “This is not an abstraction. Governments start telling you what books you can read and which ones you can’t. Dissidents start getting locked up. Reporters start getting locked up if they’re not toeing the party line. Corruption reigns because there’s no accountability.”

This is theatrical, even for Obama, who was a far superior orator than his two successors. Even if the entire Senate came down to that seat, no one is going to start getting locked up in America because they didn’t toe a party line.

Obama wasn’t the only one riddling pre-election day news with dramatic rhetoric. Historian Andrew Gawthorpe wrote in The Guardian that “the future of American democracy is at stake in the midterm elections.”

And last week, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said that Republicans caused the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and that this is what happens when a country follows “Germany in the early ‘30s.”

“This country is on track to repeat what happened in Germany when it was the greatest democracy going, when it elected a chancellor that then co-opted the media,” Clyburn told Fox News Digital. “This past president called the press the enemy of the people. That is a bunch of crap. And that is what’s going on in this country.”

When Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream gave Clyburn a chance to discuss the topic again, he doubled down with his comparison that Republicans winning control of Congress would be analogous to Germany in the 1930s.

The New York Times posted a story today that included five tips to soothe election stress which included breathing “like a baby” and plunging one’s face into “a bowl with ice water.” Talk about theatrics.

This melodramatic rhetoric also doesn’t match up with voters’ concerns. Polls before Tuesday and exit polls do now show “democracy” or a loss of it as a top concern whatsoever. It’s almost as if this threat were completely fabricated to cast fear into voters or to manipulate them to the polls. People should vote, but not for this reason.

Election losses are common but also temporary. They’re important, but cyclical. This is by design.

Democrats have every right to be frustrated, upset, nervous, or anxious. Politics is an important part of American society. But comparing America in a midterm election to 1930s-era Germany just because polls predict a Republican wave is unserious and desperate.