As someone committed to left politics and also oddly obsessed with the minutiae of American electoral politics, I was upset but not entirely surprised when Donald Trump won re-election.
The signs were all there. The so-called “vibe shift” incident to Kamala Harris being elevated to the top of the ticket had long worn off by the time the first votes were being cast. The Harris campaign itself went from something promising and oddly savvy — the pick of Tim Walz as her VP nominee was, to me, inspired and done with an eye towards the very constituencies she needed to win — to something dangerously similar to Hillary Clinton’s overly cautious, shambolic 2016 bid. I don’t know anyone who was won over by Harris’s calls for a more “lethal fighting force” or her nonsense gumbo of tax credits and regulatory reforms.
The 2024 result, like the 2016 one, was a small loss that looks worse than it is. Harris, like Hillary Clinton before her, fell a few thousand votes short across the seven swing states. Trump’s so-called “landslide” is a historically small win that closely resembles the coin-flip that this election was always purported to be.
Still, the Democratic Party is in the wilderness again. The Republicans have captured full control of the government, and this time promises to be even more barbaric and horrific than the first. While Republicans plot their revenge tour and speculate on how much violence they can enact on marginal people, Democrats are left wondering where it all went wrong.
This period of soul-searching is really exciting to me as someone who has felt disillusioned with the Party for a while. Beyond the self-serving recriminations and back-stabbing done by pundits, politicos, and others seeking to hold onto their grift, I think there’s a lot of good analysis coming out about the myriad issues that the Democrats are facing. Let’s discuss them.
Turbulent Indigo
The best and most intuitive answer that has come up in the discussions of Harris’s loss is that she was essentially an incumbent running in a global anti-incumbent environment, and that her failure to sufficiently break from the deeply unpopular Biden saddled her with baggage that kept her from fully outrunning him.
This makes sense to me and I think it’s largely correct, but I think that it’s a bit too pat. We’ve seen incumbent parties across the world outrun this anti-incumbent wave, and it would make sense that Harris, a charismatic and historic candidate with an enormous war-chest and unified backing of the party and its institutional boosters, would be primed to beat the odds.
In a way, she did: while Harris overall lost vote-share vs. Biden 2020 in basically every part of the country and across every demographic (oof), she did outperform Biden’s approval rating, turning what would’ve been a landslide against Joe Biden into a coin-flip race.
Another explanation that nicely augments the anti-incumbent wave idea is the fact that, despite some nice paper indicators, the American economy is still pretty dismal for most people. Inflation has driven up the cost of most goods. The post-pandemic safety net, which began under Trump, was unceremoniously killed under Biden, leaving people feeling robbed. I think this is really compelling and fills out some of the holes in the anti-incumbent argument. These anti-incumbent feelings aren’t simply the product of malaise or an ill-informed electorate that believes we’re in a recession even though we’re not. These feelings are animated by the very real sense that, even as the lines go up, people are being left behind.
Against this context, it’s clear why Harris lost: her administration was seen as responsible for taking away stimulus checks, sunsetting student loan pauses, and abandoning the expanded child tax credit. Her administration put banning TikTok over raising the minimum wage, put shipping weapons to a genocidal Israeli government over universal healthcare. Biden’s fairly ambitious Build Back Better plan died not because Republicans outmaneuvered him, but because centrist Democrats were too scared of “socialism” to lift a finger in service of the American people.
And the unfortunate thing for Democrats is that all of that is true. Centrists kneecapped the most popular parts of the Biden agenda in favor of…nothing in particular. Even the parts of Bidenomics that were enacted like the CHIPS Act and the IRA won’t yield results for almost a decade, and all the good things that regulators like Lina Khan and Rohit Chopra enacted were tied up in court. The material result of Biden’s presidency is a handful of half-measures and a lot of nothing, and voters reacted negatively to that. Kamala Harris could have run against this or tried to run on it. She did neither, and it hurt her.
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The Missing Soul of the Democratic Party
To augment this, let’s look at some complimentary alternate explanations.
Dave Dayen at The American Prospect argues here that the Democratic Party lacks a core animating set of principles, and this allows both the Right and voters to fill in the gaps between the disparate network of policy prescriptions that a candidate like Harris lays out.
“In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns. And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent.”
I find this argument pretty compelling — the Democratic Party was at its strongest both morally and politically when it was the party of Rooseveltian social democracy. Once the New Deal consensus was abandoned in the Carter administration, the Democrats found themselves unmoored. The full history is a bit more complex — the Democrats’ electoral dominance was built in part on a reliable set of Southern pro-segregation voters that have since left for the Republicans. The conventional wisdom is that the party had to change to respond to a rightward turn by voters.
But Johnson’s 1964 win — an actual historic landslide — partly rebuts this. Johnson embraced Kennedy’s support for the Black American Civil Rights movement and launched his own “War on Poverty” that was largely aimed at improving the economic position of Black Americans. Barry Goldwater, his arch-conservative opponent, ran a campaign largely aimed at weaponizing this.
Johnson’s support of Civil Rights and social democratic anti-poverty programs lost him the South but won him literally everywhere else. Modern Dems looking for a lodestar could do worse than Johnson.
The post-Carter rejection of social democracy in favor of neoliberalism ironically calcified the “malaise” that Carter and other liberals had identified in the post-Watergate electorate. The Republicans were the party of corporate welfare and social revanchism, and the Democrats, set loose from any commitment to minorities, unions, or the working class, became the party of institutions.
The Clinton-era Democrats were nigh indistinguishable from Republicans, save for their insistence that the government — which had throughout the 1980s become a force for evil in the lives of most Americans — was actually good. The Clinton Democrats’ government did less and less for people while still parroting the value and virtue of government. Clinton and his Democratic Party shifted right on almost every major issue of the day, but still sought to wave the banner of the New Deal and the Great Society. The Democratic Party of Bill Clinton would sooner kill a man than show any kind of backbone.
The Democratic Party of today is hardly different, but the electoral consequences are more dire. The Republicans have been remade by paleoconservatives into a fascist outlet. The voices that were once marginal are now central. Every election now recalls the 1932 Weimar election. And like their liberal counterparts back then, the Democrats would sooner cede the nation to literal Nazis than ally with the Left.
The Republicans, however awful, have a clear and authentic vision for what they want to do with the country. They believe in something. Dayen argues that it’s unclear now what the Democratic Party stands for, and convincing people to vote for a party with no soul is a hard bargain.
The Left Needs a Joe Rogan, or, “It’s The Media’s Fault We Lost”
Another in-vogue idea is that the media landscape is uniquely disfavorable to Democrats and the left. Kate Riga at Talking Points Memo points to the right’s dominance of new media as part of the issue for Democrats; Don Moynihan points to this as part of the reason that the Democrats are being inaccurately maligned for doing “identity politics;” Michael Tomasky of the New Republic lays the blame for Harris’s loss on a right-wing media that “sets the news agenda in this country” and that “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information” that legacy media outlets were quick to parrot.
I think there’s a lot to like about this line of argument: it recognizes the long-standing Marxist idea that proper education is key to bringing about a working class revolution. It also repackages the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” argument into something less smug — “it’s not that people are stupid and easily duped, it’s that there’s a concerted effort across media to mislead people!”
It also holds a seductive appeal for liberals and centrists: it pushes past the soul-level issues that Dayen and others have identified and casts the blame on a situation that is both entirely outside the party’s control and that is (at least in part) solved by elevating people like the pundits offering it. “If we were as big as Joe Rogan, we would have won” is hauntingly compelling if you’re a center-left journalist or pundit looking to scale up.
While there’s definitely something here, I think that it confuses the platform with the message. Even if Democrats had the same kind of huge, captive audiences that folks like Rogan and Andrew Huberman do, it would still need a compelling message that moves people. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars and was consistently in front of huge audiences on TV, podcasts, radio, etc. She was the biggest thing on TikTok, which is ostensibly where younger voters get their information. The issue wasn’t with getting an audience, the issue was what she was saying.
Throughout the campaign, voters in polls said that they couldn’t make sense of Kamala Harris, that they wanted to know more about her and her beliefs, and they wanted to understand why she wanted to be president. None of these questions had satisfactory answers from the campaign — Harris’s beliefs are whatever the Democratic Party says it believes, but also not; her rationale for running for president was, at core, that Joe Biden couldn’t. For an electorate looking for change and disruption, this message didn’t break through, no matter how many people got added to the audience.
I think this also skirts one of the biggest discussions in American politics, which is the question of discussion and debate itself. Since the Obama years, liberal orthodoxy has stated that liberal politicians going onto conservative media is a fool’s errand. This extends to the rank-and-file, with debates between liberals and conservatives seen not as useful political tools but as events that “platform” odious conservative thought, allowing it to become mainstream. This orthodoxy is on display even now, with millions of disaffected Twitter users decamping to Bluesky or Threads to escape Elon Musk’s crypto-fascist hellsite.
This discussion of platforming and mainstreaming has long lost the plot. There is a difference between lefties and liberals seeking as broad an audience as possible and platforming hate speech. There’s a difference between engaging people where they are and radicalizing them. The Harris camp was smart enough to recognize this, which is why she went on Bret Baier, and why she tried to go on Rogan. But these efforts were for naught because, again, it wasn’t who she was talking to, it was what she was saying.
The Body is Rotten and the Soul is Gone
John Ganz, author of the excellent “When the Clock Broke,” and the less excellent John Ganz’s Twitter, identifies a party that is too stuck on defending the status quo, which is a losing proposition in an environment where folks do not like the status quo. He writes:
“The basic terms of political rivalry that have prevailed at least since the New Deal have been turned upside down: The Democrats became Republicans and Republicans became Democrats. The Democrats, in retreat from any meaningful mandate of popular accountability, have transformed themselves into the party of the establishment: wonks, statisticians, professionals, hectoring nonprofit advocates, celebrities, reformers, lecturers (in all senses of the word), assistant professors, and corporate beancounters. They worship G-men, spooks, and generals as minor deities.”
I largely agree with this, but I also think that it’s a bit too nostalgic for the Democrats of yore. The Democratic Party’s always been anti-democratic. The Party of the 20th Century was defined by party bosses, backroom deals, and machine politics. George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election not because he was some inept liberal who couldn’t appeal to middle America, but because the Democratic Party elites, pissed that he’d taken power from them and put it in the hands of actual voters (especially minority voters), kneecapped him. The 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries were nominally “democratic” — voters were given options and were allowed to vote on them — but their decisions hardly mattered. Bernie Sanders, in both cases, lost in large part because the party establishment anti-bodies rejected him. This is not how a party that truly values democratic participation operates.
Ganz’s critique of the party goes deeper though — this anti-democratic tendency has resulted in a platform of technocratic nonsense (Harris’s big pitch to the middle class was a constellation of tax cuts and penalties that mostly help small businesses and upper-middle class folks), rhetoric workshopped to hell, and a total disconnect from the realities of the working class.
“By leaving their working-class base to fend for themselves under global trade accords like NAFTA and GATT, Democrats have forfeited credibility to speak convincingly on behalf of struggling workers.”
This critique is of a piece with Dayen’s, and I think they’re both getting at something really fundamental: that the Democratic Party has abandoned its body (the voters that made up its most durable coalition) and lost its soul (the ideological commitments that brought those folks in to begin with). The Party, body and soul, has rotted.
This rot extends to every policy area: in 2024, the Democrats sounded like Republicans on social policy (moving to the hard right on immigration and crime), on foreign policy (Biden and Harris were more outwardly bloodthirsty than any Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton, and their ambivalence to the suffering in Gaza had real moral and electoral consequences), and on economic policy (that Harris refused to add any kind of ideological glue to the Bidenomics policies that she helped pass is mind-boggling!).
Ganz ties these insights up with the recognition that part of Trump’s appeal, beyond just his populist bona fides and obvious political talents (“In his perverse way, he is a gifted public speaker…”), is that some folks just dig the racism. The bigotry can make Trump appear like a “tell it like it is” guy, someone who’s not afraid to trample over social mores to speak truth. What’s wild is that, in 2019, this was Kamala Harris’s shtick. She wrote a book about it. She made “speaking truth” and standing up against power a major part of her primary campaign, and it was perhaps the bit best aligned with her political identity. That she didn’t pick that up or expand on it in 2024 is, again, mind-boggling.
The upshot of this piece, like Dayen’s, is that the party has to remake itself into a bona fide social democratic party with true ties to the middle and working class. Reviving the New Democrats neoliberal posturing is a fool’s errand, simply retooling the New Deal pitch for the 21st Century won’t be enough. The party has to imagine a future and build itself around the realization of it. That’s going to take imagination, moral clarity, and courage. That there’s no real appetite for that among the party elite means that they are no longer well-suited to run the party.
A New Way Forward
Across all of these, there’s a throughline that I think is interesting. All recognize that America’s political system is failing in some way, and that the Democratic Party and its politicians have failed to respond to it. The party has, either because of elite capture or misapprehension, lost touch with the great American working class. The Republicans have filled that gap, either by weaponizing an unfavorable media landscape or by going full populist. Rather than recognizing that they are playing a rigged game in an unfavorable environment and adapting, the Democrats have come to defend the status quo. The Party defends the status quo even as they lose ground politically and conditions for their core voters — minorities, women, the working class — deteriorate. This deterioration pushed some to the Republicans, but it mostly just encouraged folks to stay home.
This root rot has had a physical dimension too: as the party has become ideologically and rhetorically disconnected from voters, the actual infrastructure that supports those connections has withered too. As Henry Farrell notes, the sites of civic life that used to animate the New Deal-era Democratic Party — union halls, community centers, party headquarters — have closed up. These closures are a literal abandonment of middle America. The resultant lack of meaningful connection to communities means that the Party has surrendered large swaths of the country to the Right. With no compelling message and no boots on the ground, the Democratic Party is absent in most parts of America. It’s no wonder that the Right’s insane caricature of the Democrats has hit so hard. In a lot of communities, they only hear about Democrats in attack ads and on talk radio.
I think this tapestry probably best reflects the reality of the situation. The Democratic Party lost its ideological soul in the late-20th century, and in doing so it lost touch with the voters that form the core of its coalition. The Party has largely abandoned its most effective organizational tools. Without an ideological soul animating it, the Party’s got nothing to say that will cut through the unfair media landscape.
Weirdly enough, those issues are not by themselves enough to lose elections. It took a year of near-unparalleled anti-incumbent discontent and a nominee so bad he had to quit to sink the Party’s chances. Even with the Party hollowed out, the people immiserated, and the media out for blood, Harris and Co. still fought the race to a near tie. Contextualized this way, it’s easy to see why some think that the Party can limp along like this, losing winnable elections by small margins or winning lay-up elections by small margins. Those in the party’s orbit can keep collecting checks, raising disgusting amounts of money, and feeling good about getting into “good trouble” and fighting almost (almost!) to a draw.
But for the folks whose lives are made worse by Republican governance — Black and brown people being erased from voter rolls, kicked out of housing, and killed by cops; trans folks forced to detransition as their identity is outlawed; immigrants lawful or not who are rounded up, detained, or deported — this fundamental failure to meet the moment and retool will be catastrophic. And when the Democrats come knocking at our doors in 2025, 2026, and 2028, hat in hand, asking for money and votes in “the most important election of our lifetimes,” I bet more and more folks will decline to answer.
I cannot profess to know what the best path forward is. But I do have some ideas about what some potential next steps could be:
- The Party needs to embrace democratic participation and competition. This means allowing incumbents to face competitive primaries, it means removing superdelegates from the presidential nominating process, and it means allowing for open primaries across the country.
- The Party must find its ideological core. The Republican Party is animated by Christian theocracy and racial resentment. It is horrible, but it is clear what the world that the Republicans want to create looks like. It is not enough for the Democrats to point in horror at that world and say “that’s not who we are.” The Democrats must articulate a meaningful alternative. Whether that is neoliberalism, social democracy, democratic socialism, or something else is probably immaterial, although I believe that social democratic or democratic socialist policies are best (they are popular and they will improve lives. Improving lives should be the goal of politics).
- The social/civic infrastructure that once powered the Party must be restored. As Kamala Harris’s loss in Pennsylvania demonstrated, it is not nearly enough to mobilize an army of door knockers and volunteers in the last two weeks of an election. The “ground game” is a losing one. Democrats must seek to become permanent fixtures in the landscape of people’s lives. This extends to the media — shock jocks and conservative pundits are more than just ideological lodestars for their listeners, they’re entertainment. They make up part of the fabric of those people’s lives. There is no Democratic or left-leaning outlet that so neatly folds into the infrastructure of people’s lives (sorry Hasan).
These are obviously just a start, easier said than done. But fixing a half-century’s worth of rot takes a lot, and it will be an epochal project, just like the rebalancing of the Supreme Court or the long fight for racial and economic justice. Being clear-eyed about what the end goal is and taking strong steps towards it is imperative right now.
