What Should Democrats Do?
Assessing Some Postmortems and Giving My Own
Hello,
As we all know now, former president Donald Trump (R) is now the president elect. He won both the popular vote and the EC. He won the popular by 1.6%, won all 7 battleground states, though by much smaller margins than most understand, and most counties across the country that have reported their complete results had a rightward shift, including counties that Harris won. And, yesterday, we learned that the GOP will have unified control of the federal government, for the first time since the 115th Congress (1/2017-1/2019).
So, that means, there have been a lot of “what happened?” and “what should the Democratic Party do now”? I’ll try to cateogrize what I’ve seen, and then give my own analysis.
(1) Bernie Would Have Won-type Arguments/ Working-Class Focused Campaign
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) himself put out a statement, it reads, in part:
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
In Jacobin, the magazine that best represents my own politics, Branko Marcetic wrote that Harris’s campaign took too much from 2016 Clinton mixed with neoliberal, middle class platitudes. Biden won and we saw “the largest expansion of the U.S. social safety net in generations, leading to a record-breaking reduction in poverty — only for it to be almost immediately undone and apparently forgotten by those in power.” And then the party ran away from that. Compared to her run in 2019, 2024 Harris didn’t explicitly support paid family leave with any policy proposals. Even 76% of Republicans, in some polls, show support for a strong paid leave policy. She also didn’t champion Medicare For All, like Bernie would have. Bernie believes that Biden was the most progressive president since FDR but it wasn’t enough; tens of millions of people are hurting economically.
When a candidate is explaining too much about how Americans should feel, as opposed to listening and saying “however you feel is exactly correct, and who you blame is exactly correct” like Trump exploited, it’s hard to win. I will discuss this category more in explanations (4) and (5).
What’s true though is the working class isn’t a political class in terms of electoral politics in America, it’s ripped with divisions internally. “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle,” explains Tim Barker.
(2) Biden Should Have Never Run for Re-election/Competitive Primary Was Needed
I’m curious to read the tell-all memoirs of Biden admin and campaign staff. I recall back when Biden ran in 2020 that he pledged to be a transitional president, implying that he might not run again. Though Biden biographer Even Osnos, who studied his career, when asked “do you think Biden runs again if he wins in 2020?” he was firmly on the side of, yes, he will run again; of course. Though Biden, after a bad debate performance, did eventually step aside, according to these arguers, including Nancy Pelosi, it was too late. I agree with this. Biden should never had ran for reelection in the first place. There would have been a healthy primary and maybe a more popular general election candidate would have prevailed.
Primaries last too long in this country, but 100 days was also not enough time, especially with Trump not agreeing to more debates against Harris, for Harris to spread the message that Americans would benefit from her policies more than her opponents. She was trying to defend the economic policies of a man who had a disapproval rating above 50% since September 2021, and not doubling down on her parties most popular policies at the same time. She had better policies than Trump. Policies don’t always matter voters often vote retrospectively as opposed to prospectively, saying what you will do for them in the future is a hard bet for some to swallow. This is why Harris widely lost by people who say in polls that their family is financially “worse off”than four years ago and also lost for those who said that inflation caused their family either “severe hardship” or “moderate hardship” and she won with those who felt better off. It’s the economy, stupid:
(3) Hard to Elect a Woman. Hard to Elect a Black Woman.
This is unpopular in 2024 in some parts of this discussion, but it’s undoubtedly true. This doesn’t mean that I think America won’t elect a woman, or a black woman, eventually. This isn’t to suggest all Trump supporters sexist or racist. However, to deny that Kamala Harris wasn’t impacted negatively by her very existence in a country fundamentally built on white supremacy—where protecting white innocence often takes precedence over confronting structural and systemic biases—is absurd. So I won’t pretend otherwise.
“Fear of a Black President” as Coates wrote about in 2012 and the reckoning we are now facing in our country after Obama, holds up and is borne out daily, captures what white innocence and the “possessive investment of whiteness” creates, even in non-white communities (assimilation is often defensive, protective, and believed by people because of survival reasons). As Coates (2015, 116) wrote in his introduction to that essay in his essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, “was this not what winning always looked like for us?” Black advancement always is faced with severe resistance, reaction, and crawlbacks.
I don’t care if it’s unpopular to say.
Apparently harping on this will continue to hurt Democrats. That is a strategic question and I’ll all for strategic fixes. But as Coates understands, “the world might fall off a cliff, but I [do] not have to be among those pushing it and more, I did not have to nod along while fools insisted that gravity was debateable.” I will speak and write the truth, especially when it’s unpopular. Harris was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. Just like Obama was. What does it say about us that we can’t speak candidly about this truth? It’s a moral disaster.
(4) Media Consumption Has Been Revolutionized - You Are the Media.
In “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?,” Michael Tomasky summarizes what I think is the most important and weighty explanation. Most people do not consume mainstream media anymore. They consume rightwing media, including folks who aren’t consuming it willingly. Be that in the form of TikTok videos, YouTube channels, podcasts, Instagram stories, rightwing-algorithimed X, Facebook groups and posts, and the more known rightwing outlets: Fox News, Newsmax, One American News Network, and so forth.
Apolitical spaces became political; now if you believed in aliens or UFOS you somehow were coming across more content about government lies, and now you are an expert on the CIA, and you are somehow convinced that the *ahem* Republican Party is the vessel in which truths will be pursued. Weird, zany, insane: but it’s where we are. Welcome to the United States of Conspiracy. True news and credible institutions (that always need reform and to be improved upon) are now on the defense against rumors, lies, insanity - all spread by people with crippled epistemologies or for naked self-interested reasons.
As Sam Harris put it in his post-election mortem, “The Reckoning?”:
“I know what it's like to read an article in the New York Times and to spot obvious lies. But the alternative to the failure of journalism simply isn't the firehose of lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that you find on X. Nor is it the calculated and ever-present distortion you find on right-wing news channels, which never had any journalistic standards to violate in the first place. There's simply no alternative to healthy institutions that maintain their credibility, even when they make mistakes, by reliably correcting their errors. And when they fall short of this standard, they can be pressured to do better, because they have intellectual and moral scruples. It's an imperfect process, but it's the best we've got.”
As Tomasky puts it in his essay on the media:
“Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.
…Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.”
I believe that the most important structural factor shaping Americans views is the alternative, pseudo anti-establishment “independent” media, that we are awash in. Apolitical Americans don’t realize that it’s largely ran by rightwing billionaries (often helped by literally Putin) who have a political agenda, and it is not one aligned with proper journalism. There are great people in these spaces (The Majority Report, David Pakman, Democracy Now!, The Breakfast Club) but it is overwhelmed by rightwingers. We might all swim and play in the water from time to time, but the water is red. This is a generational problem. What I saw these podcasts and channels turn into since 2020 has been devastating to witness. And children tuning into them for entertainment without any context of what’s really going on, or how things work, is, truly, a severe problem.
(5) Inflation
Yes, this is included in (1) but it really is a separate category. As J. Bradford DeLong illuminates in his great book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022), there are worse economic outcomes than increasing inflation, but, inflation impacts everyone and it makes them see, feel, that hard work can only get you so far. And they overwhelmingly blame current presidential administrations for their increased prices, everything else be damned.
DeLong (2022, 425) colors the feeling well here:
“…another effect of inflation: one can usually pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of wealth—that behind a person’s prosperity lies some rational basis, whether it is that person’s hard work, skill, and farsightedness, or some ancestor’s. Inflation—even moderate inflation—strips the mask. There is no rational basis. Rather, ‘those to whom the system brings windfalls…bcome profiteers,’ Keynes wrote, and ‘the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.’”
Inflation was minimal during Trump’s four years in office. It doesn’t matter that his economic and mass deportation promises would, if fully implemented as such, increase inflation and shrink America’s GDP by at least 4.2%. It also didn’t matter that Biden made some moves that slowed the increase, such as releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. He could have done more, such as windfall profit taxes or emergency price controls, as the professor of economics at U-Mass Amherst Isabella Weber proposed.
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All the above reasons explain a lot of what we saw on Nov 5, and also random things that are hard to measure. Maybe including Palestinian voices at the DNC would have done enough in Michigan, where Harris only lost by 1.4 points. It could be true that the Dems don’t need to do a lot. Political scientist Thomas F. Schaller predicted that the GOP wouldn’t be able to win back the presidency in 2015 for a long time. That was immediately incorrect.
The truth is no one knows exactly why elections turn out how they do; but polling was really accurate this time around, and economics and media diets absolutely deserve a lot of weight.
In the end, Trump didn’t win in a landslide, and when looking at percentages, consider the reverse as well: sure, 55% of men voted for Trump, but that also means that 45% of men did not. And 55% of Latino men voted for Trump, while 45% of them did not. Sure, 82% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump, but 18% did not.
This is crucial to remember. The truth is that it will take an idiosyncratic approach to increase Democratic turnout. What works for rural America, might not work for urban America. And certainly the 18% of evangelical America who did not vote for Trump probably knows how to reach their fellow community members better than some political consultant ever could.
Be careful of apophenia and the ecological fallacy. And remember that close to 40% of voting-eligible Americans do not vote. That is atrocious and Democrats should really try to appeal to that group of people, though they would say it doesn’t make sense to. We need to know why they don’t vote, and what it will take to get them to regularly vote.
We have a world to win,
Patrick M. Foran