Where the Democrats went wrong: According to the Democrats
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The scale of Donald Trump’s Presidential victory over a fortnight ago revealed a stunning repudiation of Democratic governance.
For only the fourth time since 1900, Democrats failed to win the Presidency, or hold a majority of seats in either the Senate or House of Representatives. Moreover, alongside winning each of the seven battleground states, Trump is the first Republican Presidential candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. In response to such a decisive electoral defeat, politicians, activists and political commentators alike have responded with a plethora of contrasting ‘takes’ regarding where the Kamala Harris campaign and the Democratic Party more broadly, failed. Notably, much of the post-mortem has emphasized micro-level decisions that, while pertinent, fail to consider broader macro-trends that have seen the steady dealignment of the multi-racial working class from the Democratic coalition and towards the Republican Party.
In a now widely circulated July 2016 interview with the Washington Post, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stated that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Schumer got it wrong. Kamala Harris ran a campaign that closely adhered to Schumer's vision of politics, as evidenced by her becoming the first Democratic candidate in decades to win “more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than from poorer groups”. Critically, this approach to political strategy is not singularly interested in winning elections, rather, its whole conception is predicated on creating a political justification to prevent the Democratic Party from embracing populist economic policies that would enrage its fundraising base of corporate donors.
In an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders argued “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”. Implicit in Sanders’s analysis was the critique that the Democratic Party had become increasingly subservient to corporate interests and, as a result, failed to articulate an economic vision that spoke to the anxiety of an electorate where 77% of voters ranked inflation as causing a moderate to severe hardship in their lives in the last year. In place of this representation gap, Sanders argues that Donald Trump offered an “explanation” to the suffering of much of the American public, through directing their angst toward illegal immigrants. Critically, Sanders is well-placed to understand the shift of the multi-racial working class, young men and Latinos towards Trump, in that these groups made up the backbone of his electoral coalition in 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns.
All this is not to say that by simply running on a more economically populist message, Democrats would have magically remedied all of their political woes. Former House Speaker and Democratic heavyweight Nancy Pelosi correctly identified Joe Biden’s failure to withdraw his candidacy at an earlier date, alongside his subsequent endorsement of Kamala Harris, as preventing an open primary contest in which prospective candidacies would have been more effectively stress tested. High-ranking members of Harris’ campaign also observed that as a result of inheriting most of their campaign infrastructure and personnel from the Biden White House, the campaign was unable to criticise and clearly distinguish a prospective Harris Presidency from Biden’s. For their part, the Biden White House pointed to global trends of significant levels of anti-incumbency in response to Covid era inflation, as the primary factor behind Harris’ defeat.
The conclusive nature of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s electoral victory serves as a profound indictment of the Democratic Party’s current trajectory. By prioritising strategies aimed at affluent suburban voters while neglecting the economic anxieties of the vast majority of the American electorate, the party ultimately alienated key constituencies that have historically formed the foundation of its electoral coalition. As Bernie Sanders astutely points out, it is the Democratic Party's abandonment of working-class concerns that have led to its own abandonment by these voters. Without a radical strategic recalibration, that includes the wholesale embrace of economic populism, the Democrats risk sliding into permanent electoral oblivion.