Living in Denial

The Democrats have now lost to Donald Trump in two out of three presidential elections, despite the fact that he has been deeply unpopular and polarizing each time he’s run, and that large majorities of voters just four months ago described him as “embarrassing” and “mean-spirited.” This time, Democrats didn’t just lose the Electoral College to him: Trump, for the first time in his career, appears to have won the popular vote, is on track to sweep all seven battleground states, and may well end up with unified party control of Congress.

The Democrats managed this despite way out-fundraising Trump and his team, and despite facing opponents who at times seemed to be trying to sabotage their own campaign in the home stretch: insulting Puerto Ricans, vowing to repeal Obamacare, promising to plunge Americans into economic hardship, and the candidate himself musing out loud about reporters being shot and miming oral sex with a microphone, among so much else. The yearslong effort to hamper Trump via prosecutions and highlighting his attempts to overturn the 2020 election proved a failure. It also comes mere months after party officials seemed willing to eat a loss rather than push their obviously ailing leader out of the race before he drove them off a cliff.

The Democratic establishment, it seems, not only cannot reliably deliver on the election wins it promises to voters — it can’t even save itself.

How did last night’s result happen? There’s a flurry of desperate finger-pointing going on among Democratic influencers right now, pinning it all, as usual, on Russia, on their candidate’s race and gender, on her running mate, on the American public’s allegedly low character, and on anything else besides their own failures. The real explanation is much simpler.

For years now, voters have been telling pollsters that they were fed up with the economy, and poll after poll during this campaign registered them saying it was the issue that would most decide their vote, especially among those who were leaning toward Trump. This held across last night’s exit polls. Across all seven battleground states and nationally, survey results were virtually the same: voters viewed the economy as the most important issue in the election; they felt their personal financial situation was worse and they thought so at significantly higher rates than they did in 2020; and huge majorities of those who voted for Trump viewed the economy negatively, considered it the election’s most pressing issue, and voted for the person they thought was going to bring “change.”

This is exactly what many undecided voters who broke for Trump had been telling reporters in advance of the vote: that they didn’t necessarily like the former president, but they were disturbed by Harris’s inability to offer a change from Biden’s presidency. One eighteen-year-old first-time voter in Milwaukee picked Trump at the top of the ticket despite generally preferring Democrats and voting for them downballot because “I’m mainly worried about economics.”

In other words, what happened last night was not just predictable but entirely typical in the history of US elections: an unpopular incumbent sees his party roundly punished as voters look for change. This is exactly what happened four years ago as well as when Barack Obama won a Democratic trifecta in 2008, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter nearly thirty years before, and when Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took power nearly fifty years before that.

As CNN’s Harry Enten had said, never in US history had a party won reelection when its president’s approval rating was this low and when this many people felt the country was going in the wrong direction under him — and history was not bucked last night.

For many loyal Democrats, this will not compute. The Biden economy, party-loyal pundits have said over and over again, is tremendous — low unemployment, strong GDP growth, slowing inflation, a booming stock market — and anyone unhappy about it must simply be brainwashed. Out of view in this self-congratulatory hall of mirrors were the constant statistics that said otherwise: evictions up past pre-pandemic levels, record-high homelessness, cost-burdened renters at an all-time high, median household income lower than the last pre-pandemic year, inequality returning to pre-pandemic levels, and food insecurity and poverty growing by large double digits since 2021, including a historic spike in child poverty.

Here’s another thing you might not have heard. Largely due to a trick of history, including the COVID-19 pandemic and a Democratic-controlled Congress, Trump was partly responsible for the creation of what the New York Times called “something akin to a European-style welfare state” in 2020 that reduced inequality and even helped some Americans improve their finances for a short spell — and under Biden, all of it went away.

Sometimes that happened due to factors outside Biden’s control and sometimes because of his own decisions, but it always took place with little fight from the president, and it contributed to the ominous rise in hardship under his tenure. That meant not only adding to people’s already onerous monthly expenses — in one case in a self-imposed October surprise that made student loan repayment much more unforgiving for tens of millions of borrowers just before voting. It also saw twenty-five million people being thrown off their public health insurance, many of them in some of the battleground states Harris lost last night. Recall that one of Biden’s attack lines against Trump four years ago was that Trump was going to strip twenty million people of their health insurance.

This might have been mitigated had the president passed the flagship policies on his agenda, helping people weather the storm of rising living costs. Those that he did enact he sometimes self-sabotaged.

There is little career incentive for Democrats and their associated commentators to talk about the fact that, however incidentally it had happened, millions of Americans saw sweeping new economic protections in Trump’s final year and even material improvements in some of their lives, then lost them all under Biden. But if they had, they might have understood part of Trump’s enduring appeal.

This would have been a tough set of circumstances for any political party to overcome. But the Democrats compounded their miseries by sidestepping the democratic process yet again and simply picking a nominee who, just as much of the party had originally feared, proved a weak candidate. Kamala Harris had famously flamed out of the Democratic primary without winning a single primary and as vice president became known for the less-than-stellar interviews and word salad that plagued her as a candidate. But rather than allowing a democratic process to play out to test her and others, the party installed her as the standard-bearer, at which point she struggled under challenging questioning, seemed reticent about her own policy positions, came off as lacking any core beliefs, and mostly avoided unscripted media appearances.

Particularly fatal was Harris’s inability to distance herself from Biden’s unpopular presidency and explain how hers would be different — with, ideally, specifics, something voters continually said they wanted to see from her as they made up their minds. Given multiple chances, Harris whiffed, offering only that she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet and an extended soliloquy about Americans’ ambitious natures.

Hanging over it all was the festering political sore that was Democratic support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Given the perfect chance to reset from an issue that had demoralized the party’s base, threatened its chances in Michigan, and thrust the world into roiling chaos, Harris chose to squander it, loyally lining up behind the despicable and unpopular blank-check policy of the man the party had just ousted as unfit.

As the slaughter continued and expanded, all with Harris’s explicit support, furious Arab American and Muslim voters determined to punish the party by making it lose, while Trump used the opening to pivot to courting these disaffected constituencies and posturing as a dove. It appears to have worked: Trump captured Michigan partly thanks to a shocking winning margin in the city of Dearborn.

Capping it all off was a decision to rerun wholesale Hillary Clinton’s 2016 strategy — one that had already failed once, and against the exact same candidate. The decision, unsurprisingly, produced the same result, only on steroids thanks to the boost of the electorate’s anti-incumbent mood.

What Didn’t Work

The Democratic Party had two models it could have copied. It could have looked at recent election victories in Mexico and France, where left-of-center movements won big and halted what seemed like the almost certain advance of a far-right candidate by delivering on or promising (or both) boosts to people’s purchasing power, most notably through minimum wage increases. Or it could run the kind of campaign UK Labour leader Keir Starmer had run to become prime minister, using a conservative strategy that promised little to voters aside from not being the unpopular ruling right-wing party.

The Harris campaign’s decision to work with Starmer’s team was a good indication of what decision they made.

In practice, Harris ran a campaign that was one part the Democrats’ 2022 midterm approach, one part Hillary Clinton’s losing 2016 strategy of exchanging progressives and working-class voters for suburban Republicans, and one part Starmer’s win in July. Beyond all the obvious problems, it was a somewhat absurd plan, since it meant Harris had to try to paint Trump, the challenger, as the incumbent, even though she was the sitting vice president and served in the unpopular incumbent administration that she refused to publicly break from.

As a result, Harris’s run was a major downgrade from the 2020 Democratic effort. Biden’s never-passed ambitions to historically expand the social safety net became firmly relegated to distant memory, never to be revived; only the child tax credit and a modest expansion of Medicare benefits survived. The campaign combined a sharp rightward lurch on foreign policy and immigration with a handful of laudable populist proposals to ban price gouging and help out first-time homebuyers (while largely avoiding the national 5 percent rent cap that Biden desperately took on before dropping out and that had earlier made its way into the Democratic platform).

Beyond the Medicare proposal and vague promises to protect and strengthen Obamacare, the idea of reforming the broken US health care system — one of Americans’ biggest and most anxiety-inducing costs — was almost entirely absent from the campaign. When voters in a Univision town hall came to Harris with their bleak personal stories of suffering under the health care system and asked how she would solve them, she could give them nothing, because her only real major health care policy was for those over sixty-five and already insured under Medicare.

Harris campaigned more with Republican warmonger Liz Cheney than with any other ally and more with billionaire Mark Cuban — who insisted to the public she wasn’t serious about some of her populist economic proposals — than with union leader Shawn Fain. This was all while courting big business and toying with firing Biden’s high-profile anti-monopoly enforcer who they hate.

Maybe most egregious, Harris seemingly refused to run on the broadly popular $15 minimum wage hike that had been a big part of Biden’s winning 2020 platform. For weeks, she wouldn’t say how much she would raise the wage by, she never brought it up in the debate and other major televised appearances, and she only officially adopted the now outdated $15-an-hour figure three weeks before voting. In thirty-five public events between the day she officially took up the position, October 22, and November 4, Harris mentioned the policy exactly twice: both times in Nevada and without mentioning a dollar figure. It didn’t feature as a top message in her Facebook advertising, it wasn’t in her final ad blitz, and it certainly didn’t appear in any of the ads I personally saw while in the battleground state of North Carolina over the weekend.

This decision likely cost her. Voters in Trump-voting Missouri and Alaska have approved or are on the way to approving ballot measures raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and instituting paid sick leave (another popular measure Harris declined to run on).

Rather than the bread-and-butter matters that voters have consistently said are their biggest concern, Harris and the Democrats were determined to turn this into an election about abortion, democracy, and Trump’s character. Overall, abortion and Harris’s tax policies — which, with their promise of tax cuts, at least related to cost-of-living concerns — were by far the Democrats’ biggest share of ad spending overall, with the party’s investment in commercials on Trump’s character rising in the last month while spots on health care, inflation, and Medicare declined. Harris’s social media advertising mentioned Trump’s name more than it mentioned the candidate herself. A late survey showed that the messages about Trump that most broke through to voters in the election’s final weeks were about his praise for Adolf Hitler’s generals, his comments about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis, and the issue of democracy.

Given a second chance by the friendly Stephen Colbert to answer the question of how her presidency would be different from Biden’s, Harris fumbled for an answer before reminding the TV host that “I’m not Donald Trump.” It may as well have been the campaign’s slogan.

The Harris team’s gamble didn’t pay off. Exit polls show Harris’s support from Republican voters in the low single digits, and she underperformed Biden in several GOP voter strongholds. She improved Democrats’ margin with affluent voters while, astoundingly, losing the battle for middle- and lower-income voters to Trump. Chuck Schumer’s infamous 2016 proclamation that the party would simply trade one blue-collar voter for two suburban Republicans was, for the second time, proven wrong.

The Narrative Storm

The story that is about to be pushed hard is that Harris lost because she was too far left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment’s go-to explanation for all its failures, and because it’s better than admitting that the party elite and its corporate benefactors failed yet again at the one bare-minimum promise they make to their rank and file.

But this is obvious nonsense. Harris ran a significantly more conservative campaign than Biden’s victorious 2020 run, one that eschewed that year’s ambitious progressive platform, kept at arm’s length many of its flagship policies, made a show of sidelining the Left, and rested on linking arms with corporate America and trying to win over conservative voters. It was a strategy that already failed once and that progressive voices warned over and over risked doing so again. They were right.

We are already seeing in real time Democratic opinion-shapers working to make sure the party learns all the wrong lessons from this result. “I think it’s important to say that, you know, anyone who has . . . experienced this country’s history and knows it cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color,” said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, adding that Harris had run a “historic, flawlessly run campaign.”

But there are some signs that reality is breaking through the echo chamber. “This is the leftovers of the 2016 kind of mess” that were never adequately settled due to the chaos of the pandemic, historian Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN in the wake of the result. As the Democratic Party picked up the pieces and figured out what it would do moving forward, she said, one important voice would be Bernie Sanders and his frequent calls that “[the party] needs to talk about bread-and-butter issues.”

Looking at the wreckage of Harris’s campaign, it’s hard to disagree.