For the last three election cycles, the main project of the Democratic Party has been to keep Donald Trump out of office. Advancing policy to improve the lives of working people has been, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, a distraction. Every other aspect of politics has been deprioritized to favor this single goal, with “vote blue no matter who” emerging as the rallying cry.

But despite the elevation of beating Trump over important policy areas like health care, education, housing, worker protections, and so on, the strategy still failed — twice. Not only are working people now set to face the immense challenges of a second Trump term without any palpable progress that might have been achieved during the Joe Biden years, but the Democrats have also dramatically harmed their reputation and lost scores of working-class voters for nothing in the process.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders, running on a slate of policies designed to uplift the working class, faced unique opposition from within his own party and was presented as an unacceptable political risk. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment, rather than learn from the surprising success of the Sanders campaign, blamed it for losing Clinton the general election.

Sanders faced the same interparty acrimony in 2020, with party elites coordinating the dropout of several popular primary opponents to boost Joe Biden’s chances. In the end, when Biden stepped over Bernie into the White House, the best the Democrats could say about him was, “Hey, at least he’s not Trump!”

In this most recent presidential election, Kamala Harris, especially toward the end of her campaign, succumbed to the fantasy that people were sufficiently afraid of Trump’s dictatorial potential and losing democracy that they would look past her party’s complete lack of major proposals to improve their material conditions. As even people close to the campaign have suggested, they were wrong.

As has been thoroughly laid out during this postelection hangover, working people were encouraged to leave their material and moral concerns behind the ballot booth curtain and check off the blue boxes. Forget Gaza — this is Trump we’re talking about! Harris famously admonished Palestine solidarity protesters at a rally in Detroit: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

The Harris campaign got off to a late but hopeful start, addressing (at least in rhetoric) economic inequality and bringing Tim Walz onto the ticket in an appeal to some segments of the working class. But the campaign’s policy prescriptions never measured up to those early, coconut-pilled days. All in all, the Harris campaign sidelined universal health care (Harris no longer supports Medicare for All, despite its remarkable popularity), affordable housing (as written in Jacobin, the Harris-Walz housing proposal “doubles down on the existing paradigm: more public subsidies, more tax incentives, and more empty hopes that developers will solve the housing crisis”), labor reforms like passing the PRO Act (an unlikely outcome without filibuster reform and enduring lack of political will), and a minimum wage increase (Harris finally professed support for $15 an hour later in her campaign, but even that doesn’t measure up to current costs of living), among other policies that could improve working people’s flagging conditions. Reproductive rights were the only exception, and Harris only seemed keen to prioritize them for horse-race reasons, attempting to win over college-educated white women.

Those voters who failed to “understand the assignment” by voting third party, uncommitted, or not at all became de facto Trump-MAGA supporters — as was demonstrated by a Harris campaign ad comparing Jill Stein voters to Trump voters. If this sounds familiar, one Democratic strategist from South Carolina stated that “a vote for Bernie [is] a vote Trump” — never mind the fact that, unlike Jill Stein, Sanders was actually running on the Democratic Party ballot line.

The Biden administration’s four-year failure to make significant and convincing moves on its weightier campaign promises gnawed away at whatever trust still clung to the bone.

For example, student loan debt cancellation never panned out in the way in which it was promised. As of July 2024, federal student loan debt clocks in at $1.62 trillion, held by roughly 42.8 million borrowers. The Biden administration has canceled nearly $180 billion in federal student debt for 4.9 million borrowers (mainly through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and for those on Income-Driven Repayment Plans), though it withdrew plans to cancel debt for some 38 million more in December.

As for Biden’s promise to be the most pro-labor president, it may be true in relative terms, but the administration also fell short, failing to champion the PRO Act (which it kicked to Harris for use as a campaign promise) and blocking the railroad workers’ strike over paid sick leave in the fall of 2022. Though his administration has made progress on labor issues — notably through appointments like Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board — this progress is likely to be short-lived due to the incoming administration’s antagonistic position on labor rights.

Likewise, despite the tangible immediacy of the climate collapse — never clearer than in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires — no climate emergency has been declared. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which may not survive a second Trump term, is inadequate to meet this moment given that it will fail to reduce emissions to the goals set in the Paris Agreement.

Bernie Sanders summed up the situation after the election: “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.”

The Democrats have not only failed to realize their own hollow project, but any lasting legacy of the Biden administration — as well as that of their Democratic colleagues — may soon be rendered null, merely a brief intermission between Trump’s terms.

The IRA, the CHIPS Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act stand as the Biden administration’s signature policies, with the IRA hailed as the most consequential federal climate legislation ever passed. But as we careen toward the next Trump administration, these would-be legacy policies face serious threats. Biden’s landmark climate legislation is already in the crosshairs of Senator Shelley Moore Capito, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Capito aims to dismantle the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants, which together represent $30 billion — roughly 8 percent of climate-allocated funds. This January, Biden signed memorandums blocking future oil and gas drilling in 625 million acres of federal waters. But under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers need only a simple majority vote to negate the executive action — or Trump can simply issue a memorandum reversing it.

Moreover, Trump’s outsized figure casts a shadow over everything in its orbit. History has a way of rounding edges and dulling details until events and people appear as mere impressions. It’s hard to imagine Biden’s legacy proving stronger than Trump’s imposing narrative and the erosion of time.

Whether Trump’s next term will be defined by mass incompetence, lessons learned from his first term, or any of the myriad possibilities in between remains to be seen. What’s certain is that this election wasn’t a Trump victory so much as a Democratic defeat. With their legacy in serious jeopardy and four more years of Trump to weather, one would hope the Democrats would learn from their failure to achieve the one thing they prioritized above all else.

But if Democrats know anything, it’s how to not learn a single thing. And now that Trump has had a full term out of office to rack up criminal charges, test the loyalty of his sycophants, and nurture his growing grievances, his second term has the potential to be even more consequential than his first.