The Reckoning of the Democratic Party

Someone needs to catch some blame here, but, when you lose this big, it’s hard to find the obvious culprit. For Kamala Harris’s campaign, the suspects will likely start with Harris herself, who, after an energetic start under impossible conditions, slowly revealed herself to be the candidate whom Democratic voters rejected back in 2019. In the coming months, I imagine there will be a robust interrogation of her staffers and an accounting of who gave what bad advice and whose sensible plans got ignored or run over. Then there is the game of blaming the voters, often broken down into identity-based categories, where a bunch of assumptions are made about what’s best for this or that group and then each is scolded for voting against their own interests. Latino voters, I imagine, will be told that they just elected the deporter-in-chief. Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan who either went for Donald Trump or Jill Stein will be told that Gaza will be turned into beachside condominiums for the Kushner family under a Trump Administration. Black men who voted for Trump will be reminded that they helped elect the same man who took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five.

I don’t think any of these criticisms, taken individually, can account for what happened on Tuesday. In the course of the past three months, I’ve been quite critical of the Harris campaign. It seemed far too wedded to specious polling, far too willing to invite unpopular Republican figures like the Cheney family into the fold, far too wary of media appearances and potentially difficult interviews, and unable to craft a meaningful message on immigration or foreign policy that didn’t involve just repeating the same talking points over and over. I don’t think any of these criticisms turned out to be wrong, but the margin of Trump’s victory suggests that, even if Harris had run a flawless campaign, she still probably would have lost. The headwinds of inflation, President Biden’s unpopularity, the impossibility of putting together an effective campaign in such a short amount of time, and what certainly looks like a broad, multiethnic political and cultural reorganization proved too strong.

But those long odds, especially when it came to demographic voting shifts, did not come out of nowhere. Back in 2020, I wrote an op-ed for the Times titled “ ‘People of Color’ Do Not Belong to the Democratic Party,” in which I argued that liberal candidates needed to stop thinking of legal immigrants as a monolith and to try to understand what actually animated these people on an individual level. The hubris of the Democratic Party was to assume that, because Trump was racist, these populations would just fall in line and vote blue no matter who was at the top of the ticket. The Democrats, in effect, had taken immigrant voters for granted and, as a result, had grown quite incurious about what Latino voters, in particular, might actually want. For the past ten years, the appeals to these voters have mostly been responses to racist things Trump or one of his people have said, a pattern that continued during the Harris campaign, whose most notable and visible message to Latino voters wasn’t about economic policy or the border but rather a cobbled-together set of celebrities who condemned the Trump campaign for the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s “floating island of garbage” line about Puerto Rico. The warning signs for a racial realignment—one in which the Republican Party became the vanguard of an increasingly multiethnic movement of disaffected, anti-establishment voters—have been around for at least the past four years, but Harris’s campaign, much like that of Biden in 2020, chose to ignore them. There is evidence now emerging that Trump made significant gains with voters who make under a hundred thousand dollars per year. That means that a coalition of “pan-ethnic working-class conservatism,” as Ross Douthat put it in the Times, on Tuesday, is no longer just the dream of conservative theorists like Douthat but, rather, it has come sharply into focus as both the present and the potential future of the Republican Party.

The liberal response to this emerging coalition must move beyond scorn, ridicule, and disbelief. The same problems that surfaced in 2020 remain true today: The Democratic Party just doesn’t understand minority and working-class voters, and it has bled both since Barack Obama left office. They have relied far too much on the belief that Trump’s racist rhetoric will scare these populations into voting for the Democratic alternative while ignoring the clear evidence that many of these voters—especially legal immigrants—want stronger border policies and a message of social conservatism. And they have leaned too far into the belief that poor people should be able to plainly spot the thief in their midst. When these presuppositions don’t pan out, the response shouldn’t be to blame these populations for not knowing what’s best for them but instead there should be an honest reckoning with why the Democratic message hasn’t worked. This diagnosis will likely find a host of problems, but I would hope the Party would promote a more universal and pugnacious economic vision that might appeal to both minority voters and young men, who swung by nearly thirty percentage points on Tuesday night when compared with how they voted in 2020. I won’t relitigate the 2020 primaries, but this style of messaging worked for both young and Latino voters who showed up to vote for Bernie Sanders.

Could Harris, who as the sitting Vice-President was beholden to an unpopular Administration, have actually put out a more populist and anti-establishment message? Probably not. When the memes and joy ran out, we were left with a candidate who could not really distinguish herself from her boss and the inflation that burgeoned under his watch. Since the pandemic, it’s been quite clear that whoever was left holding the bag for lockdowns and the disruption of society and the economy—regardless of whether such claims were fair or true—would end up paying an electoral price. That didn’t materialize in 2022, thanks mostly to women voters who were motivated by the Dobbs decision and attacks on reproductive rights, but it finally came home on Tuesday when voters rejected what they see as the establishment that got us here.

Republicans are now presented with an appealing menu of options for the future. Can they broaden the MAGA message to include even more minority voters, which would then give them an almost insurmountable advantage by turning swing states like Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia into new iterations of Florida and Ohio, both of which were in play for Democrats as recently as 2016 but have now turned deep red? Can they successfully characterize their opponents as the party of white, college-educated scolds who can’t even be bothered to learn a few things about the voters they’ve taken for granted all these years? Can they actually put up candidates in local, state, and national elections who reinforce the message of an ascendant conservative movement that will demolish the ornate and ultimately decadent legacy of neoliberalism and usher in an era of shared prosperity?

I have my doubts. Though Tuesday’s election might be seen as an indicator that this vision has already arrived, we still don’t know how MAGA-style conservatism will fare in a Presidential election without Trump leading the ticket. Democrats’ hopes for 2028 is that Trump will actually step aside and his successor will not be able to tap into the same strongman charisma. Between now and then, the Democratic Party will need to find more curiosity about non-white, non-college-educated voters, more focus on economic policies, more candidates who don’t feel like they’ve been put together by an insurance adjuster who can’t stop shuffling through a stack of faulty polling data. None of this should be revelatory, nor do I really expect that the Party will take the advice, but a reckoning is due. The country has spoken across racial and class lines, and the inversion that will see the Republicans as the diverse voice of the working class is under way. ♦