Is Sanders or Rahm Emanuel right about regaining Democratic leverage? It’s far more than blue-collar workers.
Even without hard times, failure is a better teacher than success. Success says keep on truckin’ while failure insists that change is mandatory to avoid more bad news. Predictably comes hand-wringing bloviation on why Harris lost, despite justified, mass revulsion with Trump’s sneering belligerence. She had more than enough cash, accessible speeches, celebrity endorsements, and a rational, overly cheerful persona that didn’t win over distrustful voters. Alas, she never sounded independent from the unpopular Biden and conflicts like Gaza. The irony: Biden’s domestic legislative advances made him the most blue-collar- and middle-class-friendly than any other modern president.
Certainly, Harris made a daunting sprint, a fourth-quarter substitute quarterback for a besieged president inept at modern, online contacts. Trump’s strength is Biden’s nemesis: slick publicity ploys driven by shock and awe. Boring orations cannot compete (especially with low-information types) with stagy, ad hoc, seemingly genuine conversations with supportive influencers. Further, foreign (Russian) interference, endless web machinations, hidden oligarch billions, and hundreds of million dollars from showy celebrity Musk swamped Harris backers from Taylor Swift and Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban and fascist-rejecting generals who know Trump cold.
Whatever most mattered (Harris’ bio, race, and gender, alignment with discredited incumbency, failure to validate rage, and reliance on old-style, “things are on the upswing” politics), the critical decider were millions of AWOL 2020 Biden voters. Bad timing and circumstances foiled this second test of whether any (liberal) woman of color is electable. The surging public crusades of 2020 and 2022 that favored procreative freedom (plus wider voter enfranchisement, civil rights and legal liability) did not offset volatile, high-risk Trumper disgust with the status quo and ruling D.C. elites. Enough Republicans chose instead their own (worse) Project 2025 elite – plus disruption for disruption’s sake by history’s most deviant malignant narcissist, unscrupulous enough to use re-election to escape prison time.
Bad guy bully sends the good marshal packing
Indeed, this election dramatized how a brazen, convicted outlaw gloated his way back into power, dispatching the experienced, scandal-free ex-prosecutor with nary an indictment, let alone convictions and penalties. Now truly, and not in a good way, anyone can be president – character, morality, competence and respect for the law be damned. Inverting western movie plots, the nervy gall of the cult bad guy commandeers the town, exiling the law-enforcing, adult marshal to mount up, ride out of town and into the sunset.
Why Harris lost invites infinite adjudications, but the ultimate question remains: what will the Democratic Party and supporters learn from this quasi-shocker? So far, evidence for change is notable by its absence. The delay of serious in-depth commentary from Harris-Walz makes one wonder if top Dems got the urgent message. Here’s a party who’ve lost two of the last three elections to a media-dictator able to dominate his crowd vs. reactive Dems who survey what befuddled, politically-uninvolved voters say they want, then struggle to thread that needle. Trump takes charge like a manic cheerleader. Data-driven Dems are married to prudence.
What sets Trump apart is his fixated commitment to manipulate public opinion, come what may (forever testing convention), who senses the electoral world has changed. Compare that to complacent Democrats trusting to past measures: well-run, uplifting Conventions, high-sounding speeches and professional advisers from an earlier time. As with 2016, 2024 Trump succeeded by fiercely confronting unpopular incumbency, despite running a less strategic, less focused campaign. How Harris ran appears out of date against a bullying demagogue who swamped low-information voters with massive misinformation, shock tactics (laced with wild hyperbole about national carnage), and slick, reductive lies (on “unchecked” immigration and migrant crime, low prosperity, racist ploys, trans/gender issues, even minorities eating pets).
The problem with more of the same
Let’s not ignore how badly the Democrats underestimated the seething rage of the marginally trained, less privileged voters who had already rejected Biden and another dose of GOP-distorted Bidenism. Maybe Harris never had a chance, but the critical 700,000 purple state voters demanded change, a new vision that sounded different. That’s what Harris did not execute, tragically conceding no major criticism of the Biden way. Above all, the Harris campaign embraced the defensible but misguided decision that Dems win if the election is all about Trump. Instead, she’d have done better to replicate the Obama stance as a seeming outsider whose language and vision set him against eight failed Dubya years. Similarly, the 2020 Biden won by smartly setting himself against four disgraced, stumbling Trump years. Why did the Harris team think “more of the same” would win this year?
Yes, Harris talked about fighting inflation and unfair price fixing, but she did not validate the long-standing suffering (even victimization) of the most critical voters in the most critical states. She did not surpass Biden in rebuking the power of crony capitalism and its dominance not just over commerce but political candidates and appointments (item: Trump’s staggering oligarchic crew). Few Dems (AOC, Sanders) even took up systemic brokenness, whether taxation, income inequality, campaign payola, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, class domination, the Senate filibuster – and that the upper crust assumes itself a permanent aristocracy. I never heard Harris seriously challenge heavy corporate and PAC donations and confront the huge disparity of wealth. Above all, she failed to separate from Biden and party passivity that mistakenly waits for public opinion to change.
On point, what have leading Dems done since the defeat to show 1) they understand what happened and why, and 2) are willing to take risks, try new ways to communicate, even sound like genuine critics, not defenders of a woeful status quo. Trump has proved, if nothing else, that the “old politics” and standards for candidates are over, that voters will sidestep reluctance and sanctify superficial disruptors who (again) get away with this blarney: “I am no typical pol. I am unpredictable and will follow my gut and disrupt the status quo all for your benefit.”
In the longer term, too many Dems instead bank on a return to disastrous Trump misrule, now literally with vengeance. By this dicey logic, that’s how Dems retake the House in two years. Certainly in 2028 we return to the full vetting primary process to anoint the best shot. Yet, great party tensions remain between whether to embrace the “radical” Sanders and AOC politics or fall back on “pragmatist” Rahm Emanuel’s mindset, apparent in this NY Times piece, Can Rahm Emanuel Flip the Script Again?: “I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning. Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.” Gosh, why not both?
Once more, into the principled breach
That winning means betraying strong liberal or progressive values irks Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Labor-Farmer Party, positing this loss “a damning indictment” of the Democratic Party. “People do not believe that the Democratic Party is fighting for them or for their families or gives a damn about their lives. We lost ground with almost every group except wealthy households and college-educated voters.”
Nor per Perry Bacon, Jr. in the Wash Post, is it accurate or useful for centrist Democrats to blame progressives:
Before throwing social justice causes and activists under the bus, could they consider not running an 81-year-old candidate for president? Or his vice president, who insists on never criticizing him? How about a party chair whose experience is in running successful campaigns, not lobbying for corporations? Or not relying on strategists whose heydays were 16 years ago? How about language that normal people use, instead of stilted phrases such as “opportunity economy”?
. . . The Democratic Party isn’t just an election organization. Its real purpose is to advance good policies that make the United States a better country. The party shouldn’t shun its principles and values to win elections, as centrists are calling for, but instead find the right candidates and tactics so it can win elections while also defending transgender rights, racial justice and other liberal values.
I couldn’t agree more. Trump proves even a cruel, immoral, dislikable convicted boss can beat an experienced, rational, good faith candidate. That is a clarion call for massive adjustments, starting with an assessment of seriously broken systems that no longer work for key Dem voters (far too many of whom stayed home rather than vote for Trump). That’s what saving democracy must be all about – and that means challenging, then changing the status quo across the boards.
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