Paul Sancya/AP Photo
Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 28, 2024.
In the endless postmortems about why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, there is a truly stupid narrative that holds that Democrats “ran too far to the left.”
Let’s unpack this myth. For starters, the cultural left is not the same as the pocketbook left.
Democrats did run into trouble by going left on the range of “woke” themes, of which more in a moment. But their stance on this set of issues was rendered far more problematic by the failure of the top of the ticket to articulate a credible and muscular economic populism.
For a strong rendition of the pocketbook left, we can look to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. As Sanders put it the day 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.”
For 40 years, the economic security and living standards of working Americans have been undermined by increasing economic concentration at the top. That economic power has translated into political power to “rig the rules,” as Warren famously puts it.
Payroll jobs have become insecure gigs; pensions have been eliminated by most employers. Housing has become unaffordable, and medical care unreliable. College requires debt unless you have the private head start of affluent parents. Daily life has become more of a hassle. With households requiring two incomes, day care has become a standard expense for families with kids.
This is the experience of the entire working class and much of the middle class. This is especially true for non-college-educated Americans, who went so heavily for Trump.
Democratic presidents, from Carter to Obama, did far too little to challenge this trajectory. Clinton actively promoted the financial deregulation and speculation that caused the 2008 collapse. Obama prevented a second Great Depression, but on terms favorable to Wall Street. Only Biden belatedly rejected much of neoliberalism. But the hole was so deep for ordinary people that four years of intermittent populism was not sufficient to fundamentally alter the basic trajectory, or remedy the deep pocketbook distress, or restore the Democrats’ credibility.
Donald Trump, who was criticized for sounding increasingly “dark,” accurately channeled the darkness that so many working-class Americans of all races feel. Kamala Harris’s politics of joy didn’t do it, nor did her tacking back and forth between sounding a bit populist and trying to also seem pro-business.
As my colleague Luke Goldstein has demonstrated, down-ballot Democrats who sounded themes of pocketbook populism all ran better than Harris. Even self-described moderates survived by emphasizing kitchen-table economics.
MEANWHILE, THE CULTURAL LEFT’S EMBRACE OF “WOKE” gave Republicans a strategy to divert attention from the plain fact that their economic policies serve billionaires and hurt working people. Overall crime rates are down nationally, but in cities where Democratic mayors or district attorneys took a lenient approach to prosecutions of shoplifting or to encampments of people who were homeless, drug-dependent, mentally ill, or all three, they were voted out of office by a fed-up working and middle class.
Taking great care to use the term “Latinx,” ridiculed by native Spanish speakers as a travesty of their language, did not offset the economic vulnerability felt by so many Hispanic voters. If anything, it made politically correct Democrats seem hopelessly out of touch with their real concerns.
DEI is another case where the cultural left may have overreached and provided a fat target. I preferred the older term, “affirmative action,” which was well established and broadly accepted as a necessary remedy for the legacy of slavery and state-sponsored segregation. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion”—and many proponents now want us to add B for Belonging—to the non-woke sounds precious. It does little to promote solidarity and invites resistance.
While the cultural left goes ever further out on the limb of exquisitely correct language, affirmative action itself is under assault by the courts. And the linguistic correctness of white would-be allies fails to impress Black and Latino people who are struggling economically. More sensitive language did not prevent defections to Trump.
Trans issues present the trickiest politics of all. The infamous ad targeted at football and baseball TV audiences (“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you”) was effective partly for its mockery of language.
Note that Trump, having astutely taken the abortion issue off the table by saying it is a matter for the states, has now taken gay rights off the table by appointing a gay secretary of the Treasury (who is also a Wall Street hedge fund billionaire). Scott Bessent lives with his husband, John Freeman, in South Carolina. They have two children. There was not a peep of protest from MAGA.
Trans people have not yet attained the general level of acceptance that gay and lesbian people have achieved after decades of struggle. But the more that progressives want to take political risks to advance unpopular rights, the more credible they need to be as champions of working people. And they have a long way to go.
