Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo
First-time congressional candidate April McClain Delaney prevailed in Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District with 53 percent of the vote.
More often than not, efforts to fight corporate power come from the left flank of the Democratic Party, and have ever since progressives spawned the regulatory state in the early 20th century and the New Deal took on Wall Street. For the past several decades, by contrast, the party’s centrists have generally been more accommodating toward free-market solutions.
But times are changing as old ideological reflexes are starting to come undone.
Once Joe Biden, who by no means ran as a progressive in the 2019 Democratic primaries, came into office, he led Democrats to enact economic reforms ranging from trust-busting to pro-labor policies, shifting the party’s ideological center of gravity. Not even the right was immune to this shift; some Republicans, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, now espouse a more openly skeptical view of laissez-faire economics.
But in the days following Democrats’ thrashing defeat on November 5th, some commentators immediately spun a narrative that the loss is a consequence of Biden moving left on policy, or at the very least that his more working class–oriented economic agenda was all for naught when the election rolled around.
In The New York Times, John Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson went so far as to say that giant corporations such as Amazon are “extremely popular” and thus candidates looking to rein in corporate power “are the inverse of what voters want—people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.”
The premise of this argument relies just about entirely on a misreading of the electorate at the national level that completely falls apart on closer inspection of the down-ballot races. Across the country, candidates not named Kamala Harris found success by more effectively selling the achievements of the Biden administration and casting a more convincing economic message.
By looking at frontline swing races, it’s very clear that candidates who anchored their messaging specifically in fighting corporate power overperformed the national ticket. These economic positions weren’t branded as progressive or radical but instead addressed what exit polling showed was top of mind for voters in this election: inflation and overall cost of living.
“High costs, particularly for groceries, have been a top priority that many Kansans mentioned while Rep. Davids was on the campaign trail,” said Zac Donley, communications director for Rep. Sharice Davids, who won her re-election race in a purple district in deep-red Kansas. “She is working hard to reduce these costs through a variety of solutions.”
Among her solutions was calling for more rigorous antitrust enforcement. In the final week before Election Day, Davids wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission calling on the agency to enforce the Robinson-Patman Act, a long-dormant antitrust law specifically aimed at instilling greater competition among grocery stores and other retail sectors. Davids argued in the letter that the lack of competition has allowed grocers to raise prices for consumers during a time of inflation.
“Though [the RPA] proved a positive force on the economy shortly after its passage, in the last 40 years, there has been little enforcement or oversight of this law, and high levels of concentration in the food and retail industry are rampant,” Davids wrote. “Local grocers and storefronts are the backbone of America’s small business community, and we hope to see the FTC take steps to protect our entrepreneurs and families who are bearing the brunt of higher grocery prices.”
In the 2018 midterms, Davids flipped a Republican-held district, which voted for Trump in 2016 and then swung to Biden narrowly in 2020. This year, she won suburban Johnson County outside Kansas City by a larger share than Harris and defeated her opponent by nearly ten points.
Davids is hardly a progressive. She just this week ran for chair of the moderate New Dems caucus (a race she lost to Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider).
Across the country, candidates not named Kamala Harris found success by more effectively selling the achievements of the Biden administration.
But Davids’s championing of antitrust speaks to a changing attitude among centrist Democrats, who are becoming less enthralled with market fundamentalism, at least on competition-related issues and industrial policy.
The critique of a more interventionist approach to economic policy is that, politically, that kind of platform can only work in blue states or safe districts. Numerous candidates in this cycle, however, clearly showed that argument is wrong.
At the House level, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez successfully won re-election in a rural Washington state district that Trump won handily for a third consecutive time. The right to repair has been one of Gluesenkamp Perez’s most consistent issues, and one that’s been taken up by the Biden antitrust enforcers at the FTC. Despite its being deemed “niche,” she sees the cause as paradigmatic of a broader sense that people don’t have control over their lives; instead, giant corporations like John Deere and Apple block their customers from repairing their products themselves. In this year’s election, Gluesenkamp Perez also talked a lot about price-gouging by corporations and how that’s responsible for a substantial amount of inflation.
Similar rhetoric on corporate greed worked for Rep. Pat Ryan, who held onto a Hudson Valley congressional seat in New York by running on an aggressive anti-monopoly platform. He far outpaced Harris in the district by 12 percentage points, a higher margin than any other frontline Democrat in the country. That same agenda worked for fellow Hudson Valley Democrat Josh Riley, who flipped New York’s 19th District blue.
While first-time Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke, a Blue Dog Dem, didn’t manage to flip Wisconsin’s Third District, she also made trust-busting a core plank of her campaign, specifically singling out Big Ag. Cooke herself is a sixth-generation farmer and knows the plight of being squeezed by agriculture giants. While she didn’t prevail, Cooke outperformed Harris with that economic message in the district by several points.
In Maryland’s Sixth District, first-time congressional candidate April McClain Delaney kept the district blue, even though the Cook Political Report had it listed as just D+2. A moderate Democrat who served in the Commerce Department under Biden, she carried the district with 53 percent of the vote.
In the last several weeks of the race, McClain Delaney, speaking to Politico, defended FTC chair Lina Khan, who had been coming under attack from billionaire Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman, who’d pressured Harris to oust Khan should she win the White House. McClain Delaney said, “I think she should stay where she is.” Politico noted that McClain Delaney wanted agencies to “stand up” to Big Tech and that she supported legislation that would protect kids on social media platforms from targeted advertising and other content.
It wasn’t just moderate candidates, of course, who embraced antitrust enforcers’ work to win in frontline districts. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), for example, a member of the House Progressive Caucus, won re-election in Pennsylvania’s 17th District. Deluzio ran on a cohesive narrative about “freedom,” which included freedom from abortion restrictions but also freedom from monopoly predation. Strengthening labor union rights and enforcing against illegal trade practices were also core to the agenda he emphasized on the campaign trail.
The most relevant data point from Deluzio’s eight-point victory over his Republican opponent isn’t just that he finished ahead of the national ticket in an area that went for Trump in 2016. There are two counties in the district: Allegheny County, which encompasses Pittsburgh, and Beaver County, a deindustrialized steel mill area that’s turned deep-red. Deluzio only lost Beaver county by 13,000 votes; Harris lost it by nearly twice as much.
Matt York/AP Photo
Democrat Ruben Gallego won Kyrsten Sinema’s Arizona Senate seat even as Trump took the state at the presidential level.
These trends in House districts also played out in several Senate races, too. Harris lost Wisconsin, while Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), a senator who champions the Midwest’s progressive populist tradition, was able to narrowly hang onto her seat against California real estate tycoon Eric Hovde.
Even more impressively, first-time Senate candidate Ruben Gallego won Kyrsten Sinema’s Arizona Senate seat even as Trump took the state at the presidential level. Gallego continued Sinema’s moderate streak on a host of social issues, including a hardline position on the southern border. But he decisively broke from Sinema’s pro-corporate politics, opting to emphasize economic populist measures down the stretch. On the campaign trail in September, Gallego publicized a meeting he had with Lina Khan where the two specifically discussed an issue core to his campaign: cracking down on algorithmic price-fixing by corporate landlords that enables them to jack up prices for Arizona renters.
In Nebraska, independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn railed against corporations and wealth inequality; anti-establishment economics were the very linchpin of his campaign. Osborn ended up with only 46 percent of the vote, but he had the highest percentage-point margin (7.6 percentage points) over the Harris-Walz ticket of any of the Democratic or independent Senate candidates. Just behind Osborn was Jon Tester, who also lost in Montana.
There’s been a lot made of the fact that arch-progressive and antitrust proponent Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) did worse in Massachusetts than Harris, even though the senator still handily won re-election, overcoming a giant money dump from pro-crypto Fairshake PAC in outside spending.
But on closer inspection, Warren’s populist crusading actually brought her more working-class voters in parts of the state where Harris bled margins. (The vice president made up ground in wealthier suburban areas.)
For example, Lawrence, Massachusetts, used to be a paper-mill town before the jobs moved out of state for cheaper labor. Latinos, the vast majority working-class, now make up 82 percent of the city. In this election, Lawrence swung to the right in presidential voting by 30 points compared to 2020. Harris won it by just 57 percentage points, the lowest margin in decades. Warren, on the other hand, carried Lawrence by 71 percentage points. The same pattern was replicated in other blue-collar areas like Springfield and Chelsea. Where Warren underperformed compared to Harris was in wealthy Boston suburbs like Newton and Wellesley, by several points in each.
Harris’s suburban coalition carried her in blue states, but it couldn’t bring in enough working-class voters to win nationally. A compelling economic message was better equipped to do that not just in Massachusetts but in frontline districts and red states across the country.
