Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about COVID-19 vaccinations after touring a Clayco Corporation construction site for a Microsoft data center in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, October 7, 2021.
The past 15 years in electoral politics have seen a series of lunges from one party to another. In 2005, George W. Bush, whose argument for re-election was keeping people safe, let 1,000 Americans drown after Hurricane Katrina, and many more die overseas in a failing war in Iraq. Democrats wiped out the GOP in 2006, then built on that after the financial crisis put the lie to conservative laissez-faire regulatory policy. The agonizingly slow climb out of the Great Recession and failure to prevent millions of foreclosures let Republicans storm back in 2010; endless gridlock (almost entirely caused by conservatives, but at odds with Barack Obama’s expressed vision of post-partisanship) and an inability to solve intractable problems led to a similar thrashing in 2014, along with Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph. The primary Republican promise—repealing Obamacare—didn’t happen, and Democrats ran and won on that in 2018. The pandemic showed Trump’s inability to manage a crisis, ushering in Joe Biden.
Now, Biden is slipping, due to the stubbornness of COVID-19 and continued infighting among congressional Democrats preventing passage of his agenda. The difficulty of purchasing basic goods amid the Great Supply Shock is probably playing a role too. With thin congressional majorities, a typical swing against the party in power in midterms, and federal elections weighted toward Republicans at all levels under normal circumstances, Democratic strategists are scrambling to figure out how to salvage their party’s grip on power, or lose it indefinitely.
Despite what I believe to be the clear lesson of the past 15 years—the party in power that fails to solve the problems it says it will tends to lose—the hot strategist of the moment, a young data analyst named David Shor, has picked the only election in that time period I didn’t mention above, 2012, and fitted an entire worldview around it. It’s become known as “popularism,” and its prescriptions are approximately this: poll-test the issues in the agenda, highlight the most popular measures, and say nothing about the unpopular ones.
You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening to you.
This bumps up against Democratic activist goals around diversity and inclusion and edge-pushing ideas around policing and immigration, and that’s the source of nearly all the tension around popularism. But I would argue that popularism is not only self-evident but approximately what Democrats have been doing in virtually every race of national import for the past 30 years. And that’s precisely the problem. You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening to you. There are diminishing returns to parties that never seem to get results. At this moment, the only thing that will give Democrats a fighting chance is what my friend Matt Stoller just coined as “deliverism.”
Deliverism means governing well and establishing a record that the electorate needed to win actually feels. Ironically, the best example in this comes in Shor’s formative year of 2012. Barack Obama ran on a very specific part of his record, tailored to the critical voters in the Midwest. The ticket even had a slogan: “Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” (The messenger on that slogan was almost always Vice President Joe Biden.)
The auto bailout involved a fairly novel use of funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, injected into General Motors and Chrysler despite its purpose being to buy up toxic mortgage securities. The Obama administration floated emergency loans and tossed out executive leadership, a condition not forced on banks, while pushing the companies through a managed bankruptcy. The industry rebounded and the money was repaid.
In other words, it was a decisive and successful use of executive action to reach an important policy goal, and it paid off politically. (It didn’t hurt that Obama was running for re-election against someone who literally wrote an op-ed called “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”) This contrasts with Obama’s half and quarter measures in other arenas, his reluctance use his own authority elsewhere, and his willingness to let the problems of inequality, rural crisis, and deaths of despair linger. Those caused bigger losses for his party than him personally, because of his political talents.
But Obama came along well into a miscalculation by Democratic elites, who would habitually make promises in elections and not keep them. Drug prices are a good example. In 2006, Nancy Pelosi unveiled a “Six for ’06” agenda of bills that a Democratic House would pass in the first 100 hours if given the majority. One of them was allowing Medicare to negotiate for better prescription drug prices. Frontline Democrats have been running on this for 15 years, through two Democratic presidents.
It didn’t happen in 2006 because of an inability to get 60 votes in the Senate. It didn’t happen within Obamacare because the president cut a deal with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s being attempted again in the Build Back Better agenda, amid reluctance from a handful of pharma industry moles in the Democratic caucus. (It’s very clear, by the way, that these moles are pushing Kyrsten Sinema forward as the alleged problem on drug prices to deflect attention away from themselves.)
But here’s the problem. Every time Democrats make this promise and fail to deliver, cynicism finds a breeding ground. People tune out the Democratic message as pretty words in a speech. Eventually, Democratic support gets ground down to a nub, surfacing only in major metropolitan areas that have a cultural affinity for liberalism. When Republicans screw up, that can translate to a majority, and fortunately they screw up often. But without delivering results, that will be the only option for success.
Shor and his allies argue that there’s no guarantee that doing popular things will yield electoral success; in fact, they believe in a backlash to activist government. But the far greater backlash is to advance the same popular ideas in campaigns consecutively without ever solving the problems. That just kills the party brand.
The closest analogue to popularism is the Clinton presidency through the 1990s, with its performative distance from the left on race and crime. Coinciding with a macroeconomic expansion, it felt good in some regions, but Clinton’s push for globalization hammered factory towns, and a remarkable new report shows the electoral damage that caused. Notably, in 2004 John Kerry ran on ending tax breaks “that reward companies for shipping our jobs overseas,” and so has practically every Democrat since. It’s easy to tune out now.
This infects the issues themselves, defining their popularity. People generally like low taxes because they are unconvinced they get anything for their money. Of course, they do, in a Suzanne Mettler, “submerged state” kind of way. But mortgage deductions and tax breaks flow to the upper classes; most working families just see higher costs for health care and education and family care burdens, and no longer trust the party that’s supposed to fight for them.
If Democrats want to reverse this tendency, they must use all available means to deliver results. Going back to drug pricing reform, Joe Biden has several options available to lower drug costs through his own authority, mostly involving compulsory licensing of patents created with federal support. He could have at least threatened this to get Congress on board with the relatively less aggressive Medicare price negotiation. But a comprehensive plan recently released from the Department of Health and Human Services just fails to follow through on this threat, giving up leverage to get this done.
That shows a lack of seriousness about reaching urgent goals, and voters intuit that from the endless talks on Capitol Hill. Democrats invested themselves in an outrageously ambitious, FDR-style legislative agenda that is hitting the rocks. They expect to be left behind, again, and what they express consistently is that Democrats aren’t delivering results.
But there’s a whole other side to making change that flows from executive branch agencies empowered to act in the public interest. Executive authority and legislative action must work in concert. If by 2024 there are facsimiles of postal banking accounts and cancellation of student debt, along with help for families to care for loved ones and take a day off from work if they’re sick, you can build an argument that Democrats delivered for the working class. If Biden defeats the pandemic, which is what he was hired to do, and brings life back to something approaching normalcy, he can run on that too.
It’s going to be a long climb back for a Democratic brand tarnished by decades of failure on bread-and-butter issues. Talk is cheap. Broken promises are toxic to a skeptical electorate. Deliverism is the only path forward.
