Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
People attend a campaign rally for Pennsylvania’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro and Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman, November 5, 2022, in Philadelphia.
We will soon know whether the Democrats took the drubbing that so many commentators have been forecasting, or whether the pundits were stuck in their own echo chamber, and Democrats do better than predicted. But even if the Democrats do manage to hold onto one or even both houses of Congress, it’s important to learn the right lessons.
One lesson is much bigger than the 2022 midterms: This entire period of American life, from the 1980s on, and intensifying after 2016, has been a huge missed opportunity that will not be reversed in a single election cycle.
The Democrats, after all, are allegedly the party of working people. The past several decades have been an era when working people have been suffering one assault after another on their living standards, their economic security, their future horizons, and the life prospects for their children and grandchildren.
This should have been a golden age for ordinary people flocking to the banner of Democrats as their champions, against a corporate class that has grown ever more rapacious at the expense of the common American. Instead, it was a time when working-class voters deserted Democrats for a Republican Party that slavishly favors corporations and bankers over workers. And this was happening well before Donald Trump used crude racism and hyper-nationalism to divert popular frustrations from pocketbook issues.
In 2020, Democrats lost the white working-class vote by about 40 points. Yes, this is partly about race, but race doesn’t begin to explain it all; working-class Latinos and African Americans have also been moving right.
How could this have happened? Is it that working people are somehow unaware how badly they are getting screwed? I don’t think so. The more plausible explanation is that Democrats have lost most of their credibility as their champions.
Much of this loss dates to the Clinton administration, a time when a Democratic president bashed government, liberated Wall Street, pursued budget balance as an end in itself, and cozied up to large corporations. Hillary Clinton in 2016 compounded Bill’s damage by thinking that going left on social issues could make up for going right on economics.
There are some Democrats who superbly articulate just how increasing corporate concentration has destroyed the prospects of ordinary Americans as well as corrupting our polity—Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tim Ryan, and John Fetterman, to name four. But their cogent message gets drowned out by the mixed messages of the national party.
The failure of the national party machinery to support Ryan speaks volumes. There are just too many corrupted national Democrats who make too much money by being cozy with corporations and banks for the party to welcome his kind of unabashed left-populism.
Whether Ryan narrowly wins or narrowly loses today, he will do a lot better than other Democrats who’ve run statewide in Ohio in the past two decades, the exception being Sherrod Brown, who speaks the same language as Ryan.
The other populist running for the Senate in a swing state, John Fetterman, would have won going away had he not suffered a stroke. And win or lose, he will run a very close race.
One factor that destroyed regional economies was blind Democratic support for the myth of “free trade.”
A further factor that has clobbered Democrats is the rural vote. Rural economies have been left behind by economic changes. Likewise small cities that used to be manufacturing centers. Even more than the working class generally, the people who live in those counties feel ignored by Democrats, who have not done nearly enough on their behalf. The upper Midwest, rural as well as urban, used to be a Democratic stronghold.
One factor that destroyed these regional economies was blind Democratic support for the myth of “free trade.” In the past decade, even mainstream economists have begun to acknowledge this. Tom Edsall, writing in The New York Times the other day, had an aha moment. Even blue-chip economists now agree that Democrats are losing the working class because they have blown off concerns about good jobs. Imagine that.
Edsall quotes a 2020 report by MIT economist David Autor (a relatively recent convert) and two colleagues: “The United States has allowed traditional channels of worker voice to atrophy without fostering new institutions or buttressing existing ones. It has permitted the federal minimum wage to recede to near-irrelevance, lowering the floor under the labor market for low-paid workers. It has embraced a policy-driven expansion of free trade with the developing world, Mexico and China in particular, yet failed to direct the gains toward redressing the employment losses and retraining needs of workers.”
Edsall also quotes Gordon Hanson, a professor of urban policy at Harvard: Democrats “have come to be seen as the party of free trade, given President Clinton pushing through both NAFTA and China’s entry to the W.T.O. and President Obama championing the Trans-Pacific Partnership—they are seen as the engineers of manufacturing job loss.”
As we used to say in my grade school, “No shit, Dick Tracy.”
A few of us have been pointing out for about 40 years how wrongheaded trade policies and deindustrialization have been destroying working families and communities, with the Democratic Party as collateral damage.
When a handful of brave, well-credentialed economists such as the late Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, a few journalists like me, and outlier Democrats (most notably Dick Gephardt) began pointing to these trends and the political fallout in the early 1980s, we were dismissed as flat-earth types and demagogues. But when ultra-mainstream economists confirm these realities and their lethal impact on the Democratic Party, it’s a big story.
You might say better late than never. But in this case, late may be too late. The desertion of working-class voters from Democrats is so baked in that it will take a lot more than one election cycle to begin to reverse.
Joe Biden, to his great credit, has begun shifting the Democrats in a more progressive direction. No more support for the myth of free trade. A resurrection of antitrust, corporate regulation, public investment and public planning, and trade unions. But after so many decades of neglect, the practical short-run impact of those policies may be too marginal to change very many votes this year.
On Monday, I got a blast email from a campaign operative named Cliff Schecter, who runs a Democratic media and consulting firm called Blue Amp Strategies that has worked for Biden among others. Schecter writes: “The closing argument for this election is that the Biden administration has delivered on its promises to Americans, creating the most manufacturing jobs in 30 years, lowering childhood poverty by the greatest percentage ever, and finally giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices. This is a positive record of accomplishment that we need to protect on Election Day.”
Sorry, Cliff, but if you unpack these claims, they just wouldn’t resonate with voters who have been deserting Democrats.
The “most manufacturing jobs in 30 years” turn out to be a pittance. And if you don’t happen to have one of them, the claim rings hollow.
Likewise Medicare’s alleged ability to negotiate drug prices. It doesn’t cover most drugs and it doesn’t begin to take effect until 2026. This needlessly slow rollout reflects the influence of the drug industry.
Even the accurate claim of having lowered childhood poverty (via an expanded Child Tax Credit) was reversed by Republicans and one corporate Democrat (Joe Manchin), who refused to continue it, so it is not there “to protect on Election Day.”
As our colleague Stan Greenberg keeps arguing, it makes no sense to crow about Biden’s great economic achievements when most voters are experiencing their economic lives as going to hell.
But this sort of rhetoric is the lowest common denominator in Democratic ideology and language. I want to avoid the misleading term “messaging,” because it implies that the problem is inartful language. Wrong. Behind the muddy language is muddled ideology and corrupted politicians.
I also want to be careful not to oversimplify. This defection of people who in the past voted Democratic reflects the intersection of economics and race, and the experience of white working-class people having lost status on the cultural as well as the economic front. But the evidence suggests that the economic factors are paramount.
There is the further complicating factor that populist class politics may not play well in suburban swing districts. There, local Democrats fashion a narrative that suits their districts. The problem is that the national Democratic story is all over the map.
In the past, national progressive Democrats bridged over these contradictions by delivering for working-class Americans first and foremost, but also delivering plenty for the workaday middle class as well, via such broad benefits as Medicare, Social Security, affordable housing, and education aid. If the rich wanted to vote Republican, fine. There are more of us than there are of them, and the fact that Republicans got the support of the rich just reinforced who was on which side. But today, there are far too many Wall Street Democrats, and the flip side is far too many blue-collar Republicans.
A journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step. But this will be a very long journey. And it will be a journey to nowhere if we lose our democracy in the meantime. If we can make the heroic assumption that democracy will survive, Democrats need to listen to the Ryans and the Fettermans.
