Democrats and the mainstream news media are still sorting through the wreckage of the 2024 election, seeking some insight into why and how Donald Trump and his MAGA movement were able to win both the popular vote, the Electoral College and control of both chambers of Congress. It has been 20 years since a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote and the Electoral College.
When I imagine the Democrats and mainstream news media trying to figure out how they got this all so wrong, and the implications for their grand error, I visualize them as something like the FAA officials who sort through the debris of a plane crash, picking up every bit of wreckage and then reassembling the plane somewhere else.
Was it a pilot error? Mechanical failure? A design flaw? The weather? An Act of God? A crime? Some combination of the above? Or something else entirely?
In these weeks after the election, some answers are coming into focus.
Donald Trump and MAGA have always had a clear and simple brand. Moreover, I would suggest that “MAGA” is one of the most successful brands in recent advertising history in its unity of Trump the symbolic leader, the message, emotions and sense of community. By comparison, the Democrats have not established a compelling brand. Most certainly, they could not communicate in simple, clear and direct terms what they represent to the average American who has little if any interest in politics.
Donald Trump and his campaign told a better and more consistent story that spoke to the fears, worries, anger, rage, concerns and hopes of the voting public about “the economy” and “the border crisis” than did Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Harris and the Democrats incorrectly convinced themselves that emphasizing the existential danger that Trump and his MAGA movement represent to the country’s democracy would be a winning message. Unfortunately, for the Democrats and the nation, civic concerns were trumped by immediate material worries about the economy and inflation (even if those concerns are in many ways the result of misinformation, disinformation and fear-mongering).
The Biden administration did not consistently communicate their successes or explain how they directly improved the lives of the American people. Harris was also hamstrung by how she did not create enough separation between herself and President Biden, given his unpopularity. Biden did not step aside earlier, so Harris had the additional challenge of a very limited timeline to make her case to the voters.
Ultimately, the Democrats failed to find the right balance in calibrating their message to create the largest possible base of support instead of narrowcasting to some of the most liberal and vocal parts of the party’s base. The solution here is not for the Democrats to chase the Republicans to the right by becoming more corporatist and embracing neoliberalism and gangster capitalism even more. Instead, the Democrats need to capture the working-class vote on both sides of the color line, nurture the labor movement and show how its policies and vision are connected to a real social democracy that creates opportunities for all hard-working Americans.
At The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner observes:
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.
Trump and his propagandists and other agents (including malign foreign actors) were much more skillful at leveraging the information environment and digital media space – specifically social media, podcasts and YouTube — than were Harris and the Democrats. This domination of digital media complements how the Republicans have spent decades creating a parallel media universe and echo chamber anchored by Fox News and the other “news” networks and outlets in its orbit.
Donald Trump and his agents also engaged in an expert campaign of disinformation and misinformation that demobilized key parts of the Democratic Party’s base and even pushed some of them to vote for Trump. Trump and his propagandists were also very effective in how they targeted low-information swing and independent voters and other late deciders. Voter nullification and voter suppression targeting African-Americans in the key battleground states also hurt Harris’ chances of victory. Polling locations in majority African-American areas were also the target of bomb threats that are suspected to be from Russia.
Harris and her campaign did not consistently deploy a high-dominance leadership style to counter Donald Trump. During her first and only debate with Trump, Harris trounced him. However, in the weeks that followed, Harris often reverted back to a more traditional Democratic Party campaign strategy that was too conflict-avoidant and not aggressive enough. As political scientist M. Steven Fish summarized in a recent conversation with me here at Salon:
The proof of concept was there: When the Democrats switched to a higher-dominance mode, they controlled the narrative, their prospects brightened, and Trump stalled.
But the Democrats then reverted to their low-dominance norm. They fell back on their timeworn, futile tactic of ceding the spotlight to Trump. Rather than just ridiculing Trump’s victim complex, promising to kick his self-pitying butt and then immediately directing attention back to their own great plans for the country, the Democrats devoted precious campaign time, especially in the critical homestretch, to repeating Trump’s increasingly outrageous statements and enjoining everyone to join them in being afraid and offended. Trump knew what he was doing. He kept escalating his incendiary comments while the Harris campaign focused on desperately trying to highlight how extreme, divisive, and mendacious he was. As a result, he dominated news coverage, looking bolder and badder than ever and leaving the Democrats looking like sputtering, defensive, fact-checking, umbrage-filled morality police. The Democrats’ strategy of letting Trump be Trump and hoping everyone would finally come around when they saw how awful he was failed again.
The 2024 election was an almost textbook example of a referendum where a discontent public, angry at the incumbents about “the economy” and the general direction of the country and its future, voted for change. Trump’s win should also be understood in the context of a much larger pattern where incumbents were voted out of power in elections around the world.
The role of racism, white supremacy and hostile sexism in Harris’ defeat must not be minimized. Racism and sexism continue to structure life outcomes, privilege and access to power in American society. To suggest that Harris would not have to overcome the double burden of being Black and a woman in her historic quest for the White House — in an environment where the opposing candidate’s main appeal is white identity politics and white racial authoritarianism and nativism — requires extraordinary evidence, which to this point, does not exist. Based on what we know from decades of political science and other research, racism and hostile sexism boosted support for Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans while depressing support for Kamala Harris.
Ultimately, the 2024 election can be explained by how more people in the correct combinations in the key battleground states and other parts of the country voted for Trump and the MAGA Republicans than they did for Harris and the Democrats. The story is both that simple and that complex.
In a series of stories, Politico summarizes the Democratic Party’s soul searching and blame shifting:
Some Democrats said they are looking less for a visionary who will oversee a massive strategic shift and more for a trusted neutral arbiter who will guide the party through the next presidential contest. There are also regional considerations. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), who won a battleground district in suburban Pittsburgh, said the next DNC chair must be focused on the Blue Wall.
“They gotta be able to put together a coalition that can win everywhere,” he said. “We cannot be a party that can only win in parts of the country. And frankly, our party has to be able to win the Rust Belt.”
In a second story, Politico continues with:
The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” Joseph Paolino Jr., DNC committeeman for Rhode Island, told Politico. “I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day.”
“I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics,” a DNC member from Florida told the outlet. “And you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”…
“I do think there’s this whole sentiment that we just went too far out there on identity, and it allowed the Republicans to really attack us at every turn as a result, and that we just essentially did not focus on just the everyday issues of Americans,” another DNC member from California said.
So what comes next?
The Democratic Party and its leadership need to recalibrate and engage in some critical self-reflection. As Chris Hedges wrote after the election, “Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy.”
The Democrats, as well as the larger responsible political class and news media and other representatives of “the system” and “the institutions” need to confront reality and how matters have now changed on the ground in a fundamental way. By not engaging in critical self-reflection earlier and asking hard questions about the allure and power of Trumpism and the MAGA movement, the Democratic Party and its leaders and consultants (and the mainstream news media) may have squandered away their relevance and power and most importantly, American democracy, for an indeterminately long time to come.
As Tim Barker writes in The New Left Review, “Hegemony is more than a vibe, and critical realignment is not just a fancy name for a dramatic election night. It may be that one day it will be possible to interpret 2024 as a stage in the casting of a new political order. But that will depend on what happens next: what Trump does with his victory, and how everyone else responds to the domestic and international forces unleashed by his second administration.”
