Looked at one way, the election gave Democrats little reason to panic. It was an inflation election, and the voters decided to punish the incumbent party. From January 2021 to November 2024, food prices rose 22 percent. That changes the price of a $150 cart of groceries to $183. You have to be pretty rich not to feel that. More than half of all Americans living today were born after 1980, meaning they’d never experienced inflation on anything like that scale; for the other 45 percent, it was an awfully distant memory. That’s really what happened here, period and end of story.
In addition, it always bears remembering how close the election was. If just 173,000 or so voters in four states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia—had switched their vote, Kamala Harris would be president today. That’s more than the difference in 2020 and 2016; but still, out of nearly 155 million votes, it ain’t much.
Third, their candidate was their candidate for only 107 days. Books will be published in due course giving us the inside dope on who’s really to blame for Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence that he should run again. Whatever the answer there, the decision was potentially very costly. Could a normal primary process have resulted in a Democratic victory? No one can know for sure. Harris adviser David Plouffe, in a postelection interview on Pod Save America, argued that if Harris had won the nomination in March or April through a normal process, “You spend a month, six weeks on your biography, you keep coming back to it, you define the Trump first term, you raise the stakes of what a Trump second term would be like, you have like a month just to run paid advertising on things like housing and your tax cut.” Even an abbreviated-normal process might have been better. If Biden had dropped out earlier—immediately after the disastrous June 27 debate, say—there would have been time for a mini-primary of some sort; at the very least a quick series of candidate forums, which would either have made Harris a better candidate or have produced someone else who seemed, to party activists, stronger.
Those rationalizations all carry some weight. And yet, they don’t provide much comfort. Panic may not be called for, but losing is losing, and it isn’t winning, and it’s supposed to make you think and reflect. There are, to my mind, three major things the Democrats need to be worrying about.
The first, of course, is economics, and the slippage among working-class voters of all colors. The second centers around certain aspects of cultural politics, and the role played in the nominating process by the now-much-maligned single-issue interest groups—groups defending LGBTQ rights or immigrants’ rights, for example—said to wield such iron control over Democratic candidates. The third has to do with the bleak fact that, as I wrote right after the election in a column that has now been read by upwards of half a million people, the Democratic brand is simply garbage in vast swaths of the country. This problem has many fathers, but at bottom, it is largely a media problem, and it’s one the Democrats and their donors simply have to take seriously, especially now when everyone (I hope) knows and agrees that Joe Rogan moves a thousand times more votes (and this is probably downplaying it) than the New York Times editorial page.
It’s a lot to think about. The good news is that wholesale reinvention isn’t called for. This isn’t the late 1980s, when three Democratic presidential candidates in a row received, respectively, 49, 13, and 111 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win. It’s a party that has still won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, and if you’re the type who always looks on the bright side of life, you can easily put asterisks next to the two they lost. (They were running against a wartime president, and they faced the headwinds of an inflation that they, for the most part, didn’t cause.)
However, if you’re the type to heed warning signs, well, there are plenty of them. Is the shift among Latino men a Trumpian, inflation-induced aberration—or is it a harbinger? Are the tech bros making right-wing politics seem cool to a generation of young men? If so, that’s millions of votes lost, possibly for a long time to come. The old saw, “politics is downstream of culture,” has always been comforting to Democrats and liberals, because the culture was ours; we called those shots, and we could kind of relax, knowing politics would catch up eventually. But what if it’s now conservatives who are running the culture? That would portend a shift in national character that would transcend mere politics. And it would leave progressives with the academy. God help us.
Kamala cutout
The Economic Lessons of the Election
Background. There are two parts to the story of how economics played out in the election. One relates to Harris herself, and her campaign. The other, broader story is about Democratic economic policy thinking and policymaking over the last four decades. We should begin with a two-paragraph summation of the latter.
Going back to FDR, Democrats were all Keynesians. Which means what? They followed the Depression-era theories of John Maynard Keynes that demand for goods and services drives economic activity, and therefore that the government has an interest in taking steps to create and drive demand, especially during downturns. This could mean massive public investment; it could also mean tax cuts—but for working-class people, who would go out and spend the money, not for multimillionaires, who’d be more likely to hoard it (yes, Harris’s tax-cut proposal was solid Keynesian economics).
Even Eisenhower and Nixon called themselves Keynesians. Then—we’re going fast here—came stagflation, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer and his curve, deindustrialization, Ronald Reagan, supply-side (as opposed to Keynesian demand-side) economics. Economic policymaking was turned on its head. Neoliberalism—a confusing term to most Americans, because it invokes the word “liberal” not in its currently understood sense but in the same classic, eighteenth-century philosophical sense in which even Friedman referred to himself as a true liberal—was the ruling economic hegemony: free markets, low taxes, deregulation. Even the Clinton and Obama administrations bought into these precepts to some extent. Nixon had once said, “We are all Keynesians now.” In 2006, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, said, “any honest Democrat will admit that we are all Friedmanites now.”
This is what Joe Biden was trying to change. Building on an intellectual and activist movement that gained momentum after the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and pushed to a considerable extent by Bernie Sanders and his millions of followers, Biden fully embraced “middle-out” economics: the theory that growth doesn’t come from deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy but from making investments that help middle- and working-class people live more secure lives. Not enough people appreciate how Biden assigned himself this monumental and historical task: to force an epochal change, of the sort forced by Roosevelt in the 1930s and Reagan in the 1980s, in the presumptions behind economic policymaking.
And he did it, at least to some extent. But unfortunately, the historical legacy will be mixed. The great legislative accomplishments—infrastructure, CHIPS and science, the Inflation Reduction Act—were impressive politically and are changing the country for the better in so many ways. More than 66,000 projects are underway today under the terms of the infrastructure act alone. The problem is that people don’t know it or feel it. They also have no idea whatsoever that Biden helped the working class where it mattered. Inequality decreased in the United States in 2022 for the first time since 2007. The administration turned the presumptions of antitrust policy, which were shaped by federal appeals court judge Robert Bork in the late 1980s, on their head. And as for jobs? A White House aide told me that 70 to 80 percent of the jobs created by these laws have gone to people without a college degree, and most are in red or purple America. But no one knew. “Maybe people didn’t hear it,” this aide said, “but he said it all the time.”
The other problem, of course, was that all the spending did contribute to inflation. Economists debate how much. Most mainstream economists pin more of the blame on supply chain issues and energy price shocks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though they do agree that government spending played a role. But to the people with the loudest megaphone, Republican politicians and right-wing commentators, it was all about spending—and incidentally, only Biden’s spending, not Donald Trump’s. (They conveniently forget that Trump’s $2.2 trillion 2020 CARES Act was larger fiscally than Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.) So Biden got more blame for the bad than he deserved, and less credit for the good than he earned.
The campaign. Enter Harris. A former prosecutor, she just wasn’t an economically minded politician. I went back and reread the 2019 speech in which she announced her candidacy. She had relatively little to say about the economy. She did say, “Our economy today is not working for working people,” but she said almost nothing about what she believed and would do economically as president, aside from deliver “the largest working- and middle-class tax cut in a generation.” Keynesian, yes, but politically safe and unobjectionable.
At a Pittsburgh event in late September last year, the Harris campaign released its economic plan in the form of an 82-page booklet. It had some progressive ideas, notably on large tax credits for first-time homebuyers. Where it broke with the Biden administration, it did so from the cautious center. In the Pittsburgh speech, she signaled support for cryptocurrencies, rejecting Biden’s mostly hostile posture toward the industry. (His Securities and Exchange Commission, under Chairman Gary Gensler, brought numerous actions against the sector.)
This followed a tonal shift noted in a postelection piece by The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, who had written a book on the Biden administration and checked in with Biden sources after Harris’s defeat. Foer wrote, “Harris began the campaign portraying Trump as a stooge of corporate interests—and touted herself as a relentless scourge of Big Business. During the Democratic National Convention, speaker after speaker inveighed against Trump’s oligarchical allegiances.” But later, and “quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared.” One Biden aide told Foer that Harris was “steered away” from populist messaging by her brother-in-law Tony West, the chief legal officer for Uber. Many news articles during the campaign fingered West as the key influence reining in whatever populist instincts Harris may have had.
To be fair: Harris had to walk a line that would be hard for any politician to walk. She needed to show loyalty to her president, because that’s what vice presidents do, and when they don’t, they invite controversy; and she simultaneously needed to show she was her own person. On economics, this should have meant sticking to the basic thrust of Bidenomics (without using the word) and putting her own spin on it, but also finding a way to critique inflation and separate herself from it.
She did a number of things right in the campaign, but this she didn’t handle well. Her failure to differentiate herself came into focus most notoriously in the horrible answer she gave in early October to the sympathetic hosts of The View. When asked what she would have done differently from Biden, she answered: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” It’s impossible to imagine she wasn’t prepped for that question. It doesn’t seem like it should have been hard to express pride in the administration’s accomplishments and then offer one or two gentle caveats about spending or emphasize that her approach on an issue—housing, say, which was her signature economic idea—would be different. On The View, when she finally did get around to saying something she’d do differently, it was, again, a cautious and centrist thing: She’d name a Republican to her Cabinet.
Next time. What do Democrats need to take away from all this? They must remain fully committed to the basic historic change Biden was trying to make. They can’t accept the right-wing (and to some extent mainstream) narrative that Bidenomics was an unmitigated failure. Around 16 million jobs were created under Biden. There was a manufacturing boom (which is really just getting started; Trump will undoubtedly get—and take—credit for factory openings made possible by Biden-era legislation). Recently, wages have grown at much higher rates than prices. I could go on, and on.
That said, there are different ways to do this. Democrats do need to be careful about the potential inflationary aspects of their policies. But everything doesn’t have to be a big government program. There are plenty of things they can highlight that have nothing to do with big spending and would clearly tell working-class voters and families that Democrats are on their side. Corporate rent-gouging, for example, is a big part of the housing crisis. Biden tried to address this. Again, hardly anyone knew. Going forward, the Democrats need to make sure people know. If they make it clear to voters that they are on the side of renters (about a third of the country rents housing, mostly the working class), they will surely harvest some votes.
Here’s the bottom line. Most working- and middle-class people are struggling to one degree or another. There are only two narratives to explain these struggles. One, it’s the meddling government, the pointy-headed elitists who back it, and the groups threatening the moral order that the elitists coddle. Two, it’s corporations with too much power, which the system never, ever holds to account, and their political enablers. That’s it. It’s one or the other. It’s zero-sum. The Republicans have the former argument down to an art. The party of government has to make the argument that the problem is unchecked corporate power. And it follows logically that Democrats have to spurn some corporate donations as well. They just can’t be serious about regulating crypto or breaking up tech monopolies while they’re raking in tens of millions from these interests.
Some journalists write about this as if it’s a panacea. It isn’t. There’s no silver bullet in politics. A big chunk of voters are by now so cynical that they simply don’t believe the government is going to do anything to help them. This is going to take time. What the Democrats can’t do is try populism for one cycle and then decide it doesn’t work.
They have to do all this consistently, and without apology. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut published a series of posts on X shortly after the election: “We cannot be afraid of fights—especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism. The right regularly picks fights with elites—Hollywood, higher ed, etc. Democrats (e.g. the Harris campaign) are tepid in our fights with billionaires and corporations.” That is so true. Democrats look and sound afraid when they head down this path. Trump never comes across as afraid. People notice this.
But they also have to do it smartly. They have to choose good enemies. Some of them already know how to do this. Six weeks before the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and shortly before the election, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal released a scathing report on the outrageous denial rates employed by UHC and two other providers. But what was done with the report? Harris should have been all over it.
You couldn’t invent better villains in a laboratory: insurers ripping off seniors. But Democrats just refuse to tell stories. Most of the time. They did tell effective stories having to do with abortion rights, like the story of the incredibly brave Hadley Duvall of Kentucky. But they don’t know how to tell anti-corporate stories. Frankly, they’re afraid to. That must change. And no—doing this is not being too “left-wing.” It’s just being pro-worker. It’s telling the mass of people you’re on their side.
Culture, and That Ad
Background. It was 1969 when the term “interest-group liberalism” was first formulated, by the renowned political scientist Theodore Lowi. The number of single-issue interest groups had been rising throughout the 1960s in conjunction with the growth of the government in the Great Society years. Where others saw these groups as existing in healthy competition, Lowi saw a problem stemming from his observation that a given group’s political power resulted from its connections and resources and not the legitimacy of its claims on government resources. He called the book in which he advanced the notion The End of Liberalism.
Lowi identified a problem that has only calcified over time in this respect: While they can certainly claim on a general level to represent the views of distinct blocs of voters, interest groups chiefly do what their donors and boards want them to do, and whatever will help them raise money and stay afloat. Competition for foundation and donor (large and small) dollars is fierce. There is also an inevitable logic by which, once a certain long-held goal is obtained—via legislation, say, or a major court victory—they must find new battles to fight, as they’re not in the business of folding up shop and saying “mission accomplished” (although this has happened, with respect, for example, to some health care groups after the passage of Obamacare). This results in a steady march leftward.
And yet, to limit any analysis of interest groups to the above points is too cynical. These groups play important roles in liberal politics (they play almost no role in conservative politics, more on which soon). The people who work at them are admirably dedicated to the causes the organizations fight for. Often, they perform this work for very modest pay, especially the lawyers among them, who could be making far more elsewhere. Also, these groups often represent some of the most downtrodden and exploited people in the United States. They are entirely within their rights to press Democrats to adopt their positions. That is their job.
But politicians have a job, too: to get elected. And sometimes, they make the judgment that getting elected requires them to say “no.” The most famous instance of this in modern U.S. history is the episode that has lent its name to the phenomenon of politicians saying no to interest groups—Bill Clinton’s criticism of the rapper Sister Souljah at an event for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.
In June 1992, I was in the room that morning at the Sheraton Washington Hotel when Clinton delivered his rhetorical blow. There was no missing what was happening as Clinton ended a fairly conventional speech with his criticism of Jackson for having Sister Souljah speak at the conference after she’d used racially divisive rhetoric in an interview. I remember sitting in the lobby afterward with some conference attendees—leaders of social service organizations, presidents of small urban colleges, people like that—who were livid. “Clinton Stuns Rainbow Coalition,” ran the headline in the next day’s Washington Post. And yet in a few weeks, it was over—Jackson endorsed Clinton less than a month later. Ever since, centrist Democrats have demanded of their nominees a similar “Sister Souljah moment,” while those on the left have warned their nominees against attacking segments of the base for such obvious political purposes.
Mara Keisling and Kamala Harris; Trump campaign ad
The campaign. Harris earned a reputation during her short campaign as a candidate who couldn’t say “no” to anyone, which as we shall see is not entirely true. This rap dated to her performances at multicandidate forums in 2019, during the early days of the 2020 presidential campaign, when she (and practically every other candidate) endorsed several very liberal positions: decriminalizing illegal border crossings and backing Medicare for All, for example.
It was also during her brief candidacy that Harris sat for an interview on transgender rights with Mara Keisling, who at the time was the founding director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. It was a short interview, about six minutes, and didn’t make news at the time. But it was that interview that served as the basis for the most quoted Trump ad of the cycle, “Insane,” which criticized Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery for inmates. “I made sure that they changed the policy so that every transgender inmate would have access,” the ad quotes Harris as saying. Then, at the end: “The power that I had, I used it in a way that was about pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.”
Harris said these things. If you watch the whole interview, it’s very clear Harris believes—strongly—that what she did in that case was right. The case involved a prisoner who’d killed a father of three young children in 1980 in what the Los Angeles Times called a “drug- and alcohol-fueled rampage.” And Harris used the case to force a wider policy change at the California Department of Corrections. The Trump ad—or more appropriately, ads; there were several variants, and the campaign and affiliated groups spent tens of millions of dollars airing them—was sensationalist and clearly designed to evoke a response of disgust in the viewer, playing on anti-trans sentiment. But factually, it was accurate.
I interviewed Keisling in December. She said that, while she doesn’t think the Trump ad was “decisive,” she regrets nothing about the interview. She said, accurately, that she wasn’t pushing Harris to make a commitment on surgery or any specific issue. She just asked Harris why trans people should vote for her, and Harris went on a roll. “If you’ve seen the interview, I didn’t say tell me about federal prisoners,” Keisling said. “I was like, tell me what you think. Tell me what you’re doing. What have you done? And she walked into it.”
Having said this, though, Keisling also argued that she thinks progressive interest groups need to alter their approach to electoral politics dramatically. “I think people are sick of progressive activists,” she said. “They’re sick of scolding, they’re sick of thought-terminating clichés.” She pointed to an example of the leader of one organization where employees are told to say LGBTQAI-two-S-plus (which includes asexuals, intersex people, and “two spirit” people). Keisling: “And I was like, ‘You’re killing me here. People don’t know what this is.’ And this person said, ‘Mara, you don’t understand. Nobody wants to be the plus.’”
She even said that, come the next election, candidates and campaigns should simply refuse to answer some questions. “I guarantee you [activists] are going to demand that the candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028 say what they’re going to do about federal prisoners. I guarantee that. And if I were the candidates, or I was the campaign, I’d say we don’t have a position on that. It’s what I would say.” People needed to understand, she said, that getting Harris elected was far more important than the fact that she was a prosecutor or “that she had one case that everybody didn’t like.”
Many Democrats and liberal commentators expressed frustration that the Harris campaign didn’t respond to the ad. In the Pod Save America interview, top Harris aides said they made and tested some response ads, but none of them tested as well as other ads, on the economy or the candidate’s biography. Plouffe: “We took it very seriously, but it wasn’t something at the end of the day.… What matters in an election is, is something causing someone to behave differently, either who they vote for or whether they vote. And our sense was, in the battleground states, this was not driving vote behavior to the same extent like the economy was generally, [or] even immigration.” The Lincoln Project made an ad explaining that Harris’s policy on the surgery question was no different from the Trump administration’s. Harris noted the similarity in her interview with Bret Baier of Fox News, but in the Pod Save America episode, Stephanie Cutter said, “we certainly weren’t going to run ads on [the fact] that this was a Trump policy.”
Another interest-group intervention that received scrutiny this cycle was an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire, filled out by the 2019 Harris campaign. The questionnaire asked Harris 18 questions (one had two parts) on various issues of concern to the ACLU. There was a box for the campaign to check “yes” or “no” and then an opportunity to explain its position in 500 words or less. Question 14 concerned support for medical care for transgender people, “including those in prison and immigration detention.” The campaign checked the “yes” box and explained Harris’s work as attorney general, which she discussed with Keisling. The Harris campaign checked “yes” on 11 of the 18 questions, leaving the other seven blank. The campaign did in fact express disagreement with the ACLU on a few matters, although it did not check the “no” box: finding ways to grant the vote to currently incarcerated people, reducing the size of the immigration detention system by 75 percent, issuing federal guidance limiting the use of force by police.
The ACLU wasn’t willing to put someone on the phone with me to discuss all this and instead sent a statement arguing that the questionnaire was justified because “voters needed information on [the campaigns’] positions to draw meaningful policy distinctions among the crowded field.” The statement did note that the only Democratic campaign that didn’t complete the questionnaire was the winning one—Joe Biden’s.
Next time. We are at the beginning of what might well be a horrifying four years for transgender people, for undocumented immigrants, and for members of other groups in Trump’s disfavor. Democrats must make stands in defense of their rights and dignity. We can accept nothing less from the party purporting to represent the dispossessed. Interest groups will have an important role to play in the fight. They should not be trashed.
That said, things around election time need to change. Let’s just say it: How about no questionnaires? Candidates have records that groups and people can scrutinize. Maybe doing this should be enough. Or, more campaigns should emulate Biden’s and just ignore the questionnaires. Maybe all the campaigns should make a pact in 2027, as those forums gear up, that they just won’t answer questionnaires or specific litmus-testy quasi-gotcha questions. Yes, Harris did pay a bit of a price for some of the positions she took in those events. Her explanation for why she had changed her position on a fracking ban and other matters was totally unconvincing (“my values have not changed”). Again, I don’t intend to dump on Harris. She was in a hard situation. The point now is that Democrats need to give serious thought to how to avoid a repeat of this.
Here, for what it’s worth, is how conservatives handle questions about issues with limited popularity. First of all, as noted above, this problem doesn’t really exist on the Republican side, because there are very few single-issue Republican-affiliated interest groups. Republican candidates don’t have to formulate careful positions on LGBTQ issues or environmental issues or what have you. They don’t get a lot of detailed questionnaires on the finer points of domestic policy.
But one conservative group was interesting to observe during this election: Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion interest group. The organization did not like a lot of what Trump said, especially his repeated vow that he would not sign a federal abortion ban. Over the course of 2023 and into early 2024, the group and its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, sparred a bit with Trump. The organization had announced in 2023 that it would oppose any candidate who refused to back a federal 15-week limit.
Then, in early April last year, Trump made a decisive move that forced a reaction. He posted a video to Truth Social announcing his position that abortion should be regulated by the states. This was certainly not SBA Pro-Life America’s position. But according to Politico, within minutes of Trump’s posting, Dannenfelser issued this statement: “With lives on the line, SBA Pro-Life America and the pro-life grassroots will work tirelessly to defeat President Biden and extreme congressional Democrats.” In other words, they caved. (The group denied my request to speak to someone about all this and just emailed me an anodyne statement.)
There’s something to be said for keeping one’s eyes on the prize. Democrats will never be perfect from an activist perspective. But they can’t help anybody if they don’t win the election.
I’m not saying liberal groups should let themselves get rolled quite like that. But there’s something to be said for keeping one’s eyes on the prize. Democrats will never be perfect on these issues from an activist perspective. But they can’t help anybody if they don’t win the election.
The “Brand Is Garbage” Problem
Background. As I was reading through the thoroughly depressing Senate election results, I thought back to the years when I started covering politics, and the Senate that existed then. I’m thinking of the 101st Congress, seated from 1989 to 1991, which was around the time when I wrote my earliest pieces on national politics. Both West Virginia senators were Democrats. Both Tennessee senators as well (one of them was Al Gore). Both Alabama senators. Both Arkansas senators. Both Louisiana senators. Both Nebraska senators. Both North Dakota senators. And one from Texas, one from South Dakota, one from Montana, one from Kentucky, one from Oklahoma, and one from South Carolina.
That’s 20 Senate seats held by Democrats from states where electing a Democrat today is a near impossibility. Twenty seats! That’s a hell of a lot of real estate to give up. Chris Murphy, in the series of X posts I alluded to above, wrote that the “practical ceiling” now for Democrats in the Senate is 52 seats, while for Republicans, it’s 62.
Now, consider the House. The imbalance there isn’t quite as bad, but it still exists. According to the Cook Political Report’s House race ratings from November 1, 2024, there were 175 safe Democratic seats and 191 safe Republican seats. That leaves 69 seats, of which Democrats would have to win 43, or 62 percent, to gain the majority. If we include seats that lean Democratic or Republican, things tighten up, but Republicans still have the numerical advantage. Including leaning districts leaves just 22 seats truly up for grabs, of which Democrats would have to win 13, or 59 percent, to get to 218.
In sum, Democrats are at a pretty substantial mathematical disadvantage. There are many reasons for this transformation, and going into them all would require a book, not an article. I’ll pluck out the example of my home state of West Virginia, where nearly every statewide officeholder was a Democrat when I was a boy. West Virginia became Democratic under Roosevelt, during the Depression. It was a heavily unionized state, and the United Mine Workers of America of course always backed Democrats. Things started to change a little in the 1970s, when the culture wars first showed up in the state—a controversy over the content of schoolbooks in Kanawha County, the state’s most populous. The Southern Baptist Convention, which had had little presence in the state, began making inroads. Statewide races started getting competitive. Still, Bill Clinton won the state twice. But Gore was too much of an environmentalist, and the coal industry by then felt itself besieged. The UMWA presence dwindled with automation. Guns became an issue. By the 2010s, Republicans had won massive majorities in both state houses. In November, Trump won 70 percent of the vote there; the only county where Harris came within single digits was my home county of Monongalia, where West Virginia University is located. In most counties, the margin was closer to 50 than five. And Republican Jim Justice won the Senate election by 40-plus points. Joe Manchin may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s the last Democratic senator we’ll see from that state for decades.
Elissa Slotkin Sherrod Brown
The campaign. There were some positive Senate results. It was nice to see Ruben Gallego defeat Kari Lake in Arizona. Elissa Slotkin’s razor-thin win in Michigan was the other notable win by a Democratic nonincumbent. Gallego and Slotkin, and winning incumbents Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, all won partly by emphasizing some of the Biden legislative accomplishments and touting their role in them. The points they emphasized were not uniformly liberal, but at least these candidates—in tough states—showed they could convince some number of Trump voters to switch to the Democratic column when it came to voting for a senator.
On the other side of the ledger, the particularly devastating loss, of course, was Sherrod Brown’s in Ohio. He lost by more than 200,000 votes to Bernie Moreno, a car dealer and blockchain entrepreneur who once called Trump a “maniac.” GOP groups spent a hefty $34 million on ads attacking Brown falsely over trans issues, including one charging that Brown voted to “allow transgender biological men to compete in girls’ sports.”
Brown first got to the Senate in 2006, a good year for Democrats, defeating incumbent Mike DeWine, now the governor. He got himself elected to three Senate terms, but he did so over a time period when the state moved from purple to a deep Trumpy red. He carried 47 of Ohio’s 88 counties in his first race; in his second, he won 25 counties; by his third run in 2018, that was down to 16 counties. A class-politics pol all the way, who spoke constantly about helping working- and middle-class families, Brown was exactly the kind of Democrat who could compete in a state like Ohio. He may run for the Senate again in 2026, and in an environment favorable to Democrats, it’s possible he could win. But if he doesn’t run, it’s likely that Ohio, too, won’t see another Democratic senator for a while.
The other sobering losses were in Montana, Texas, and Florida. They were all expected—but they were all just a little worse than expected. Jon Tester fought hard in Montana but never really had a chance against a pro-Trump GOP businessman opponent. In Texas, Colin Allred looked great on paper; if Beto O’Rourke could come within 3 points of Ted Cruz in 2018, surely Allred, a former NFL player, could do at least that well? He lost by nearly 10 points. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell was always something of a long shot in Florida. But a 13-point drubbing? Florida is another state that had one Democratic senator in that long-ago Congress, and indeed up through 2019; but it probably won’t be sending a Democrat to the Senate anytime soon.
Next time. This is a problem that was years in the making and will take years to address fully. But Democrats must focus on this intensely. A ceiling of 52 senators is a disaster.
This has come about largely because the Democratic brand is garbage in these states. And why has that happened? It’s in no small part a media problem. These are places where everyone who watches the news watches Fox News. Where many people listen to either Christian radio or right-wing talk radio. Where the local news stations are probably owned by Sinclair, which injects its right-wing agenda into local news coverage. And where the number of liberal voices is roughly zero. I mean, forget liberal voices: There are fewer and fewer old-fashioned straight news sources, let alone liberal ones. And of course, in these states and elsewhere, people are getting their news from social media, and conservative voices outnumber liberal ones there, too. A postelection Pew study into that makes for sobering reading. Democrats and wealthy liberal donors have to take all this seriously. Republicans and conservatives have spent the last 30 or more years building a media ecosystem to promote Republicans and paint Democrats and liberals as extremist weirdos who want to make everyone use they/them pronouns. They’ve succeeded fantastically. And they’re not done. Small wonder Democrats can’t win in these states.
Of course, Democrats need to take substantive steps to improve their standing in these places. I’d like to hear them talk more about trade schools. I often wonder, as Democrats carry on and on about college debt, what does the HVAC specialist or electrician or pipe fitter or radiation therapist or beautician think? I’d like to hear Democrats talk more about the opioid crisis, which has definitely not gone away. I’d like to hear them talk about teen mental health, which is a hair-on-fire crisis in this country; it affects everyone, but it surely hits working-class people without the resources and networks to know where to find good help harder than it hits well-heeled professional families. I’d love to hear them talk about farm policy. At least the Iowa caucuses saw to it that the Democrats running for president had to learn the basics of ag policy. But that’s out the door now. Neither Harris nor Biden nor Hillary Clinton used the word “farm” in their convention nomination acceptance speeches. Barack Obama did, in passing. You have to go all the way back to Gore, a quarter-century ago, to find someone who actually took a stab at discussing farming in any meaningful way.
And Finally, Talk Normal
Last thing. As the Democratic Party becomes more and more the party of educated Americans, there is a tendency for them to talk like that. Relatedly, there exists, let’s face it, a big problem with the kind of language-policing Mara Keisling referred to above. There are places where language policing is totally fine, or at least understandable—in the academy, within the world of progressive nonprofits. But not in presidential politics. If you want to get the votes of working people, you have to talk in ways they can relate to.
As the Democratic Party becomes more and more the party of educated Americans, there is a tendency for them to talk like that. But if you want to get the votes of working people, you have to talk in ways they can relate to.
But again: This is not 1989. The Democrats have not been wiped out in three consecutive elections. There is no cause for panic. But there is cause for concern, and thought, and action. Democrats need to tell voters a compelling story about why their lives are hard, and why they, the Democrats, will make things better. They need to name names and call out specific villains. They need to say “no” once in a while—to their corporate donors, and to liberal issue groups. They need to start addressing their brand problem in vast swaths of the country. And, of course, they need a leader who can tug them in these directions. And a base willing to follow.
