Decisions for Democrats
Bloodied, beaten and bickering. How will the Democrats move forward?
We are still very much in the low foothills of post-election second-guessing in America. But some things we already know. Donald Trump has won both the electoral college - winning all seven swing states - and the popular vote - the latter by something like 1.5% once all the lagging votes from California and Washington roll in.
This matches almost precisely with my scenario four from my election prediction posts. Good news for me, right? Well… Unfortunately for my predictive skills, I only gave this scenario - a big Trump win - a ten percent probability. But since I have now noted my failed predictive capacities on both Trendy and Newsnight, I think my apology tour can end and we can move back onto steadier ground with some analysis.
There is a lot to say about what Trump’s victory means for democracy in America and beyond and I hope to get to that in future posts. One thing we can say, however, is that whatever Trump’s distaste for liberal democracy, he has now been the beneficiary of it - with a victory that can’t be gainsaid or put down to America’s weird electoral institutions. This was a big win.
Not though remotely unprecedented. In terms of electoral college performance, with 312 electoral votes, Trump is in the same ballpark as Barack Obama in 2012 (332), Jimmy Carter in 1976 (297), Richard Nixon in 1968 (301), Joe Biden in 2020 (306) and some guy called Donald Trump in 2016 (304). With an estimated final popular vote margin of around 1.5% he looks similar to George W Bush in 2004 (2.4%), Carter in 1976 (2.1%) and Nixon in 1968 (0.7%).
So, we should be careful before making outlandish claims about this being a landslide. It was a clear victory but very much in tune with many recent close elections. It is very far from being Reagan/Mondale (58.8% to 40.6%, 525 electoral votes to 13) or even Obama/McCain (52.9% to 45.7%, 365 to 173).
Still Trump looks to have won a trifecta, unless the remaining seats in the House all finish counting in a very unexpected manner. And the Republicans have a clear 6:3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Trump will be able to act in a fashion similar to other presidents who won in landslides and Democrats will have very very little ability to counter his policies, except in cases where the federal government needs cooperation from local or state governments.
So, the Democrats will have little else to do but engage in bloodletting and recalibrating. In this post, I’ll set out the different strategies I can foresee. As I am sure you’ll appreciate, I won’t be attaching probabilities this time! Once bitten…
Strategy 1: Wait and See
The most viral image to circulate after the election was John Burn Murdoch’s image of incumbent performance in elections across Western democracies back to 1945. As John shows, using data from ParlGov, 2024 is the only year where every incumbent lost vote share. What’s more, the Democrats actually did ‘well’ compared to other incumbents, with a decline in vote share of only around three percent. Compare that to the experience of say Rishi Sunak, or of Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in the French parliamentary elections, and it looks pretty good. In fact, 2024 is basically bizarro 2020. In that election Joe Biden won back five states that had voted for Trump in 2016 and the popular vote swung three points in his direction. In 2024 Trump won back six states that had voted for Biden and the popular vote swung back six points in his direction.
Given that electoral pendulum, maybe the Democrats should basically throw their hands up, say ‘difficult year', too bad’, and hope the swing favours them next time. We live in a time of enormous electoral volatility. If Trump ends up pushing inflation up because of tariffs or mass deportations (both of which could well have inflationary effects), maybe it will be the Republicans’ turn in 2028 to feel the wrath of voter discontent. After a long period of time in which two-term presidencies were the norm - Clinton, Bush, Obama - maybe we are back in a world of four year cycles, more similar to the late nineteenth century (from 1880 to 1896 there was a party switch every cycle).
It might work. The ‘good’ news for the Democratic Party is that it will not involve a lot of effort. Or rethinking. Just sit tight and let the party carry on as is, hoping that a mainstream candidate can ride the wave of popular discontent in four years against the Republican nominee, most likely J. D. Vance.
But it might not. For one, the Democrats are starting to face some structural weaknesses as a party. Ticket splitting is becoming rarer (though not too rare to prevent the Democrats from winning Senate seats in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada). And that means to be able to win the Senate, the Democrats are going to have perform more strongly in currently red states. What’s more because of population change, the Blue Wall strategy that would have made Harris President this time will not work next time. So the Democrats will need to win all those states back plus a red state - be it Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, or even Ohio, Texas or Florida. None of this is impossible. But it seems unlikely to be easy if the party remains strategically stuck in 2024.
If changes are needed though, which way? The next four strategies require doing something new. Maybe they can be combined, but probably not completely. So let’s look at the choices.
Strategy 2: DEIcide
The first casualty of the 2024 Presidential Election is ‘woke’. The single most common critique of the Democrats from their own strategists, from the mainstream media, and certainly from Republicans has been that they have been imprisoned by the mores and language of ‘wokeness’. This is an absolute hornets nest because one person’s definition of woke is another’s non-negotiable commitment. So let’s talk specifics.
The most common critique has been that Democrats and progressives more generally have been engaged in heavy policing of language in politics, activism, journalism, and even business. There’s an element of exaggeration here - treating people respectfully and not engaging in racial or homophobic slurs is something that Democrats could and should agree on regardless of 2024. But I think it is fair to say that things such as the ‘progressive stack’, or the defenestration of David Shor for citing a political science article in support of the claim that violent protest backfires, are not helpful ways of broadening out a political movement.
More generally heavily policing speech boundaries almost necessarily means that some ‘normies’ who mean no harm will end up feeling as if they have been ‘cancelled’ or excluded, and come to resent the party. You don’t have to be Elon Musk (a man with a million cancellable opinions) to feel like this can have a chilling effect or that it unnecessarily narrows, rather than widens, the circle of people in the progressive movement. When you ask everyone to ‘do the work’ some people will say, actually I don’t want to. If you have an electoral majority already, no problem. But if you don’t…
Whether it’s really the case that language policing - or broader discontent with DEI institutions - is actually hurting Democrats, I suspect will have little bearing on what happens next. Blaming ‘woke’ norms and institutions is cheap and easy for the party, so the party will do it. It doesn’t really require much more of party elites and prospective candidates than to make a few denunciations and slaughter a few sacred cows. Every possible 2028 candidate is going to have some ridiculous ‘Sister Souljah’ moment where they attack some ‘woke shibboleth’. And those parts of the progressive movement who are upset by this are going to struggle to fight back.
You could already see this a little in the change in language used between the 2020 and 2024 Democratic National Conventions. But I suspect we will see the end of land recognitions, words like Latinx, and pushback on pronouns etc. Because, rightly or wrongly, candidates will think this will win them back votes and it’s easy for them to do, not least because the groups who want to push back are fairly weak.
Strategy 3: From Lego Bricks to Economic Populism
If the Democrats want to do something more challenging they will need to take on some actually powerful vested interests. Here they would need to take a leaf out of the Trump / Vance playbook and be willing to upset business. Now you might immediately say, Trump and Vance are super pro-business and of course they are - but they were also willing to push hard against some of the preferences of the Chamber of Commerce - on trade, on Social Security / Medicare, on immigration. And it turns out they got away with that because they figured out how to craft an economic populist message that could win elections.
The Trump Vance message of economic nationalism - tariffs, deportations, cutting taxes on small businesses or on tips - is not the same one that will work for Democrats. And the Harris campaign - indeed the Biden Presidency - did have some economic populism - anti-price gouging, big investment in manufacturing through the IRA and CHIPS acts. But the message has not cohered with the public. And increasingly the Democrats have become associated with standing up for elites, not the ‘common American’.
Whether that claim is fair or not, what it underlines is an association of the Democrats with the Professional Managerial Class (the dreaded PMC). One very noticeable attribute of Democratic politicians, activists, and strategists is the extremely elite higher education institutions they attended. The party has become quite dominated by the Ivy League and its mores. Ironically, that was not in fact the case for either Joe Biden (University of Delaware and Syracuse) or Kamala Harris (Howard and UC Hastings) but in terms of the broader cadre of Democratic elites, it remains the case.
A related insane fact about the Democratic Party is that Tim Walz was the first person on a Democratic Presidential ticket since JIMMY CARTER not to have attended law school - that’s Mondale, Ferraro, Dukakis, Bentsen, Clinton, Gore, Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Obama, Biden, Clinton, Kaine, and Harris in a row. Now I know we all love lawyers but that feels a little too non-occupationally diverse to me.
Obviously there are lots of Republican politicians with law degrees (e.g. Mike Pence or JD Vance). But among candidates recently on the ticket, we have people with a business background (GWB, Romney, Trump, Vance, Cheney), entertainment (Reagan, Trump), military or intelligence services (Bush Sr, Vance, McCain, Cheney), even leading a trade union (Reagan, LOL).
The Democrats have increasingly found themselves coming professionally almost entirely from the ‘knowledge economy’ - they are what Robert Reich famously called ‘symbolic analysts’.1 But their traditional base was working class, very far from such jobs. Since Reagan, the working class has drifted towards the Republican Party, whose policies were traditionally targeted at managers not workers. This has led to lots of ‘What's the Matter with Kansas?’ style tomes, where left-leaning writers ask why working-class voters support a ‘party of the rich’. Rather less time was spent asking why knowledge-economy workers supported the Democrats - a ‘party of the poor’.2
And the reason is likely in part that the Democrats stopped being viewed as a ‘party of the poor’. Some of this was the move from Bill Clinton onwards to more neoliberal, pro-market policies in order to capture back the middle class. Some of this is just misunderstanding the policies promoted by Democrats, which still are largely more progressive than Republican ones - so perhaps it’s a bad sales pitch. But I think it’s also related to the composition of Democratic elites, whose educational and career backgrounds look ever more different from their traditional base. A similar pattern occurred with the Labour Party in the UK, as Tom O’Grady has shown. But that the pattern is common does not mean it is not challenging.
In sync with the shift in the Democratic Party away from both working class voters and working class (or at least non-lawyer) politicians, has been the deliberate construction of a new coalitional logic, which reached its peak in the Democrats’ great years of success between 2008 and 2016 under what turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime political genius, Barack Obama.
The Obama coalition built by David Plouffe in 2008 and furthered by Jim Messina in 2012, was a brick-building strategy. Take a series of demographic groups where you have large leads and add them together. African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated whites (especially women), young voters. Collectively, these ‘lego bricks’ could be stuck together to get you over fifty percent of the vote. What’s more, the groups outside your coalition - non-college whites - were in relative decline. So the strategy would ultimately euthanise the Republican Party.
We all know how that went. First, it relied on groups whose geographical location was inefficiently concentrated (i.e. crammed into cities and on the coasts), meaning that post-Obama the Democrats ended up facing such an electoral college bias that they would need to win the popular vote by 2 or 3 percent to win the Presidency. Second, it became challenging to find a policy program that could tie all these groups to the party at once, given that what united them was largely that they supported the Democratic Party, not particular policies. Third, it led to the tendency to denigrate the group left outside, white working class voters, who had of course been the party’s traditional base - hence the famous ‘deplorables’ cut through.
Finally, and most importantly by 2024, it relied completely on these groups remaining loyal to the Democratic Party. But what if they didn’t? Donald Trump, starting in 2020 and escalating in 2024, captured much of the ever-growing Hispanic vote back. He also did well among younger voters. And although ultimately he did not secure much change in the African American vote, his campaign made real efforts to reach out to Black men in particular. By the end, the Democratic Party were at risk of becoming a party whose remaining loyal voters looked much like their strategists and activists - college-educated whites.
The lego-brick strategy is dead. And to replace it the Democrats will need to find a clearer message. To combat Trump it will likely need to be in the grand tradition of successful electoral messages in American politics - a narrative of economic populism. I use that term very loosely - it can encompass everything from Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal and trustbusting, to FDR’s New Deal, to Johnson’s Great Society, to Reagan’s Morning in America, to yes, Trump’s Make America Great Again. All of these, especially Trump’s message, had cultural overtones. But they also had a national economic through-line.
But since Bill Clinton, the Democrats have lacked that economic through-line. Not all Democrats - clearly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had a great deal of success with national economic narratives. And Bidenomics was sort of a thing. But much of the messaging has been lego-brick appeals to diverse groups, or warnings about authoritarian Republican presidents (be they GWB or Trump), or just relying on the one-time genius of a figure like Barack Obama.
There’s not time nor space in this post (you’ll be delighted to know) to state precisely what this populist economic message should be. But I suspect Democrats will need to craft one - I’ll give two options below. And that may cause them trouble among their new set of backers - wealthy, college-educated, coastal elites in law, finance, tech, entertainment, universities, etc. Because the deal the Democrats struck with those supporters for two decades was, support us and we will get behind your cultural preferences and when it comes to the crunch we won’t push up your taxes. As Peter Mandelson once put it about New Labour, the Democrats became intensely relaxed about inequality. Because the winners of that inequality voted for the Democrats. I’m not sure this pact is permanently sustainable.
Strategy 4: Veer to the Left
But which way, Western economic populist? There are two possibilities, I think. The first is to follow the Sanders / Warren strategy and move left. There are risks to such a strategy. Polling shows that voters generally thought of Kamala Harris as more ideologically extreme than Donald Trump. Many people thought she was a leftist and that’s why they didn’t vote for her. Harris’s Senate record was very much on the left. But she also ran a pretty centrist campaign which was hardly tub-thumping about corporations.
It will not surprise anyone to hear that people on the left of the Democratic Party think that 2024 can be blamed on not having a left-wing message. But still, there’s something to this. If the electoral problem is that increasingly large numbers of low and middle-income voters don’t think that Democrats understand them, or care about them, then a new message has to take that seriously. And it needs to do what the Harris campaign was unable to do - develop a set of simple, coherent policies that underline the overall message.
Trump has such a set of policies - tariffs, deportations, tax cuts. Easy to remember, easy to identify, easy to understand within the context of the overall campaign message. Do I think these policies will help the American economy over the medium to long run? Not really. Does that mean they will be entirely ineffective? Absolutely not. Democrats should worry that these policies will work as intended. If they do, and Democrats want to end those policies, they are going to need a clear replacement that promises even more.
That might be through taxing or regulating billionaires. I’m not completely confident that this messaging really works for Democrats since it’s not like they haven’t tried it before. But it has worked in the past - for Teddy Roosevelt (yes a Republican), FDR, LBJ. It’s not mad as a strategy. But it will need an effective salesperson who can’t immediately be ‘othered’ as an un-American socialist. That salesperson is probably not now Sanders or Warren who have aged out of their prime. Nor is it Sherrod Brown or Jon Tester who have both lost their Senate seats. AOC is of course now old enough, as of last month, to be President. And I don’t deny her political skill, but I suspect she will be the next Pelosi, not the next Obama.
And herein lies the problem for the left. Most of their standard-bearers have been legislators. There are precious few left-leaning Governors, though Tim Walz was a good example. The other left Governors tend to scream Professional Managerial Class, most obviously in the case of California Governor Gavin Newsom. So while I think this is a reasonable strategy it relies on finding a figure who can carry it off - and I just don’t know who that person currently is. But that takes us to possibility number two…
Strategy 5: Find a New Clinton
The second possibility is to continue to hew to the economic centre-ground but to reframe the narrative - along the lines of John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton, or (maybe) Barack Obama. In other words, it’s the messenger not the message, stupid.
The ‘simplest’ way for the Democrats to win again is to find a once-in-a-generation rhetorical genius who manages to inspire the nation and win over enough moderates and even conservatives to get elected. Easy stuff.
Where would such a person come from? Well unlike JFK or Obama, but very much like Bill Clinton, I suspect they will be a Democratic Governor. Though probably not Gavin Newson (see above).
Governors have real advantages on this ‘center-track’. They can point to actual physical and tangible achievements. They can talk about how they have ‘worked across the aisle’. They are very used to making speeches across the state, to businesses and union halls, not just to other legislators. They are by definition not currently working in ‘the Swamp’ of Washington, DC. And they can use their current job as a four-year audition.
So who are we talking about? Most obviously Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, probably the leading runner and rider right now, particularly as he is not tarnished with 2024. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Wes Moore of Maryland. These are the big four and right now, I suspect it will be one of them. Pete Buttigieg might be in this zone too, though his executive experience as a town mayor and Biden Cabinet member is quite distinct, and probably less favourable, than the others.
But there is a related possibility. A Trump-like possibility. Of someone outside of politics but with political interests and great name recognition running successfully. Exactly who they could be is unclear - business leaders such as Mark Cuban, perhaps a Hollywood star or athlete? I wouldn’t rule it out. We learned from Trump that sometimes extremely well known people can biast their way through a crowded primary.
Welcome, President Taylor Swift.
I think you've overestimated how easy it is for the left to ditch DEI.
For a lot of people, these are sacred values - as just one example, we can see in the UK that even as local authorities have faced major real-terms budget cuts over the last 15 years they have kept and often expanded their DEI activities. Trans rights, 'anti-racism', are what it means to be a good person.
What's more, even if the main politicians running for office ditched it (as Harris seemed to try to, to some extent) the ideologies are deeply embedded in schools, public services, charities and academia - meaning that the public will still encounter it and hold politicians accountable for it, unless they are actively repudiating it and rooting it out.