Time to close America’s bureau of wishful thinking

Tuesday night’s sweep by Donald Trump gave liberal America the kind of shock that will only grow as time goes on. Conventional excuses won’t do. Had the electoral college boiled down to Michigan, Democrats might have pinpointed the Arab American backlash against Joe Biden’s handling of Gaza. Had it hinged on Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris’s pick of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as her running mate could have been isolated as the cause of her defeat. Ditto for the damage that Harris’s past support for open borders did to her credibility with voters in Nevada and Arizona.

Given the closeness of the polls, logic dictated that even the tiniest event, such as a change in the weather, could tip the election. What happened in practice robbed Democrats of any such reassurances. In a high turnout election, Trump is set to win every swing state, and a majority of most key demographics, including ones that Democrats thought they had in the bank. For anti-Trump America as a whole, not just Democrats, it was a devastating verdict. They urgently need a new theory of the case. Tweaks will not be enough. 

Here is what Bernie Sanders said the day after Harris’s defeat: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Also watch or rewatch Trump’s most successful television advertisement of the campaign. “Kamala is for they/them,” it says. “President Trump is for you.” Tuesday night strongly reaffirmed that Democrats are no longer the party of the working class. Not only did Trump consolidate his grip on blue-collar white Americans, he won almost half of Hispanic males and more than a fifth of Black men, according to AP VoteCast. It would be a big error for Democrats to write off America’s working classes as hidebound know-nothings. Nor should they dismiss the tens of millions of lower income households that voted for Trump as economically illiterate.

I lost count of how often I heard or read Democrats and their allies tell voters they had basically never had it so good. This was tantamount to broadcasting that Democrats placed far more weight on their reading of America’s (objectively robust) macroeconomic numbers than on the personal verdicts of most of the electorate. Big majorities of Americans keep saying their country is on the wrong track. Here is the result. Trump won a majority of US households that earn less than $100,000. Harris won most of those who earn more. What Democrats said in practice is less important than what voters heard. 

Harris’s vibes and energy conveyed that she saw this contest as being about something far bigger than their economic circumstances; the future of the republic was at stake. Without overtly meaning to, she turned this election into a subliminal referendum on values. This was an error of wishful thinking. As I have written before, liberal America suffers from confusion between how the world is and how liberals think it ought to be. Just because something seems obviously right — defending the rule of law, decency towards asylum seekers, protecting women’s bodily autonomy and other critical freedoms that could stretch to paragraphs, all of which are at risk — does not mean others will see it the same way. If you want a person’s vote, you must take their worldview seriously. In the final New York Times/Siena poll, just 7 per cent of the likely US electorate said democracy was their biggest concern.

Harris’s failure to present a memorable economic narrative meant she also missed an open goal — the awfulness of Trump’s economic plans. Spelling out Trump’s impact on people’s bottom line would have registered with voters. Rising inflation, a higher cost of borrowing and cheaper imports due to resulting dollar appreciation, will be devastating to middle income America. Trump was last in office during the era of easy money. This time round, his fiscal Keynesianism will quickly collide with a monetary brick wall. Trump 2.0 is Liz Truss 1.0. If Americans don’t get that reference, they should be reminded of the 1970s.

Washington is also about to become a playground for some of the world’s biggest oligarchs and most spendthrift regimes. Tuesday was a great night for the likes of Elon Musk and Saudi Arabia. We should be profoundly worried about Trump’s far-right instincts. But we should never lose sight of the money. The Washington playing field is now wide open to an epically self-confident coterie of America’s super-rich. I don’t think Harris came anywhere close to driving that point home.

My plea to anti-Trump America is be less distracted by the president’s lurid clown show and more focused on the circus movers behind the scenes. Trump will not be stopped by legal niceties or moral outrage. Democrats have to begin the long and painful task of winning back voters. They can only do that once they grasp the magnitude of their failure. The good news is that Trump ought to give his opponents plenty of opportunities. His screw ups are rarely modest. The bad news is that Democrats are the party of the principled and the privileged who live in a well-sealed bubble. 

I am turning this week to John Judis, one of America’s most prescient political observers, who has been blowing the whistle on class voting trends for many years. Perhaps now John’s alarm will be heard more clearly. John, what is your advice to anti-Trump America? 

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John Judis responds  

I agree with what you wrote. For the Democrats, the 2024 election signalled the end of a political era that began with the “blue wave” of 2006 and Barack Obama’s election in 2008. The Democrats’ hold on what was deemed the “rising American majority” — women, minorities, and young people — decidedly weakened in 2024. Democrats’ support among young women (perhaps the paradigm constituency) dropped 14 percentage points from 2020. Trump got 47 per cent of the vote among Latino men.

I’m not good at giving advice to politicians. I spent almost a decade agitating for revolution and in 1980 got Ronald Reagan for my efforts. But I would go back to lessons of the late 1980s — the last time the Republicans — under Reagan and Bush — appeared to achieved a realignment. After three straight presidential defeats, a group of Democratic politicians and political operatives developed a strategy to win back what were called the “Reagan Democrats”. One crucial part of their strategy was distancing the Democrats from stands on social and cultural issues that had alienated erstwhile Democrats. These included opposition to capital punishment, support for racial quotas and the use of support for abortion as a litmus test for candidates. The Democratic Leadership Council’s strategy was partly responsible for Democrats winning back the White House and Congress in 1992.

I don’t know whether it is possible to execute this kind of strategy in the era of social media, but Democrats have to do something to dissociate themselves from the radical stands on social and cultural issues espoused by left-leaning think-tanks, foundations, policy groups, and media sites. These include opposition to stronger border enforcement (in favour of a path to citizenship for illegal migrants); support for “gender affirming care” (i.e. surgery and puberty blockers) for minors (of which social democratic Europe has become sceptical of); support for equality of outcome rather than opportunity to remedy racial inequality; indifference to the plight of working class young men (a principal victim of “deaths of despair”); the justification of draconian steps to halt to climate change by warnings of imminent planetary apocalypse; and the dismissal of Trump supporters as racists and sexists. And that’s a short list.

Democrats need to focus on what many of the voters who deserted them want: a growing economy that provides decent job; safe streets; and a safety net that removes Americans’ anxiety about access to healthcare, childcare, and a good education for their children. But voters will ignore even these earnest efforts if Democrats don’t sever their identification with cultural radicalism.  Look at the fate of Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, who exemplifies a constructive Democratic approach to the economy.  Brown was defeated for re-election by a car-dealer and crypto supporter who was aided by a fusillade of ads charging (falsely, as it turned out) that Brown had supported “allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minor children” and had voted to “give illegals taxpayer-funded stimulus checks, health care, even Social Security”. Brown couldn’t dissociate himself successfully from what had become the Democrats’ “brand”. To win back a lasting majority and not merely rely on the misbehaviour and incompetence of a Republican president, the Democrats are going to have to change the way that many voters perceive their party. 

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Higher for longer no matter who is in charge”:
“I agree with Rana on higher inflation for longer and am not sure that’s such a bad thing. So sad that we as a society focus more on the middle class and wealthy rather than helping the poor, but politicians will always go where the votes and money are.” — Rick Soloway 

“Demographics — ageing populations — often considered in an economic context but few analyse what it means for democratic politics. Do too many aged voters make it hard to implement innovative policy, or does the wisdom of age prevail?” — FT commenter Sven