Jonathan Cohn ad Henry Wrotis, “A right turn for Democrats is a wrong turn,” CommonWealth Beacon, December 1, 2024.
IT’S THAT TIME of year again. And, no, Mariah Carey, we don’t mean Christmas; we mean the annual tradition of conservative- and centrist-leaning Democratic operatives blaming the left for any of the party’s losses.
The title of Liam Kerr’s recent article, “The politics of subtraction,” is ironic given that his whole premise is that the Democratic Party should subtract from its agenda and abandon constituencies. It is a misdiagnosis that the party would be wise to reject.
Kerr blames Vice President Kamala Harris’s unfortunate election loss on the progressive positions she took on questionnaires five years ago. Reading his article, one might be surprised to learn that a majority of Americans oppose the expansion of fracking and a majority of Americans support Medicare for All. Progressive policy positions are not something to hide from. Indeed, the progressive policies put forth by the Harris campaign this year were overwhelmingly popular, but many voters didn’t know she was supporting them.
So what lessons should we learn from the election? Although the full picture will only become clear after the voter file analyses and autopsy reports are completed, we shouldn’t wait to draw some critical lessons.
This election saw voters abandon the Democratic Party either to former president Donald Trump or simply to the couch. Indeed, in cities like Boston, the decline in Democratic presidential votes far exceeded any increase in votes received by Trump. This speaks to a dissatisfaction, disappointment, and disillusionment that the party must address.
Although, by various metrics, the economy under Biden has been strong, voters don’t experience the economy through national macroeconomic statistics, but through everyday transactions. Given that grocery prices have gone up significantly over the past few years due to pandemic-related inflation and corporate greed, housing costs continue to grow, and inflation-adjusted wages have not fully recovered from the pandemic, many people feel that they are no better off than they were four years ago (and a societal commitment to forgetting the nightmare of the 2020 pandemic certainly doesn’t help).
Voter dissatisfaction with higher prices has led to the ousting of incumbents across the globe, and the Democratic Party lacked a deep enough well of trust or good will with the electorate to buck that trend.
As progressive stalwarts like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have emphasized, that lack of trust or goodwill stems from the party’s history of not delivering on its promises to working people. Democrats were able to accomplish a lot given their narrow congressional majorities in 2021 and 2022. The irony is that it was the opposition from the type of conservative or centrist Democrat that Liam Kerr is promoting that caused the party to narrow its agenda.
Democrats failed to muster sufficient votes to raise the federal minimum wage (which has been flat since 2009), to make an expanded child tax credit permanent, to create a public health insurance option, to lower the eligibility age for Medicare, to enact a national paid leave program, or invest in a universal child care system, even though progressive electeds and advocates fought hard to preserve these aspects of Biden’s 2020 platform.
As pollsters like Anat Shenker-Osorio have pointed out, many swing voters simply don’t believe Democrats will fight for the things they say they support (so often the case here in Massachusetts), and even worse, they don’t take the Republican Party seriously about what it supports (a well-documented—see here and here—and stress-inducing reality).
When cynicism prevails, Republicans benefit. That, as well as the persistence of prejudices in this country that Republicans can stoke to their advantage, can explain why progressive ballot initiatives can routinely win despite voters electing Republicans.
Here is what we believe Democrats should take away from 2024:
Name Whom You’re Fighting Against, Not Just What You’re Fighting For: The Democratic Party too often adopts a villainless politics that presents solutions for problems that it will not diagnose. For voters to trust that you will fight for them, they need to know who you are fighting against. Trump is always clear about whom he is fighting, although this always involves perniciously displacing blame from his corporate backers onto the immigrant community. But Democrats need to be clear as well.
If prescription drug prices are too high, name the drug companies that are profiting from those high prices. If grocery prices are too high, name the companies who are gouging consumers. If wages are too low, name who is keeping them too low. If workers are facing layoffs—we’re looking at you GM—name the incredible profits that corporations are making. The Democratic Party’s desire to raise money from the very industries that it promises to rein in creates a contradiction that will always result in muddled or muted messaging.
Don’t Cede Anti-Systemic Critique to the Right: In contrast to Kerr’s idea that Democrats lost by too closely embracing the left, Harris frequently highlighted her endorsement from prominent Republicans, touting endorsements from various high-ranking members of past Republican administrations and most notably doing campaign events with former congresswoman Liz Cheney (including one at the birthplace of the Republican Party in Wisconsin).
According to exit polls, such steps failed to secure significant crossover votes, but what they did succeed at is reinforcing Trump’s faux populist persona. Counterposing Trump against the Republican Party helps bolster his attempts to paint himself as against the “elite” or the “establishment.”
The problem with Donald Trump has never been that he is not like other Republicans but that he is just like them, supportive of the same unpopular agenda of tax cuts for the rich, including rollbacks of protections for workers and the environment, and cuts to vital services on which people depend.
Deliver — and Make Sure to Tout Your Wins Loudly and Clearly: In his piece, Kerr also highlights that Democrats in deep blue states like Massachusetts need to better model good governance. On that point, we would agree, although we find it unclear why he implies that progressives, who by no means control the Massachusetts State House, shoulder the blame.
Kerr offers little in the way of solutions, but we are happy to do so. If Democrats want to regain the trust of voters they lost and strengthen the loyalty of their base, then they must show how the government can and will work to improve their everyday lives.
Massachusetts can do that by raising the minimum wage to be a living wage so that no one has to work two jobs to make ends meet; by ensuring that everyone has access to high-quality, free public education from pre-K to college; by investing in our public transportation system so that it is the world-class system we deserve; by investing in innovative approaches to our housing crisis like social housing and allowing communities to stabilize rents; by finally passing Medicare for all (which has been languishing in the Legislature for decades despite repeated majority support in local ballot questions); and by accelerating our transition from fossil fuels toward a green energy economy.
And to show what true, progressive blue-state governance looks like, our Legislature can do all this in a way that is transparent and accountable to the public, as opposed to the closed-door, top-down model of policymaking that so often dominates on Beacon Hill.