No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right

Both parties now face voters, white and non-white, who were open to some left-wing ideas about race, crime and gender in 2020 but are far more skeptical now.

In the summer of 2020, after a backlash to Trump’s border and deportation policies, the share of Americans who wanted increased immigration surged to the highest level ever — 34%, according to Gallup polling. Just 28% told pollsters that they wanted immigration levels to decrease.

That was turned on the head in the Biden years. In June, Gallup found that just 16% of Americans wanted higher immigration levels, while 55% wanted a decrease, the highest share for that position since the weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks.

It was a similar story on crime, with public support for reform peaking during the Trump years and falling after the GOP nominee headed back to Mar-a-Lago. In June 2020, 47% of Americans said they were “satisfied” with federal anti-crime policies. This summer, just 28% of people agreed with that sentiment; 69% said they were “dissatisfied.”

Harris’s shifts on these issues, and the ways she talks about them, have been covered extensively. The candidate who talked about using presidential powers to prosecute oil companies still talks about climate change, but in the ways Barack Obama used to, “all of the above” policies that wouldn’t keep carbon in the ground. Other Democrats are operating on the same premise – that the electorate has moved right – and using similar language.

“I have voted [for] and brought thousands of border patrol agents to Arizona, have voted [for] and funded hundreds of miles of border walls, where needed, where our experts wanted it,” Arizona Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego said last week, in his only debate with Republican US Senate nominee Kari Lake.

When Lake accused the former border wall critic of an election year “makeover,” Gallego, like Harris, said that Republicans had killed more border security funds for political advantage, on Trump’s orders.

In power, the Biden-Harris administration has restored the muscular LGBTQ protections for health and employment that Obama left behind. But they have campaigned more defensively on those issues while facing Republicans who are newly confident that voters don’t want “biological men” in sports or free gender surgeries for prisoners. In multiple states, Democrats who’d never run ads about transgender rights have run ads promising that they wouldn’t let “boys in girls sports,” or assuring voters that what they’re seeing on TV is already illegal in their state.

“I hope the media will help us by putting out there that they aren’t true, because fact checkers have said they aren’t true,” Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown told reporters in Steubenville last week, declining to discuss the substance of the transgender-focused ads in his race. “These 10s of millions of dollars are aimed at a senator who’s always taking on these interest groups, and that’s where the money comes from.”

Harris and Democrats are running on a suite of populist tax policies, including support for homeowners and parents of small children, that build on Biden’s record. But after Republicans connected the post-COVID inflation spike to 2021 deficit spending, they are no longer running on massive new programs; the most expensive item in the Harris agenda is the continuation of most 2017 tax cuts for households making less than $400,000 per year.

Harris is promising more coverage for home care, one of her more ambitious ideas, and more constraints on prescription drug costs while also dropping the idea that it can expand Medicare to younger people. That is a step back from 2020, when the Biden-Harris campaign ran on restoring “public option” that was blocked from the original Affordable Care Act — an approach that was then considered the default moderate alternative to more far-reaching “Medicare for All” proposals.

“I think not only should we keep it, we should be adding to it, providing for a public option, a Medicare option if you chose that,” Biden said at a Dec. 2, 2020 roundtable on public health, organized by his transition team.

It was the last time Biden uttered the phrase “public option” in public, and the idea did not return for the Harris campaign.

For the last year, much of the activist left’s energy has been consumed by opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. In 2016 and 2020, it had presidential primary challengers to channel its ideas ambitions through; in 2024, it didn’t. Watching Harris and the party now, progressives have veered between worry that Democrats will fail to excite base voters, anxiety about their influence in the next administration, and optimism that they can have the conversation again in January.

“The notion that ‘people are shifting against immigrants and trans people’ is some sorta pre-ordained or utterly natural phenomenon just shows how little people understand about the formation of political judgments and preferences,” wrote the progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio this week, urging the party not to adopt conservative framing about asylum-seekers or gender identity.

But the threat of a Trump restoration has kept the vast majority of progressives in line. Support for this year’s most prominent left-wing third party candidates, Jill Stein and Cornel West, is well below support for Stein’s campaign eight years ago, when most Democrats assumed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency anyway. As he’s campaigned in swing states, rallying progressive voters outside the auspices of the official Democratic campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders has praised Harris for her healthcare and tax policies, while admitting that he wanted her to do more.

“Kamala has come up with a number of important proposals,” Sanders told Democrats at a rally in Marquette, Mich. this week. “Do they go as far as I would like? No. And after she wins, we’re going to sit down and have a nice conversation.”

The country hasn’t “shifted right” over the past few years on everything. Had Donald Trump not abandoned the party’s support for entitlement reform, he might never have been competitive with Clinton; had the Obama administration re-negotiated NAFTA before 2016, it might have cut off Trump’s approach to non-college voters and labor union members who felt abandoned by Democrats. Harris has continued to prioritize pro-labor positions even as she’s struggled to consolidate the union vote. Democrats everywhere are as confident as ever about their position on abortion.

But Democrats had already adjusted to those positions by 2020. What’s new is the strategic abandonment of popular left-wing ideas from the Trump years. Advocates have tried to keep them in the mix; in the last week, I saw polling from FWD.us and the Alliance for Black Equality which argued that Harris could win votes by supporting “commonsense criminal justice reforms” and opposing stop-and-frisk policing.

The Harris campaign hasn’t fully rejected that; its Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, released this week, warns that Trump would “make stop-and-frisk practices mandatory for local police departments.” It just doesn’t emphasize these ideas as Biden or Clinton did in their races, and it’s watched progressives absorb the blame for any increase in crime. In Harris’s California, progressive prosecutors elected in the post-2020 reform wave are on track to lose re-election, or be recalled. Harris will still talk about reform, but the Harris who told the 2020 DNC that “there is no vaccine for racism” isn’t running right now.

The media environment of 2020 is gone, too. Democrats are responding to four years of criticism in conservative new media, and to hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that link them relentlessly to criminals and chaos. When Trump’s positioning was less popular, the party would fight back; his views on crime and immigration are far more widely shared now, and they are more selective about their response..

One example: In an interview with the “All the Smoke” podcast, when pushed on what happened to the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that Democrats ran on, Harris didn’t abandon it. She noted that the Biden administration had implemented some criminal justice reforms, working on “no-knock warrants, and a national database for police convicted of misconduct.” But she acknowledged that there had been pushback, stopping the progressive that activists hoped was inevitable when they rallied in 2020. And if they wanted those policies, they would need to rally again, aware of the potential for backlash.

“Don’t fall asleep on this stuff,” Harris said. “Don’t sit back and get comfortable, like: Oh, that’s done.”