The Scene
On Wednesday afternoon, as Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election, Democrats confronted the idea that a short progressive era had come and gone.
In Ohio and Montana, two populist Democratic senators who’d always defied gravity succumbed to it. In California, voters ousted two reform prosecutors in deep blue counties – Los Angeles and Alameda – while recalling Oakland’s progressive and scandal-plagued mayor. Arizonans voted to allow local police to enforce immigration law; New Yorkers were on track to reject a new city diversity officer.
All of that unfolded on a map that got redder outside of a few cities and suburbs, and far redder in majority-Latino areas that had rarely voted Republican. Before Tuesday, no Democrat born after 1986 had ever voted in an election where Republicans won the popular vote. Now, all of them had. They were not entirely sure why.
“I would love to see some kind of autopsy,” said Faiz Shakir, the founder of the progressive journalism channel More Perfect Union, and the manager of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. “I would worry about a party that said: Let’s move on, let’s fight, let’s get into resistance mode.”
Sanders had urged Democrats all year to reach unlikely voters and emphasize their economic policies, many shaped by him after the 2020 primary defeat. On Wednesday, before Harris addressed supporters at Howard University, he said in a statement that Democrats shouldn’t have been shocked that a “party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” white and non-white.
Not every progressive agreed with Sanders. Biden, who the party’s left opposed in the 2020 primary, had pleasantly surprised them; he had walked a UAW picket line, appointed antitrust activists to key government roles, and approved trillions of dollars of climate, infrastructure, and welfare spending. He did this in consultation with activists who saw Biden burying the neo-liberal politics that defined his career. And Democrats saw working class voters move toward Trump, running on nostalgia for pre-COVID prices and a suite of new tax cuts.
Democrats delivered on an economic agenda,” said Analilia Mejia, the director of the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive nonprofit built from the remnants of the old anti-poverty group ACORN. “The Biden administration was one of the most progressive administrations in my lifetime..”
But there wasn’t just one “progressive movement” in the Biden years. Democrats embraced the Black Lives Matter movement; on his first day, Biden signed an executive order centering “racial equity” in the post-COVID recovery. They embraced immigrant rights movements, and delivered on a promise – initially – to slow down deportations of illegal border-crossers. They embraced criminal justice reform movements that had elected the sorts of progressive prosecutors that Californians just threw out. In 2020, Harris endorsed LA County DA George Gascon, saying he would “decrease the state prison population and get people convicted of nonviolent offenses greater opportunities to get their lives back on track.” This year, as he tumbled toward defeat, she took no position on his race.
Activists were still grappling with the aftermath of all this on Wednesday. In D.C., a coalition of Latino outreach groups postponed a call that was planned to share details of their election strategy. In Harris’s California, another coalition of progressive groups launched We Are California, promising to “call out the billionaires, bigots, and authoritarian bullies who are threatened by the changing demographics of California and the rising majority of working class people of color.”
Other progressives, like Sanders, kept their focus on the Democrats. The IMEU Policy Project, which had urged Harris to embrace an arms embargo on Israel, said in a statement that Democrats “failed to listen to their core voters — young people, women, people of color, and progressive voters — who have been demanding that their government end its support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.” It would work, for the next few months, on convincing D.C. Democrats to cut off military aid.
Adam Green, whose Progressive Change Campaign Committee had urged the party to embrace populist economic ideas, said that the Democrats’ losses weren’t inevitable – and that progressives weren’t at fault. “We invested a lot of time trying to get the right things in the teleprompter,” he said, urging Biden and Harris to talk about fighting price gouging on groceries, taxing billionaires, and protecting Social Security. Harris ran hundreds of millions in ads about them. It was not sufficient, Green said, Harris didn’t pick high-profile fights to elevate them.
“They went to Texas to drive news on abortion and the Ellipse to underscore January 6th, but they didn’t complete their own trifecta,” said Green, referring to the Harris campaign. “There was no rally at the headquarters of a price gouging corporation or barnstorming with the president of the UAW. The words were in her teleprompter, but not in her bones.”
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David’s view
In 2000, Democrats had an easy if unsatisfying answer to why they lost the election: Republican chicanery in Florida. In 2004, they were more adrift, worrying that the party’s cultural liberalism was making them unelectable in red America. The growing unpopularity of the Iraq War solved that problem. In 2016, there was widespread Democratic agreement that Hillary Clinton blew the election, another candidate would have won it, and a party that excited working class voters again would win a new majority.
There’s no consensus about what would have worked this year, other than “don’t be the incumbent party when people are angry about inflation.” (You might think that “don’t run an 81-year old nominee for most of the race” would build a consensus, but I found some Biden defenders today, still angry about the donors and Democrats who convinced him to quit.) Sanders’ reaction wasn’t hugely surprising, but his emphasis was, re-casting the Biden years as a wasted opportunity that didn’t reflect real progressive governance.
Some of this is defensive. Progressives got blamed in 2020, after Biden won by less than expected, for elevating the “defund the police” movement and creating a problem for swing seat colleagues. Of course they’d be blamed for an actual defeat. But they built real influence in the administration amid all that chatter, and they won’t get that chance next year.
“This is not a time to throw up our hands,” Harris said in her concession speech. “This is a time to roll up our sleeves.” That rhymed with what Barack Obama said in his 2017 farewell address, urging Democrats to “grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.” Two presidencies later, the optimism that this might work, and permanently change the country, has been dashed.
Notable
- In Politico, Christopher Cadelago and Holly Otterbein look at the decisions that helped cost Harris the election, none of them obvious at the time. Breaking with Biden, as some Democrats wanted her too, might have “undermine[d] a litany of public statements she’d made about the president and blow holes in her own record of accomplishments in the White House.”
- In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Julia Terruso, Max Marin, and Anna Orso recap the argument between the city’s Democratic leaders and the Harris campaign, spilling into view on Wednesday, with locals saying that the nominee simply didn’t give them the respect they’d earned.
- On his blog, John Ray reviews a year of Democratic “spam texts,” asking whether some would-be resistance groups are just wasting money. “Zero of these organizations have shown themselves to be pivotal in any sense — if anything, they should be on the hook for explaining to the activists they harass, bully, and lie to why they exist at all due to the sheer meagerness of their results.”