‘The groups’ are too easy a scapegoat for Democrats

It’s certainly true that many Democrats, especially those with national ambitions, listened to activist organizations that promised gains with relevant voters if the party moved left on certain issues — only to later discover their positions repelled some of the very same voters.

But as someone who covered the Democratic policy conversation as their beat from 2016 to 2020, their role can also be exaggerated to an extent. The biggest problem was not “the groups,” per se, but the candidates.

The era Harris operated in was one in which Democrats were driven by a flawed belief that voters wanted maximalist positions on everything in order to compete with Donald Trump’s larger-than-life boasts and Bernie Sanders’ anti-establishment authenticity. It’s this mindset that was responsible for many of the most damaging moments that haunted the party later on — and Democrats have already started to move past it. Harris, who was a holdover from the previous period, is a lagging indicator.

Many of the more established advocacy organizations on issues like guns, climate, and immigration in the period that defined Harris actually had plenty of experience trying to work within the bounds of public opinion. Those borders shifted with the political winds in ways that forced them to recalibrate after elections, but they were typically aware they existed.

This is where the mindset of Democratic candidates, not advocacy groups, mattered a lot. Because most Democrats felt safe taking the consensus position around a given issue, individual politicians had to go beyond what “the groups” were asking for in order to distinguish themselves in crowded fields as the progressive leader on the topic and generate attention on social media.

“The groups” on gun safety, for example, were often concerned about ideas that smacked of gun confiscation. It was a presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, who broke that taboo by endorsing mandatory buybacks and declaring “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15!” This, in turn, meant Harris had to weigh in on the topic and — as was a recurring issue for her — she lacked the political foresight, confidence, or just instinctive moderation to dismiss the idea.

It was the same thing on immigration. Harris raised her hand in a debate to call for decriminalizing the border, a moment that haunted her all the way through this year’s campaign. But Harris wasn’t discussing it because “the groups” demanded it — it was because then-candidate Julian Castro created a new litmus test to try to outflank the field from the left, where virtually every relevant Democrat already backed “the groups” on a comprehensive immigration reform bill with a pathway to citizenship.

Similarly, when “Abolish ICE” took off as a social media hashtag, longtime activists in “the groups” that I asked about it initially sounded baffled as to where it had come from — many of them had spent years trying to court Republicans for bipartisan reform efforts, meaning they were often wary of alienating the center with faddish ideas that sounded extreme.

In fact, the slogan was championed by Sean McElwee, then a young socialist influencer in New York, as part of an effort to move the “Overton window” on discussion about deportation. It was Democratic candidates, seeing the idea get some traction online, who then gave it life. Harris didn’t embrace it, but she also didn’t forcefully dismiss it — providing another soundbite that came up this cycle. “Abolish ICE,” meanwhile, peaked within weeks of its initial appearance on the scene and was soon largely forgotten, except by Republican opposition researchers. Ironically, McElwee later became a major advocate of the “popularism” movement, which pushed Democrats to avoid divisive positions that test poorly.

Notably, by far the most damaging of these old moments for Harris in her campaign was on LGBT rights, where she endorsed gender reassignment surgery for prisoners in an onstage interview and ACLU questionnaire. Oddly enough, though, this moment was largely overlooked at the time because Republicans were still years away from running on the topic and even mainstream Democrats largely assumed they’d won the issue in a rout. After all, even figures like Donald Trump and Rick Santorum were trying to move to the middle on transgender issues the previous cycle. “The groups” mattered here, but so did the default political assumptions of the period.

Moving forward, Democrats need to debate their substantive positions, the effectiveness of their message, and whether they’re alienating voters with litmus tests from activists. But the 2019 mindset embodied by Harris was already on the outs: Democrats in competitive races, including potential presidential contenders, have been far more cautious about being dragged to the left and far more skeptical of hashtag activism — candidates won down-ballot this year in part because they had already begun breaking with the White House (and activist groups) on issues like the border, or fracking, or ran ads decrying “defund the police” slogans, starting years ago.

It’s easy to miss this shift because Democrats were forced to run a nominee at the last second whose relevant positions were locked in when the party was in a state of magical thinking about what voters wanted. Harris also tried to renounce and move past her old ideas and rhetoric, but the timing of President Biden’s exit meant the party never got a chance to have a competitive primary where these vulnerabilities might have been discussed and aired. The electability conversation is likely to look very different come 2028, which will feature candidates whose politics were more influenced by the current era.

In Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias argues that Democrats need to commit themselves to broad new ways of thinking that may conflict with core philosophical beliefs on the left, not just individual positions from advocacy groups. “Most elected Democrats are not, themselves, actually that far left, and when faced with acute electoral peril, they swiftly ditch ideas like defund the police or openness to unlimited asylum claims,” he writes. “But what they haven’t generally done is publicly disavow the kind of simplistic disparate impact analysis that leads to conclusions like policing is bad.”