Why the Democrats Have Been Making the Same Mistake—for 44 Years

Having lived now through four particularly stinging Democratic presidential election defeats as an adult (1980, 2000, 2016, and 2024), I can tell you two things. One: The baseline criticism in every case has been the same. Two: Democrats, being (mostly) liberals, tend to overthink and overanalyze things. Parties lose elections for a hundred reasons, and yes, it’s worth giving some thought to all of them.

But it’s striking to me that in these crushing defeats that have occurred over the course of 44 years, the basic thrust of the criticism has been the same: The party lost contact with working-class voters. The criticism has assumed somewhat different form over the years—most notably, 1980 is a little different from the other more modern cases, because it was pre-polarization and Democrats were still theoretically competitive in a number of states that are deep red today. But its essence has always been the same—and it is valid and correct.

So that brings us to a question. If we agree that the Democrats have lost repeated elections because they’re not speaking directly enough to working-class voters’ economic concerns, then why do they keep making the same mistake?

Before I explore answers, it’s important to note: They don’t always make this mistake. Bill Clinton showily ran as a centrist on certain high-profile matters, but he also campaigned on the famous Carvillian mantra about the economy, and when he got into office, he passed a stimulus bill that raised taxes on the wealthy and increased the gas tax (this would, alas, be bad politics today, but it showed some gumption back then). Barack Obama won, in my view, not chiefly because of hope and change but because after the financial meltdown of September 2008, he responded more responsibly than John McCain did and persuaded voters that he was better equipped to handle the crisis. Then he ran a very economic-centric reelection campaign. Finally, in 2020, Joe Biden embraced a respectably populist program and announced his intention to change the country’s economic assumptions.

In contrast, Al Gore in 2000 ran an economically cautious campaign. His convention speech was fairly populist, but between the convention and the election, he tucked that in. Hillary Clinton promoted a few populist ideas such as a stock-transfer tax, but she mostly hewed to her cautious instincts. Besides, her team was convinced there was no way she was going to lose, so there was no need to do anything bold to nail down those last couple million votes.

Kamala Harris too ran an economically cautious campaign. I suspect she or her handlers felt that as a woman of color who grew up in Berkeley and whose father literally was a left-wing economics professor, she could be too easily caricatured if she went too populist. Trump did caricature her in those ways, although we have no idea whether these depictions were effective with swing voters. At any rate, Republicans tagging Democrats as socialists is just a fact of life at this point. More plausibly, with swing voters, it was just that they wanted to punish the inflation party. There’s also extant reporting from Franklin Foer indicating that Harris started listening to her brother-in-law, Uber’s chief legal officer Tony West, who convinced her to dial back criticism of corporate power—a ripe field of enemies with whom Democrats might pick fights.

Now, let’s get back to the same-mistake question. I think there are two answers. One clearly has to do with donors. A lot of big Democratic money comes from sources that don’t, on their face, present a moral dilemma. In the 13 sector categories of donors on OpenSecrets.org, Harris had big hauls from labor, the legal world, and ideological or single-issue organizations like abortion rights groups. But she also took in tons of money from finance, insurance, and real estate ($164.1 million), and communications ($125.4 million). Included in that sector is tech. That’s a problem.

Interestingly, they’re not particularly big spenders. Meta, for example, gave just $3.3 million to Democrats (and $800,000 to Republicans). But maybe that’s all they determined they needed to give to get their desired outcome, which is to prevent Democrats from doing what they so clearly ought to be doing and breaking these companies up, which solid majorities of people support. But it’s only in just the last month, in response to an earlier ruling by a federal judge, that the Biden Justice Department has suggested it might seek to break up Google. Trump, by the way, has indicated he’s against that.

Some people think all pols just do whatever their donors want. I think there’s truth to that, but most of the time, the donor’s desire comports perfectly well with the pol’s beliefs—Republicans aren’t voting to deregulate industry because they got checks from the Koch brothers. Still, there are obvious cases when donors can corrupt parties. Big Pharma and Democrats have been a prime example. And let’s not kid ourselves—Pharma still gives lots of money to Democrats, but at least the party did pass that insulin bill. And there was all that crypto money sloshing around this cycle. Whatever influence it had can’t have been good.

So that’s one reason. But I don’t think it’s the main one. The main one is psychic—or something more ephemeral. It’s this fear most Democrats have of being called too left-wing. It’s a real concern, given the power of the right-wing media to define such things. But at the same time, there’s a maddening paradox at work here: After a Democratic loss such as this, the mainstream media chide the Democrats for not speaking to working-class people and their pocketbooks. But if they espouse plans to do that—a higher minimum wage, free community college, paid leave, and so on—then they’re being too left-wing.

This is the million-dollar question someone in the party needs to figure out how to answer. I don’t know it. It’s hard. Senator Chris Murphy, who is definitely one of the smarter ones, was pondering exactly this point in an interesting thread of tweets over the weekend.

I think maybe one part of the answer is that everything doesn’t have to be about government programs. Sadly, people’s trust of government is so low that they just don’t believe government is going to help them. And here’s another problem with that approach: Unless Democrats gain full control of government and are willing to do something about the Senate filibuster, they’ll never be able to deliver on such promises anyway. The Republicans will obstruct, but the voters will blame them, the Democrats, for not following through on their promises.

Democrats can begin by asking a simple question: What are the main stress points in the lives of families living on modest incomes? Many of them are financial. But some aren’t. And that second category is where I think Democrats need to do their soul-searching and find some answers.

I wanted to write a column during the campaign that I never got around to arguing that Harris should embrace teen mental health as one of her core issues. Now, if you don’t have kids, that may sound silly to you, like one of those “first lady” kind of issues. Well, I have a teen daughter, and I’m telling you: In my conversations with other parents, every single one I’ve raised the issue with has some kind of story to tell. Every single one. It’s just so hard being a teenager these days, which means it’s hard to be a teenager’s parent, and obviously, nothing is more important to people than their children.