I was depressed by the US election results this year, but initially I was just kind of surprised at the results. Harris ran a solid (if a little conventional) campaign against whatever Trump’s campaign was, and she underperformed Biden’s 2020 results by millions of votes. Trump picked up votes this year over 2020 (also deeply surprising), but overwhelmingly the issue is that voters didn’t show up for Harris, and that lost her the election.
And it looks to me like the reason is pretty simple.
Americans care about economic issues that affect them directly, like inflation, the costs of goods and healthcare, job availability, and access to opportunity.
That’s what motivates them to vote.
And Democrats have offered voters close to nothing on this front.
If Americans say “we’re not doing well economically,” you can’t respond with “we did a great job with economic recovery” and then rattle off statistics about the stock market, unemployment rates, and GDP per capita. If your grocery bill is up 60% and your paycheck is only up 5–10%, you don’t give a shit if the S&P 500 is up 10,000%; you’re not doing well.
Americans are largely indifferent to other issues when it comes to picking a president.
And when you look at election results current and past specifically through this lens, so many things start to make sense.
Obama won in a landslide in ’08 maybe in part because he represented change and that mobilized young voters, but much more importantly, after eight years of Republican economic policy, our economy was tanking in a huge way and Americans felt it.
Americans didn’t pick Trump this year because they loved his bizarre campaign speeches about Hannibal; they picked him despite of that, because they believed that this would lead to better economic outcomes for Americans (I don’t think they’re correct here, but that’s what they did).
Biden presided over years of inflation levels we haven’t seen in years and high interest rates, and even though the inflation cooled back down, the prices are still as elevated as ever, and paychecks aren’t. Americans voted against that. It didn’t help that Democrats have been patting themselves on the back on the economy, and Harris’s campaign didn’t really suggest she was going to deviate massively from the status quo of what Biden was doing.
And although Democrats did do impressive work to stabilize the economy and address inflation, Americans don’t feel like they’re taking home record paychecks the way the stock market is closing at record highs.
That’s it. That’s the issue.
Sure, if you talked to enough Americans you’d see a nuanced and complex narrative form, but nothing you’d be able to build a cohesive campaign message around. Nuance doesn’t work in political campaigns.
But that doesn’t seem to be the thing the national Democratic party seems to think they got wrong. As one DNC member from Florida puts it:
I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’
Translation: “we lost because of woke. If we hate on trans people more, we’ll finally win over those centrist voters!”
Are you fucking kidding me? Democrats do jack shit for marginalized groups. They just expect to get their votes, and Democrats will alienate the marginalized in some stupid misguided effort to win over hateful voters who already weren’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway because when it comes to being hateful, the Republicans are actually committed. When Republicans try being racist and lose, they double down on the racism. It’s called having principles. The principles suck, but Republicans have them and they stick to them.
I firmly believe you could go into a red state and open a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature like The Onion’s depiction of an $8 billion abortionplex and if you promised hundreds of high-paying permanent jobs people would be generally happy with its existence. If you take good care of Americans economically they’ll look past the stuff they don’t like about you.
Evangelical Christian voters looked past Trump’s… not family friendly nature. Free-market conservatives looked past Trump wanting to enact tariffs. Americans writ large looked past Trump’s Nazi-leaning tendencies. Americans just don’t care.
I’m disappointed we weren’t more principled here. I hate that as a country we’re so indifferent to social injustices, climate change, and threats to democracy that we’ll let those things slide because we think the fascist who literally tried to overthrow the election last time he lost will make groceries cheaper (which he won’t).
In the long term I believe America’s biggest strength is its capacity for growth and progress.
But in the more immediate future, progressives who want to get elected have to recognize that you campaign to the electorate you have, not the electorate you imagine you have, and the optimist in me sees a straightforward path to winning:
- Push broadly popular, mostly economic-focused policies whose benefit to everyday Americans is obvious and would be immediate if passed
- Absolutely shit on everyone who tries to push back on these policies, including fellow Democrats.
Campaign on slashing prescription drug costs. It would be a wildly popular among Democrats and Republicans alike, even if it included coverage for prescriptions for gender affirming care for trans people.
Hell, campaign on significant health care reform! If not full-blown universal healthcare, then at least bring out a public health insurance option that’s less of an administrative burden on your doctor and spends close to 100% of every dollar on paying for healthcare (under Obamacare insurers only need to pay out 80% of premiums collected on healthcare). Someone literally shot a private health insurance company CEO last week in broad daylight and liberal and conservative voters alike shrugged and largely saw it as an inevitability. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Americans this aligned on something.
Bring back the idea of the Green New Deal. History looks favorably at the New Deal because it created good jobs to solve an urgent world problem. Americans don’t love oil jobs because they specifically love increasing carbon emissions; they love oil jobs because they’re good-paying jobs, and they love good-paying jobs building and installing solar panels.
Roll out universal parental leave, giving new parents months of job-protected paid leave. Roll out universal daycare so that when those parents return to work they can rest assured their children are getting excellent care and that all of America’s youngest are on equal footing. Sell it to individuals, and sell it to small businesses who don’t have the budgets to foot the bill for these on their own.
Make paid sick leave universal, a thing I can’t believe we didn’t do when COVID was widespread, but it’s better late than never.
Americans want this kind of stuff, and we need to quit pretending this shit’s politically impossible. These things are only politically impossible because Democrats are helping make that be the case.
And I’m not suggesting that Democrats roll over on improving the lives of the marginalized! I promise these policies will be popular with marginalized groups too, and if you are enacting policies to make Americans feel materially better off, you can also quietly help address issues of inequality and Americans will dismiss the weirdos screaming about it as the weirdos they are.
I usually roll my eyes when I hear people lament that Democrats and Republicans are basically the same, but when it comes to the needs of Americans who work for a living, elite Democrats and Republicans alike aren’t lifting a god damn finger. Members of Congress in both parties tend to get really wealthy after elected considering their salaries, and they enjoy stock portfolios that perform suspiciously well. While Clarence Thomas is sporting his lavish gifts from donors, the Supreme Court voted 9–0 that they don’t think they should be subject to more stringent independent ethics scrutiny. Nine to zero.
A better life and a better world
If Democrats support policies like this and manage to get a live one to run for president, we could see a sea change in US politics.
But it takes a lot.
So please donate $50 to the Harris Fight Fund right now!
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