Democrats Need To Stop Treating Voters Like Idiots
Telling voters “Americans Don’t Have A Clue What the Democrats Actually Did For Them” is not a smart way to approach politics
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Most analyses of why Kamala Harris got thumped by Donald Trump in the 2024 election count the economy as a major factor. But how they consider it to have affected Harris’ chances varies wildly.
Mehdi Hasan has a video whose click-baity title encapsulates much that I disagree with. It’s headlined “Americans Don’t Have A Clue What the Democrats Actually Did For Them.” While Mehdi’s facts are, as always, accurate, I disagree with his analysis of them and the tone of the title only reinforces the condescension that cost Kamala Harris a great many votes, in my view.
Where Joe Biden’s foreign policies have ranged from bad to utterly disastrous, his domestic policies have met with at least some success, and that is undeniable. I would argue that the real successes were almost entirely because of the pressure Bernie Sanders and the most progressive Democratic activists put on Biden back during the 2020 election but regardless, they were positive acts. His choice of Lina Khan as Federal Trade Commission chair stemmed at least some of the tide of corporate mergers monopolizing the markets into even fewer hands. Biden’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were impactful in confronting some of the worst union-busting behavior.
And his rhetoric, while too infrequently backed with significant action, still helped create an atmosphere of greater awareness of the needs of labor and working people, and that did help spur action from others. Credit where it is due, regardless of whether Biden—who, as the long-time “Senator From MBNA” has a strong history of corporate support and practical opposition to the needs of working people—did so because of political pressure or because he believed in it.
His actions were not trivial things in a country where organized labor has been in a 50-year tailspin. They are magnified because of that very tailspin; since the days of the Nixon administration there has been a steady and precipitous decline in protections for, and the practical conditions of, working people. So, Biden can claim to have been the best since such and such a date, and it is true, even if it is far less meaningful than it sounds.
But some of what people love to point to is just performative nonsense. Indeed, before any of his truly meaningful acts are generally mentioned, we hear how Biden was the first president to ever walk on a picket line. Who cares? In 2023, union membership hit an all-time low of 10.1% of the work force. That’s a lot more important than an octogenarian man walking a few steps with workers. His abandonment of railroad workers, and then claiming he got them what they wanted (he didn’t, Sanders did) is another example of Biden’s limited positive impact.
It’s still the economy, stupid
We hear that the economy is doing great. Unemployment was a mere 4.1% in September, all these jobs were created under Biden, and inflation has been brought under control. The stock market is doing great, and so are 401(k)s.
But in real life, people are struggling. Rents have skyrocketed and the price of purchasing a home is now out of reach for a much larger percentage of the population. The price of many crucial durable goods like cars has also gone way up. And, as we all know, the price of groceries has risen enormously. Bringing inflation down is fine, but the prices don’t come down when that happens, they just go up more slowly.
Real unemployment—a figure which “…tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes”—was not 4.1%, but 23.9% in September. That’s real life, not statistical mumbo-jumbo. Those are the real voters, the people out here scrambling and failing to make a living.
According to the Department of Agriculture, food insecurity shot up by 40% between 2021 and 2023. That’s not because of Trump’s policies.
In 2021, thanks in significant measure to Biden’s measures to revive the economy after the pandemic, the US Census Bureau calculated that 25.6 million Americans were living in poverty. In 2023 that figure ballooned by 67% to 42.8 million.
That’s a real strain on real people, real voters and a whole hell of a lot of them. But no one mentioned it. No one addressed it. No one on the Democratic campaign trail, frankly, cared. Kamala Harris was too busy palling around with Liz Cheney and her dad to worry about hungry Americans.
Gaslighting, Democrat-style
The message from Democrats, and Kamala Harris in particular, was that the economy, while not perfect, was doing very well. As a result, she also said she was going to do nothing to change it; she offered just a few policy tweaks on the margins. And that’s on the campaign trail, where promises are routinely far loftier than real plans, much less eventual actions.
We can talk about the nature of capitalism and how it plays out with two political parties dominating the scene, both of whom want to maintain that capitalist system at all costs. That is, indeed, an important conversation to have right now.
But what’s important in considering Harris’ spectacular—and largely self-inflicted--failure is what working people see and experience, and how the television punditry and elected officials talk to them like they’re so stupid that they don’t know how good they have it in their $2,000 a month studio apartment with bad plumbing and bugs, a car that they can’t afford to repair, and frequently having to decide whether to buy food or medicine despite working over 40 hours per week.
That condescending message was what came through the Harris campaign loud and clear. And the worst part of it is that Trump knew it. While everyone was laughing at his pantomiming oral sex, talking about Arnold Palmer’s dong, and softly pumping his fists to Ave Maria for half an hour, he also went to workplaces and made shows, however phony, of his concern for working Americans. The Democrats couldn’t even be bothered to pretend, and it cost them.
This isn’t just about Democrats’ elitism, though that is a problem as well. This is about hearing American voters. Bernie Sanders is absolutely right, they want change. And this cycle was particularly troublesome for them.
Democratic voters overwhelmingly support a major hike in the minimum wage, universal health care, women’s right to control their own bodies, and ending support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, among many other issues we heard nothing about from Harris. She either stood firmly against her own constituency on these issues or avoided them altogether.
Many voters who supported Harris, as with Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016, didn’t do so because they liked her, but because they were justifiably terrified of what a second Trump term would mean.
But when that’s the chief selling point for your candidate, that breeds apathy, frustration, hopelessness, and despair. What it doesn’t produce is a lot of votes. It’s a measure of how horrifying Donald Trump is to so many that Harris even got as many votes as she did.
The reality is that national elections shouldn’t be close. The only reason they are is because Republicans like Trump speak in populist tones, even while they are laying waste to everything working people need. They tell people they will look after their interests.
Trump does better when he’s out of office precisely because he can tell the people what he’s going to do to address what’s wrong. When he’s in office, it’s a little harder to get away with the lies, whether on the economy, a pandemic, national unity, or any of the myriad other issues he screwed up.
Democrats have tried their own version of gaslighting, though it’s more difficult for them because their voter base is more educated, even if not necessarily less gullible. This cycle, that strategy crashed and burned as it never has before, because people expected change after the upheavals of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests at the end of Trump’s first term.
Instead, they got a few band-aids to quiet the protests for a while, but no fundamental changes, just as Biden promised. And Harris promised more of the same.
Democrats need never lose an election again. I am not suggesting that every progressive cause is popular, at least not yet (remember how radical the idea of same-gender marriage was, and how quickly that changed). But there are plenty of issues—health care, wages, paid family leave, and numerous others—that Democrats could move forward with, campaign on and win back workers all over the country.
In order for that to happen, Democratic leadership must be overthrown, and, most importantly, we must all start to recognize and call out the self-interest that is motivating those leaders, as well as political consultants and media pundits who are, even now, ridiculously claiming that Harris was actually too far to the left, an entirely absurd idea that is detached from reality. But it does serve to maintain the status quo that is paying such lofty salaries to so many of those folks.
This can be done, and done in short order, but it requires us all to organize, to support these causes and demand new leaders who will listen. And that has to start happening today, not a few months before the 2028 election when the next Republican will loom to force Democratic voters to accept another “lesser evil” that will drive them away from the polls again.
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