Now Democrats must face the future: What do liberals actually want?
It seemed as if nature was telling us something: Wednesday, Nov. 6, wasn't just an unseasonably warm day across eastern North America but a record-setting mini-heat wave. Temperatures broke 80°F in New York, Boston and Washington — for our international readers, that's about 27°C — in all cases exceeding record highs for the date by at least three degrees.
You can read that as a fluke, a demonstration of climate change or a metaphor: What had unfolded over the previous night and into early Wednesday morning was certainly a form of explosive combustion. Donald Trump's sweeping victory across all the so-called swing states and in the national popular vote wasn't just a defeat for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Losing the U.S. Senate seats in Ohio and Montana, although disappointing, could be understood as the normal operation of pendulum-swing electoral politics . Trump's massive win could not.
What has befallen the Democratic Party in 2024 is a catastrophe, and it must be understood in those terms. If the party and its larger constituency of supporters fail to understand this as a moment of reckoning — one that demands a fundamental reconsideration of what the Democrats stand for and whom they represent — the catastrophe could prove fatal.
Defensive chatter about how this was a close election (it wasn't) and how the Harris-Walz campaign fought hard in every state (and failed across the board) simply won't wash. After a final week of overconfident hopium-smoking and vibe-driven vaporware — which seduced me at least a little, and quite likely you too — the paper tiger of Demo-norminess was thoroughly crushed by a manifestly unqualified and likely deranged opponent whose message, if that's even the right word, was built on delusional, hateful fantasy. But hey, at least he had a message. There's a lesson there, of sorts.
Harris and her team of Clinton-Obama advisers bet everything on appealing to middle-ground or center-right voters with a slightly updated version of the back-to-normal message that got Joe Biden elected four years ago. It was like a PowerPoint presentation arguing, over the course of seven or eight slides, that we're the rational, trustworthy folks who will try to build consensus with minor technocratic fixes to the country's massive and intractable problems, whereas that other guy is a dangerous aspiring F-word dictator who just wants to smash things. Far too many voters drifted away or fell asleep by the second slide and concluded — reluctantly, in many cases — that given the options, smashing things sounded like a lot more fun.
This electoral calamity seriously undermines the Democratic Party's already-tenuous claim to represent an American majority, and virtually completes its estrangement from most of the American working class. (With the important exception of Black people at all socioeconomic levels, whose distinctive history renders them either more rational, more stubborn or more loyal than other Democratic constituencies.) According to exit polls , the only economic stratum that Harris clearly won was people with household incomes above $100,000.
How to fix those critical and potentially terminal problems is very much up for debate, and God knows the internet is already overloaded with half-baked takes: Democrats are too woke, too cautious, too corporate, too contaminated by identity politics or dark money or both. I have opinions about those things, and if you're reading this you probably do too.
Current Democratic leadership must not be allowed to persuade the party's voters that, well, darn it, with some message-tweaking and focus-grouping and meme-management everything will be OK. That's a death march toward obliteration.
Whether the Democrats should divorce themselves from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and rebrand as a multiracial social-democratic alliance focused on economic justice, or push into the space abandoned by Republicans on the center-right and become a pro-business, pro-military "Cold War liberal" outfit, is an enormous and ultimately unavoidable question. (Those tendencies, bizarrely enough, are almost perfectly symbolized by two Latino members of Congress from adjoining New York City districts: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left and Ritchie Torres on the right.) But the crucial point here is that either of those things would represent an actual identity, something the current party clearly lacks.
The current Democratic leadership has decisively failed, and must not be allowed to persuade the party's voters — whether described as moderate, liberal, progressive or something else — that, gosh darn it, we lost but we sure fought hard, and somehow Elon Musk and the Russians are to blame. Next time around, with some message-tweaking and focus-grouping and better management of memes and podcasts, everything will be OK. That's powerless shrug-emoji narrative is not merely the signpost pointing into the abyss, which is pretty much where the party is already, but a death march toward obliteration and irrelevance.
I'm not just talking about the party's consumer-facing candidates or Democratic National Committee officials, problematic as those are, but its entire Beltway class of consultants and advisers and their accumulated body of collective wisdom. It's no use running down a list of the usual K Street suspects, but if any of them (or their assistants) are reading this, they know who they are. Let's assume they meant well, sort of, and believed they knew what they were doing. But hey, Napoleon felt pretty good going into the battle at Waterloo. They have failed, finally and completely. They must not be allowed to fail again. To quote a Democratic campaign slogan they will remember well, it is time for them to go.
It's impossible not to feel some compassion for Kamala Harris, who, after the sugar-high of late August and early September, proved to be the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. She ran a game but incoherent campaign and could not escape either from her unpopular boss (to whom even more compassion is owed) or from her own personal and political limitations. Whether a different candidate might have produced a different result is unknowable, but as I've already suggested, this outcome was likely overdetermined by the Democratic Party's trajectory of self-destruction.
In her brief and gracious speech at Howard University on Wednesday, Harris said that while she conceded defeat to Trump, she did not "concede the fight that fueled this campaign ... the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people." What stands out there, unfortunately, is the fatal vagueness of that list of buzzwords. What do any of those words mean, to the Democratic Party? How is the "fight" for such abstract concepts to be conducted?
We cannot and should not discount the pernicious effects of sexism and racism on this election, especially when those attitudes are often under the surface or largely unconscious, and are certainly not limited to white men. The combination of race, education, culture and class has become Donald Trump's kill-zone against Democrats: White people without a college education were almost 40 percent of this year's electorate, and two-thirds of them voted for Trump (with a notably insignificant gender gap ).
I don't imagine that even the woke-most of liberal Democrats is willing to dismiss that enormous chunk of the population as entirely comprised of unregenerate racists. But even beyond that unsolvable problem, it has become clear that the decades-long Democratic Party faith in demographics as destiny was a disastrous mirage. Exit polls suggest that Trump won a majority of white women (as he did in 2020) and a majority of Latino men — an epoch-shaping shift, and a first for any Republican presidential candidate. He also made significant gains among Asian-American voters and (in contrast to the stereotypes held by many white people) dominated the Native American vote.
Harris performed no better among women voters than Joe Biden did in 2020 — if anything, a couple of points worse — and the overall gender split, with men favoring Republicans and women Democrats, was no different from other recent elections. Voters in several states where Trump won easily also voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions. Were those rational choices? Certainly not, but political decisions are driven by emotion and narrative, not instrumental logic. The Harris-Walz campaign seemed at first to leverage those more visceral forces effectively, but would not or could not follow through.
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One last statistic, the most damaging of all, suggests the depth of the Democrats' predicament. Although America's two-party system is pretty much baked in, we should not assume it's entirely static: I recently wrote a historical essay that partly concerned the World War I-era demise of Britain's center-left Liberal Party, which was destabilized and ultimately destroyed after its collision with a homegrown authoritarian movement. Some of the same dynamics are present now, although the specific context is undeniably different.
Joe Biden received approximately 81.3 million votes in 2020. With counting nearly complete in an election that Democrats loudly proclaimed as a final showdown between democracy and fascism, Kamala Harris currently has just over 68 million votes. Democrats need to take a long, hard look at that staggering arithmetic: Thirteen million Biden voters either switched to Trump or, in more cases than not, simply couldn't be bothered. If that's not an existential crisis, one of this decade's most overused terms, then I've never seen one.
