Opinion - Democrats pay the price for ignoring working Americans
Having fired Donald Trump in 2020, U.S. voters did an about-face Tuesday and sent him back to the White House. It was a remarkable political rebound, but one that owed as much to the Democratic Party's weakness as it did to Trump's strengths.
Despite heavily outspending her opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris carried not one battleground state in failing to reassemble the solid anti-Trump majority of four years ago. She also lagged behind Joe Biden's 2020 performance with key Democratic-leaning groups: young voters, Hispanics, Blacks and even women.
The demographic and geographic sweep of Trump's victory is impressive. He made inroads among urban and suburban voters, independents, young men and non-white working-class voters. The U.S. political map is getting redder.
Most importantly, Trump improved his 2020 performance with Hispanics by 25 points, despite his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants. Overall, he won 46 percent of the Hispanic vote, the most ever for a Republican presidential candidate.
The electorate's rightward shift has sparked heady talk among Republicans about a new U.S. political alignment around education level and social class rather than traditional left-right polarities. It certainly is a rebuke to the left, which has been hailing the advent of a new progressive majority for much of this century.
In addition to building a decisive majority in the Electoral College, Trump seems on track to win the popular vote by roughly five million votes. Republicans will take over the Senate and could retain narrow control of the House as well.
As Democrats sift through the wreckage of their 2024 presidential hopes, they face a hard question: How did they manage to lose so badly to the most divisive and ethically challenged presidential candidate in U.S. history?
The short answer: The party's coalition has shrunk because it's ceded working-class voters to Trump and the Republicans. The only silver lining in this week's blowout is that Democrats finally have the spur they need to rectify this colossal error.
They can't pin the loss solely on Kamala Harris. She was thrust into the race late, after Biden unexpectedly dropped out on July 21. That gave her less than four months to introduce herself to the public, assemble a campaign team and develop a distinctive body of themes and ideas to run on.
In fact, had Biden not insisted on running again, Democrats would have had a much better shot on Tuesday. Harris would have had a chance to hone her political chops in a primary contest likely featuring an array of new Democratic faces.
Nonetheless, Harris recharged her demoralized party with fresh energy and the promise of generational change and initially rose past a discombobulated Trump in the polls. It was a game try, but ultimately she couldn't overcome the drag of Biden's unpopularity – his public approval rating on election day stood at just 38.5 percent .
It's hard for incumbents to run as convincing candidates for change. As vice president, Harris also bore the onus of lingering public discontent with high living costs, the administration's failure to bring order to the border, her party's self-marginalizing fixation on identity politics and an aging president's cognitive decline.
The last four years have been a tragically missed opportunity for Democrats. As other candidates for the party's nomination in 2020 swung hard to the left, Biden offered himself as an experienced and comparatively moderate leader who by virtue of his working-class background could speak to middle America.
In office, however, "Joe from Scranton" tacked left. The White House forged an alliance with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and the House Progressive Caucus to "go big" on fiscal stimulus, infrastructure, broadband, climate change and clean energy, and a Build Back Better bill stuffed with new social spending.
Washington Democrats congratulated themselves on "delivering" big spending bills, but working families got walloped by spiking prices for fuel, food, housing and other necessities. Inflation kills incumbents everywhere, and in this case it also eclipsed public fear of Trump and pervasive anger over abortion.
The administration also pulled back from public school choice and other reforms advocated by Presidents Obama and Clinton, outsourcing its K-12 policy to teachers' unions. It launched an ill-founded campaign to break up U.S. tech companies spearheaded by left-wing academic Lina Khan, while ignoring more convincing signs of concentration in food processing, health care, transportation and other sectors.
To be sure, some of Biden's priorities — especially the infrastructure bill, rural broadband and the CHIPs Act — are smart public investments in economic growth and innovation, even if it's taking too long for their benefits to trickle down to working families. This underscores the need for Democrats to make reinventing government a central theme again.
As Ruy Teixeira and John Judas document in " Where Have All the Democrats Gone? " Democrats have made themselves a smaller, more ideologically homogenous party dominated by very liberal and relatively affluent white college grads whose views are well to the left of the media U.S. voter.
This helps to explain Biden's relentless push for more than $400 billion in debt forgiveness for college student loans. Absent commensurate support for non-college youth, this idea, an outgrowth of progressive demands for free college for all, sends working-class families an insulting message: Your government thinks investing in college students has higher social value than investing in your kids.
The Democrats' shrinking coalition and declining competitiveness isn't just bad for the party, it's bad for our country. It's opened the door to Trump's return to power, who despite his victory is still underwater in terms of popular approval ( 43.6 percent ).
The next four years will likely be the biggest stress test of U.S. democracy since the Civil War. To safeguard our political and governing institutions against Trump and lesser demagogues, we're going to need a bigger, stronger Democratic Party that once again provides a welcoming port in the storm for America's working families.
Will Marshall is the founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute.
