The Democratic Party has spent most of the past decade deciding to lose.
It is no secret that the Democrats are in a sorry state. They’ve lost to an exceptionally unpopular Republican presidential nominee twice in the last nine years. They have long odds of regaining control of the Senate next year and aren’t even certain to retake the House of Representatives. They’re historically unpopular, having lost ground with much of the party’s traditional base — including voters who are working class, people of color, young, or all of the above.
Since Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, the Democratic Party has undergone two really major shifts. First, we have shifted our priorities, focusing less on kitchen table economic issues and more on issues that are less concrete and more abstract to voters: climate change, democracy, abortion, and other identity and cultural issues.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party became a lot more left-wing than it used to be across the board. In 2013, 24 percent of Democrats in Congress co-sponsored Medicare-for-all. In 2023, that was 47 percent. In 2013, 41 percent of Democrats in Congress co-sponsored an assault weapons ban. Now, it’s 88 percent. Only 1 percent co-sponsored a reparations study bill in 2013. Now, that’s a majority. And I think these two shifts are primarily responsible for the situation that Democrats are in today.
I think it’s primarily a story about Democratic elites. It’s about donors, both large and small, about the staffers who run Democratic campaigns. It’s a story about the pundits who are influential on Twitter. It’s a story about the advocacy groups that have a lot of policy sway in Democratic spaces. All these groups have themselves moved left over time.
Meanwhile, as the party became increasingly a high-socioeconomic-status party, those groups got increasingly influential. And I think there’s a ton of polling and academic evidence showing that Democratic elites have systematically different priorities and preferences than the general electorate.
Kamala Harris was a senator between 2016 and 2020. I believe she was the second-most left-wing senator in the country, based on her voting record. When she ran for president, she endorsed a whole slew of left-wing policies, from banning fracking to banning plastic straws. Then, she became vice president for a president that the overwhelming majority of Americans thought was too liberal. And then, she refused to distance herself from any of that president’s actual policy positions. And when she moved away from some of her own older stances, she did it quietly and never articulated an explanation for why she thought those old ideas were bad.
I don’t think that Kamala Harris’s efforts to moderate hurt her electorally. We saw, during her short-lived campaign, that her approval rating went up a lot from the beginning to the end. So, I think it’s sort of hard to argue that her efforts to moderate were the reason she lost. But, at the same time, I think it really just shows that you can’t expect to talk a big game on border policy in the three months before the election if your actual border policy when you’re in office allows millions of unauthorized immigrants to come into the country.
On immigration, the party is a lot closer to public opinion than it was years ago, when you had almost every Democratic presidential candidate raising their hand to say, “We want to decriminalize border crossings.” So, the party has learned a bit of its lesson. I think the problem is that Democrats are facing an absolute crisis of credibility and trust. Even as Trump is unpopular in polls, the Republican Party continues to have an enormous advantage on the question of which party you trust more to handle immigration, to handle border security, to handle crime. And so, I think a big step for Democrats would be to acknowledge what happened and give Trump credit for securing the border.
